Greek language question
Guidance is necessary, to avoid the "mob rule" of undisciplined and uncorrected Demotic, but ultimate authority still lies with the people, whose judgement over the long term decides which works and writers are "elected" as the classics to be emulated.
[2]: 109 It was hoped that as the damage done to the spoken language by centuries of subjection to "Oriental despotism" was gradually repaired, the Greeks would begin to think more like their rational, critical and creative ancestors, and that the political and cultural life of the nation would thus be revitalized.
He left out the dual number, and the logical connectives γάρ 'for' and οὖν 'therefore', as being too far from modern usage; and in yet another compromise, he admitted that the public were not yet ready for the ancient negative particle οὐ, while also recommending that the Demotic equivalent δεν should be avoided, thus leaving his followers with no easy way of writing 'not'.
[d] The exchange sparked a small war of pamphlets from other pedants, competing to expose inconsistencies, grammatical errors, and phrases literally translated from French in the works of their rivals, and proposing their own alternative sets of rules.
They were happy to use newly coined Katharevousa terms for modern inventions,[i] and some (though not all)[j] alternatives for loanwords, but the trickle-down of Ancient Greek grammatical forms into the language of ordinary people that Korais and Vyzantios had hoped for simply did not happen.
On the mainland, the First Athenian School of literature had been concentrating on Katharevousa since 1830; but in the Islands the Heptanesian tradition of Demotic poetry associated with Dionysios Solomos lived on, and some were still prepared to argue for the written use of the spoken language.
Manousos ended his preface with a long quotation from Ioannis Vilaras in support of the written use of the spoken language, and immediately put this into practice by writing his own commentaries on the songs in Demotic.
When in 1853 the Ionian poet Georgios Tertsetis was bold enough to enter the national poetry competition with the Demotic poem "Corinna and Pindar" the adjudicator advised that "we must not dissipate our forces in the specific development of dialects, but concentrate them on the dignified formation of the Panhellenic language".
During his early career in the Parliament of the United States of the Ionian Islands, Valaoritis had become famous for his passionately patriotic poems, written in vigorous Demotic with dramatic dialogue and a style recalling Greek folk-song.
But (in an 1857 foreword, just after the Soutsos controversy) he had also mounted a strong defence of the general use of "the language of the people" in poetry: "Born automatically, it is not the work of art, unlike the [Katharevousa] that is being devised at present ... it is the sole remaining shoot on the venerable old tree of our nationality".
Just as the creation of Katharevousa had answered the political needs of its time (throwing off the Turkish yoke, erasing the traces of servitude and regaining cultural parity with Enlightenment Europe), so now the laografia movement served the new "national struggle" against the Slav territorial threat in the north.
Taking the long view, Hatzidakis recognized that the same thing could eventually happen in Greece; he looked forward to the adoption of Demotic for all written purposes, but only after "a Shakespeare or a Dante" had appeared to erect an "outstanding literary edifice" to rank with the Divine Comedy and establish a standard.
[27] He also returned to his earlier theme, that it was impossible to use Katharevousa to describe simple everyday actions and objects such as food, clothes, furniture and utensils without sounding stilted and unnatural, and that it was therefore unsuited to realistic prose about ordinary life.
As a Neogrammarian linguist, Psycharis stressed the importance of observations of actual spoken usage, and urged his fellow scholars to "take the boatman as our teacher ..., and run and study our language at the feet of the tailor and cobbler".
From a Neogrammarian point of view, he argued that because Katharevousa had been consciously put together from a more or less arbitrary selection of Ancient Greek features, it had no naturally evolving coherent internal structure that could be studied scientifically; so there was no rigorous way of determining if a particular construction was grammatical or not.
There was some dispute over linguistic technicalities; there was general disagreement with Psycharis' uncompromising principle of banning all Katharevousa influence; and there was a great deal of discussion about the "ownership" of the written language—who, if anyone, was entitled to make deliberate changes to it.
[w] Vlachos was not the only one to argue that written Demotic, while admittedly expressing the "national soul", belonged to the world of the folk songs, and that poets had no business trying to adapt it to high culture or modern needs (Vernadakis had already said something similar).
Notably, Psycharis, Eftaliotis and Pallis while all born on Greek soil and unfailingly patriotic, all spent much of their working lives in French- and English-speaking circles where diglossia was unknown and it was taken for granted that people wrote and spoke in the same language.
Orthodox Bishop Fan Noli, who translated into Demotic works of Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen, emphasized the necessity for a people's language and recalled in his memoirs that because of Katharevousa "there were humorous scenes in a comedy and it happened that no one laughed".
[2]: 257 Writing as a doctor and a father, he presented a child's view of contemporary Greek education: from the start, the pupils are told that they have been using the "wrong" language, and are made to spend much of their time simply learning new "correct" Katharevousa words and expressions.
In 1908 liberal educationalist Alexandros Delmouzos [el] introduced the use of Demotic as the language of instruction in the newly founded Municipal Girls' High School of Volos and thereby achieved considerable improvement in test scores and pupil satisfaction.
[43] Germanos Mavromatis, bishop of Demetrias in Magnesia and a leader of the local opposition, declared that: "In the conscience of all the people, demoticism, anarchism, socialism, atheism and freemasonry are one and the same",[44]: 323 and Delmouzos was even falsely accused of sexually molesting some of the pupils.
[2]: 281 Her first two books For the Fatherland (Gia tin Patrida (1909)) and In the Time of the Bulgar-Slayer (Ton Kairo tou Voulgaroktonou (1911)) are adventures set among the defenders of the Macedonian frontier in the heroic days of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire.
Linguist and educationalist Manolis Triantafyllidis (who would later play a major role in producing Demotic readers, grammars and dictionaries) argued that "children emerged from school able to say 'nose', 'ears', 'pig', 'horse' and 'house' in Ancient Greek but without having broadened their repertoire of concepts".
But in the intervening years Greece had greatly expanded its territory in the successful Balkan Wars, and when Eleftherios Venizelos assumed power again in the aftermath of the National Schism his position was strong enough to push through reform.
[2]: 270 In the past, the traditional primary combination of lessons on Ancient Greek, in a classroom using Katharevousa, had proved less than effective in Hellenizing non-Greek-speaking populations, even the Arvanite minority settled in the area around Athens itself.
Its report particularly objected to the use in examples of 'vulgar' words such as kafes for coffee: "All the mire of the streets, everything foreign, barbaric and vulgar that has ever been introduced into the mouths of the lowest social strata, has been fondly picked up and imposed as the form and model of the language of primary school".
[2]: 316 In 1972, the Armed Forces General Staff published a widely available free booklet under the title National Language which extolled the virtues of Katharevousa and condemned Demotic as a jargon or slang that did not even possess a grammar.
[10]: 362 The folksy neologisms popularized by Psycharis had been largely trimmed away again (these were the "extreme forms" deprecated in Law 309), and henceforward in SMG new words would usually be coined the Katharevousa way, using ancient models.
However this final change was not universally popular, and some (non-educational) writers and publishers still continue to use the traditional polytonic system, employing up to nine different diacritical marks, often with several in each word and sometimes up to three on the same vowel (for example ᾧ).
