Greek Polytonic System

[akritas]

Polytonic Greek is not a language itself but rather a representation form of the Greek Language.

It is named Polytonic due to the use of multiple (poly-) diacritic marks, as opposed to Monotonic that uses a single (mono-) diacritic mark.

Polytonic script may be utilised in writing all phases of the Greek language throughout its 3,000+ years of evolution. Very broadly these phases may be divided into 4 categories:

• The Homeric script - Can only be written with the Polytonic script,
• The Classical Hellenic script - Can only be written with the Polytonic script,
• The Neo-Hellenic "Katharevousa" (Puristic) script - Can only be written with the Polytonic script, and
• Modern Greek (a.k.a. The Contemporary Neo-Hellenic script/"Demotiki") - Can be written with both Polytonic and Monotonic scripts.

Currently there is a rather limited community of people (mostly academic scholars and clergy) that are still actively using the Polytonic script while writing contemporary Greek language (item d above). The majority is using the Monotonic script (this is the official form).

The controversy between polytonic and monotonic system seems to belong to that special category of controversies involving strong and unexpected passions. There are other fields with controversies: art, esthetics, pedagogics, how to raise your children, politics, fashion... Sometimes one may even wonder why one should write down the history of such a controversy. It is obviously impossible to formulate a widely acceptable answer, since the dialog is usually around apparencies, what seems to be and not what is, it concerns the opinion on the issue of accents and not the issue itself: opinion supersedes science in many cases, ambiguity is more important than meaning, faith replaces proof. Sometimes there is fear, the primal fear of ignorance, or simply of social image (in general, we all show that we know our language less well when we write it in the polytonic system). This fear re-establishes the system of values which is the subconscious fundament of our positive or negative opinions.

On the Citizens' Movement for the Re-introduction of the Polytonic System the reader will find elements allowing him/her to enrich his/her own version of history, or at least to refute the one we suggest, since this Web site has a single well-defined intention.

But the reality of the controversy between polytonic and monotonic seems to be not only complex but complicated. The difference between complex and complicated lies in the fact that facing the latter one does know neither its exact dimensions, nor its exact quality, and one can not even be certain about the way it functions. When we try to classify the arguments of both sides, to be able to construct a lattice of evaluation of each argument in its own domain, we remain on the level of an initial question, since we ignore the dimensions of the problem and their relationships: how do we evaluate, for example.


Sources for reading

1. The Greek Polytonic System by Microsoft
2. Citizens' Movement for the Re-introduction of the Polytonic System
3. Series article from Antibaro(Greek only)