BIG Greek Lie # 2,"The Koine Language is Greek"

[akritas]

These quotes is an answer to the article entitled “BIG Greek Lie # 2” and showed in http://www.maknews.com/html/articles.../stefov59.html by Mr Risto Stefov.

Mr Stefov claims showed that there were no "Ancient Greeks" since the word "Greek" was not coined until after the Roman conquests, approximately 600 years after the establishment of the City States and approximately 150 years after they were conquered by the Macedonians.

In a similar manner we will show that the Koine language was not exclusively Greek as Greece would have us believe.

In his article Mr Stefov deliberately and cleverly distort the etymological meanings and the periods of the Greek language when he said Ancient Greek = Katharevousa or Koine has route in Macedonia pro-Alexander period.

[akritas]

1st Period (3000 BC-330 B.C.) or Classical Ancient Greek period

In the classical or hellenic period Greek existed in several major dialects, each of which has its own significance for the history of the language, but the most influential of these would ultimately prove to be the one spoken in Athens, called Attic. Well within the Hellenic period, though, Attic and Ionic—the form of the language spoken mainly in the Greek city states directly across the Aegean Sea from Athens—exerted significant influence on each other as the preferred forms of the language for oratory and philosophical prose, eventually producing a dialect now called Attic-Ionic.

The most standard formulation currently for the pre-classical and classical dialects is four major groups:
1.Northwest Greek/Doric (with major Laconic, Cretan, Sicilian, Southern Italian and Ancient Macedonian)
2.Aeolic (with major Boeotian, Lesbian, Thessalian, and Aegean/ Asiatic Aeolic subdivisions)
3.Attic-Ionic
4.Arcado-Cyprian

2nd Period (330 B.C.- 330 AD) or Hellenistic Greek period

The term Koinê showed up in the Hellenistic period and after the conquests of Alexander the Great (roughly 336-323 BC). Alexander carried the Attic-Ionic form of the language, along with Greek culture more generally, far into the Near East where it became the standard language of commerce and government, existing along side many local languages. Greek was adopted as a second language by thenative people of these regions and was ultimately transformed into what has come to be called the Hellenistic Koinê or common Greek.

This new form of the language remained essentially a further development of the Attic-Ionic synthesis.
The Koinê is known as the Alexandrian dialect ("Peri Alelexandrou Dialecton"), meaning the dialect spread by Alexander the Great (a term often used by modern Classicists).
The Hellenistic Koinê brought significant changes in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and some of these changes have persisted into Modern Greek. The time of rapid change initiated by
Alexander, though, lasted from about 300 BCE to 300 CE. The histories of Polybius, the discourses of Epictetus, and the Christian
New Testament all date from this period and are good representatives of the Koinê. Koinê used personal pronouns in oblique cases much more often, whereas writers in Attic used them only when they were necessary for clarity. One of the biggest syntactical differences involves the use of the optative mood.. Variations of nouns, adjectives, and verbs are often according to sense, and a neuter plural substantive may be used with either a singular or a plural verb

During the Hellenistic period some purists reacted strongly against the Koinê. They developed a movement called Atticism, which treated classical Attic as the only acceptable standard for prose writing. This movement would continue to influence Greek writing well into the modern era by constraining the production of literature in the normal idiom of actual daily speech.

Clearly Mr Stefov the Hellenistic Koine was spread to the Mediterranean and after Macedonian campaign, and not before as you claim. There is no Alexandrian Greek literature before Ptolemies’ ruling times. There was no reason for foreign peoples to adopt Greek language for administration but if this administration was Greekspeaking as well the Macedonian administration.
After the Roman military influence in the known world Hellenistic Koinê wasn’t an administrational language, only. All texts of Greek writers from 4c BC to 5c AD like Strabon, Arrianos, Plutarchos, New Testament’s, Euclides, Loukianos, Apollonios, Hesychios, Diofantos, Diodoros Sikeliotis, e.t.c. were written in Koinê. Koine was the language that Macedonian poets used to write.

So, Mr Stefov Koinê was a language of art used by Macedonians and others Greeks and not Greeks as Romans!!!

[akritas]

3nd period (330-1453) or Medieval Greek period

When the capital of the Roman Empire was transferred to Constantinople in the 4th century AD, the official language of the state continued to be the Latin, yet the literary and spoken language of the entire Eastern part of the Empire continued to be the Greek.

Greek was also the language of the church and education, while the university preserved a diglossia between the two.

Eventually, the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire and not
Pravoslav e.t.c. adopt the Roman name and Romans (Rwmaoi) itself becomes a synonym for a Greek (Ellhn), while the official name of the Byzantine state "RWMANIA", ends up referring to the medieval Greek state of Byzantium. The name "Rwmaoi" (Romans) is used as a title of prestige, which symbolises the awe of the old Roman Empire, and typically declares the land claims of the Byzantine state.

Atticism dominated the production of literature for the entire Byzantine era from the establishment of Constantinople in 330 until 1453 when the city was defeated by the Turks. The development of actual daily speech during this period is extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct since the vernacular speech was deemed unfit for literary production. As Greece entered a protracted period of bondage to the Turks lasting four hundred years, its literary production had been drastically reduced by the demands of Atticism.
Crete managed to resist Turkish control until 1669.

The poetry produced there in the local dialect near the end of this period would contribute significantly to the development of modern demotic literature as would the folk songs produced on the mainland.

[akritas]

4th period (1453-…..) or Modern Greek period

Mr Stefov as I said deliberately mention the kathaverousa as Ancient Greek. Because as a Greek speaker you know very well that is unaccurate. Modern Greek had started taking shape well into the Middle Ages but for convenience linguists place its starting point at the Fall of Constantinople.

Katharevousa is a form of the Greek language, created during the early 19th century by Adamantios Korais (1748-1833). A graduate of the university of Montpellier in 1788, Korais spent most of his life as an expatriate in Paris. Being a classical scholar, he was repelled by the Byzantine influence in Greek society and was a fierce critic of the ignorance of the clergy and their subservience to the Ottoman Empire. He realized that education was a precursor to Greek liberation.

The "purified" Greek was to be the midpoint between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. Katharevousa actually contained archaicised forms of modern words, purged of "non-Greek" vocabulary from other European languages and Turkish and a (simplified) archaic grammar.

Dhimotiki, is the daily language. Dhimotiki was made the official language in 1976 and by the end of the 20th century Katharevousa had become obsolete. However, the ancient Greek grammar and syntactical rules that Katharevousa had adopted and many words from Katharevousa have influenced and entered Dhimotiki during the two centuries of its existence, so that the project has left a very noticeable trace in the modern Greek language, especially the written form

As I said Mr Stefov the Grammar, Syntaxis, 75% of the modern Greek vocabulary use the ancient Greek language . Of course you forget to say that thinks in your article.
And Last your given Mr Stefov table with the Greek words is not accurate. And you speaking and read it the Hellenic language very well

We say alogo but also ippodromia (horse racing),
we say kota but also ornithotrofio(chicken farm),
we say gaidaros but also “peri onou skias” (proverb, = for a donkey’s shadow = for unimportant things),
we say psomi but we say “artopoieio” or “artopoleio” (=bakery).
We say aiga > aigidion > gida. (Aigai, first known capital of
Macedonia, is named after this word.)
The words katsiki and gaidaros have foreign origins. Probably turkish

Mr Stefov the modern Greeks use and today Ancient Greek words
from the showed table

[Orphic_Hymn]

Risto has claimed that the term Graikos wasn't coined prior to the Roman conquests indicating his ignorance on the Hellinic anthology, let alone whatever is related to the history of this country, its language..etc.


Graikos as Aristotle tells us Aristot.meteor.I.14. 352a33-352b4

"........particularly in old Hellas, that is, the country round Dodona and the Acheloiis... Here dwelt the Selloi and the people then called Greeks and now called Hellenes"

This is supported by the Parian Chronicle (FGrH 239), Appolodorus'Library 1.7.3 :

"Hellen had Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus by a nymph Orseis. Those who were called Greeks he named Hellenes after himself, and divided the country among his sons"

The encyclopedia of Suda :

"Graikos :
Adler number: gamma,447

The Hellenes. [The name comes] from a particular village, or from a certain Graikos. From this [comes the singular] Graix, [genitive] Graikos."

Sophocles, Ichneutae frag. 518, Strabo's Geography 1.46 and 5.216, Callimachus Fr.104, Lykophron's Alexandra 605, Alexander Polyistora's 'Aitia' Fr. 2..

The German classical historian Georg Busolt, 1850-1920, derives it from Graikhos "inhabitant of Graia" (lit. "gray"), a town on the coast of Boeotia, which was the name given by the Romans to all Hellines, originally to the Hellinic colonists from Graia who helped found Cumae (9c. B.C.E.), the important city in southern Italy where the Latins first encountered Hellines.


While the Hellinic language through its evolution became more simplyfied especially through the evolutionary stage of Koine. Under no condition has it changed to such an extent as presented in the specific article of absolutely no other value than a sorry attempt of misinforming the ignrorant readers.

To quote the reknowned liguist B. E. Newton from his "Greece & Rome, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Oct., 1960), pp. 124"

"Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and the modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably 99 per cent, of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French and two in Afrikaans. "

Of course B. E. Newton also includes in his work the well known strongly critisized attempt of a turn towards classical Hellas that R.Stefov and his sidekicks have so strongly critisized as the attempt of 'purists' to relate to our undisputed ancient past.
B.E Newton justifies this, by clearly stating that :

". For nearly four hundred years, while the rest of Europe was making unparalleled progress in every cultural and scientific sphere, thanks to the discovery of classical learning, Greece itself under Turkish occupation became an intellectual backwater severed from Europe."

[admin]

Excellent stuff. This is called referenced work

[Euklid]

These Mako's are truly very ludicrous in their effort of discrediting our ancient heritage.

If the Koine is the language of all people including them as they claim, then How do they not use it?

The ones who do not use it are somehow entitled more to the ancient heritage, than the ones they do?

As it seems they have completely abandoned their thesis as the direct hereditors of Macedonian ancestry, and their aim now is to impose upon the non-Scientific world the discontinuity of the Greek Ethnical Identity.

Very similar to the German scholar Fallmerayer attempt at the 19th century to discredit the idea of the continuation of Hellenism.

Unfortunately for him, The Great Constantine Paparregopoulos counter-attacked him succesfully.

It is a pity, that such resolved issues are raized once more, under the census of the EU from a country so deeply in debt to the New-Greek Foreign Policy.

[Euklid]

An interesting article as far as the differences between the Ancient Grammar and the Demotic Grammar is concerned is up in Wikipedia:

Here is an extract:

" Modern Greek is still largely a synthetic language. It is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive. Noticeable changes in grammar (compared to classical Greek) include the loss of the dative, the optative mood, the infinitive, the dual number, and the participles (except the past participle); the adoption of the gerund; the reduction in the number of noun declensions, and the number of distinct forms in each declension; the adoption of the modal particle ?? (a contraction of εθέλω ίνα > θέλω να > θε' να > θα) to denote future and conditional tenses; the introduction of auxiliary verb forms for certain tenses; the extension to the future tense of the aspectual distinction between present/imperfect and aorist; the loss of the third person imperative, and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, such as augmentation and reduplication. Some of these features are shared with other languages spoken in the Balkan peninsula (see Balkan linguistic union).
Due to the influence of katharevousa, however, demotic is not commonly used in its purest form, and archaisms are still widely used, especially in writing and in more formal speech, as well as in a few everyday expressions like the dative εν-τάξει ('OK', literally 'in order') or the third person imperative ζήτω ('long live!')."

Full article here.

Therefore, Mr Restov, keep your illusions for the uneducated masses!


And if you are so much in love with the KOINE, then join our Greek community, learn it and embrace that (Greek)culture that you so long for.


P.S.: Mr Restof, our Greek, Hellenic, Ionic continuation is the result of a bloody and cultural struggle through the centuries, and as you can see we do not put it up for auction.


Giorgos K.

[Tsontos]

"A koiné is a common language, but not necessarily a standard one, Petyt's examples of koinés are Hindi for many people in India and Vulgar Latin (vulgar: 'colloquial' or 'spoken) in the Roman Empire. The original version of koiné was, of course, the Greek koiné of the Ancient World, a unified version of the Greek dialects, which after Alexander's conquests (circa 330 BCE) became the lingua franca of the western world, a position it held until it was eventually superseded, not without a struggle, by Vulgar Latin."

-Ronald Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2002, p.40