Post by Arxileas on Feb 16, 2008 1:10:32 GMT -5
Greek may have dominated the cultural life within the Roman Empire, but it never branched out because its users worldwide belonged mostly to an educatedelite keen to keep the language as pure and as close as possible to the great texts of Greek art and philosophy that inspired them.
MARK DRAGOUMIS
WHAT made Greek - a language spoken by numerous, small, disparate, often feuding city-states at the southernmost extremity of Europe - become so successful in the oikoumene (populated world) up until 1453 and what made it retain its basic structure until today without giving birth to any offspring as Latin did with the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish etc)? A new book by the distinguished linguist Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the World: A Language History of the World, attempts to answer these questions as well as many others by linking the history of languages with that of the rise and decline of their users.
Greek escaped from the peninsula where it was born thanks to Alexander the Great, whose conquest of vast foreign lands extending over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was completed during the decade 333-323 BC. This process of Hellenisation created a vast Greek-speaking community that eventually came to dominate the Eastern Roman Empire after the formal division of the Roman Empire in AD286. As a result even the word 'Romaios' (Roman) was further Hellenised, entering the vernacular as 'Romios' meaning, colloquially, 'Greek' to this very day.
Alexander did not just prove to be a brilliant strategist, he was also the possessor of a secret cultural weapon: the Greek language. Unlike other linguistic communities in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks were among the first to adopt the alphabetic writing system invented by the dozen or so independent trading cities of coastal Lebanon, known as Phoenicia. This gave them a most flexible tool that allowed them to write down their thoughts, ideas and arguments without the cumbersome baggage of the ideographic system prevailing in Asia. In fact, the Persian King Darius was so attracted by the alphabetical notation that in 522BC he had decreed Aramaic - an alphabetical Semitic language - to be the administrative language of the empire even though the Persian royalty, belonging to the Achaemenid clan did not speak a word of it.
Darius might have chosen to adopt only the Aramaic alphabet - much like Kemal Ataturk imposed the Latin script for Turkish in 1925 - but refrained from doing so lest Persian would be seen to become too informal, too degraded for imperial use. As it happened, the Aramaic script did not catch up and was abandoned by 338BC, ie before the fall of the Persian Empire to the Greeks. However, its demise was not without consequences: the use of Aramaic for two centuries as a kind of lingua franca separate from the vernacular languages created the structures for the rapid spread of Greek to serve for the same administrative purposes after the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander and his successors. It was thus that Greek flowed for the next two centuries through channels opened originally for and by Aramaic.
This was the first instance of unstable bilingualism. The second such phenomenon in history emerged in the relations between Greek and Latin in the Roman Empire, the former dominating the cultural and the latter the political life. Ever since Alexander's conquest there followed a general linguistic streamlining in the Middle East with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages in the area. Interestingly, although Aramaic had close links with Hebrew, Greek was to become the preferred language of Jewish intellectuals (especially those in Egypt) as proved by the translation into Greek - known as the Septuagint - of the Hebrew scriptures forming the Old Testament. This formidable task, believed to have been the work of 72 scholars from 308 to 246BC was commissioned by Ptolemy II in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander's death. Obviously, the Jews had realised at that time that a sophisticated language like Greek, created by people who had invented logic, tragedy and elective government, brought with it a mass of perceptions, judgements and inspirations that would prove most appropriate to make their scriptures accessible to a larger audience of educated readers.
The same proved true for Christians who chose Greek for their New Testament (even though Jesus spoke Aramaic) because it was free of any Jewish associations and because it appealed to the world of the Gentiles; Aramaic did not and never would. The Ptolemies did their best to spread the use of Greek, relegating the Egyptian language to the extremes of the sacred and the profane, ie to the temples on the one hand and the lips of the common people on the other. The Alexandrian elite spoke exclusively Greek. Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule, from 51 to 30BC, was the first to learn Egyptian and is believed to have conducted her amours with Caesar and Anthony in Greek.
The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek, much more so than any military, political or economic considerations. In contrast, the Phoenicians' language, known as Punic because it was used in the Phoenician colony of Carthage, seems to have remained largely unknown outside the Phoenician settlements, thus proving once again that the language of trade is after all that of the customer rather than that of the provider. Even in Carthage, Greek became established during the last couple of centuries BC as the most appropriate language for international discourse. It was even used in the Carthaginian army, made up as it was of mercenaries from all over the Mediterranean lands. The coins struck by the soldiers during the great mutiny in 241-238BC were inscribed in both Greek and Punic. It is also a fact that the annalists Silenos and Sossylos, who accompanied Hannibal, put up a plaque recording his exploits in a temple of Hera in Sicily written in both Greek and Punic.
"Greek," Nicolas Ostler points out, "like English, was spread through a variety of means - speculative commerce, naked imperialism and cultural allure." Athens remained for centuries the cultural centre of the world until the Roman Emperor Justinian closed its famous school in AD529. The language survived because, having been shaped mainly for public use, it remained in the eyes of its Roman users a valuable tool for argument, rhetoric and philosophy. Greek also remained attractive in the eyes of the Roman bons viveurs who appreciated haute cuisine, wine, music and frolics with either sex. The Latin word pergraecari (to act like a Greek) meant devotion not to high culture but to high living.
Greek may have dominated the cultural life within the Roman Empire, but it never branched out because its users worldwide belonged mostly to an educated elite keen to keep the language as pure and as close as possible to the great texts of Greek art and philosophy that inspired them. "The cult of Atticism," notes Nicholas Ostler, "has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2,500 years - but to no avail... People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of classical Attic when in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks." Even after the Renaissance took hold of Europe, Greek did enjoy a kind of revival as a source of Aristotelian wisdom, even if by then Latin had established itself as the lingua franca. By contrast with Greek, the Roman conquests proved much more permanent in their linguistic effects as Romans settled all over Europe, mixed with the natives and shaped in common with them many of the local languages.
Modern Greek - the language of the nation-state of Greece that emerged in 1830 after a long war of independence - went also through a phase during which 'Atticising' purists tried to 'cleanse' it from its mainly Turkish accretions. The controversy, now over, produced a language enriched with much of the vocabulary of its prestigious past and the freshness and spontaneity of its 'demotic' present. Interestingly, once again Greek has started these days to travel beyond Greece's borders and not just among the Southeast European would-be immigrants wishing to work and settle in Greece. A list compiled by Greece's education ministry in 2006 shows that 344 courses in Modern Greek Studies at university level are today operating in five continents. Most (179) are in Europe, 63 are in the US, 10 in Latin America, 9 in Canada, 54 in the former USSR, 22 in Asia and 27 in Africa. It seems as though Greek is gaining new popularity thanks to the literature and especially the poetry written in it (Greece boasts two Nobel Prize winners, Seferis and Elytis, among its many poets) and the worldwide attraction of Greece as a tourist destination with a difference, due to its cultural heritage.
There is undoubtedly some life left in the language of a country of which Kazantzakis said in his Journey to Morea: "The face of Greece is a palimpsest bearing twelve successive inscriptions: Contemporary, the period since 1821; the Turkish yoke; the Frankish sway; the Byzantine; the Roman; the Hellenistic epoch; the Classic; the Dorian Middle Ages; the Mycenean; the Aegean; and the Stone Age."
And Alexander did not only prove to be a brilliant strategist, but he also possessed a secret cultural weapon: the Greek language.
MARK DRAGOUMIS
WHAT made Greek - a language spoken by numerous, small, disparate, often feuding city-states at the southernmost extremity of Europe - become so successful in the oikoumene (populated world) up until 1453 and what made it retain its basic structure until today without giving birth to any offspring as Latin did with the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish etc)? A new book by the distinguished linguist Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the World: A Language History of the World, attempts to answer these questions as well as many others by linking the history of languages with that of the rise and decline of their users.
Greek escaped from the peninsula where it was born thanks to Alexander the Great, whose conquest of vast foreign lands extending over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was completed during the decade 333-323 BC. This process of Hellenisation created a vast Greek-speaking community that eventually came to dominate the Eastern Roman Empire after the formal division of the Roman Empire in AD286. As a result even the word 'Romaios' (Roman) was further Hellenised, entering the vernacular as 'Romios' meaning, colloquially, 'Greek' to this very day.
Alexander did not just prove to be a brilliant strategist, he was also the possessor of a secret cultural weapon: the Greek language. Unlike other linguistic communities in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks were among the first to adopt the alphabetic writing system invented by the dozen or so independent trading cities of coastal Lebanon, known as Phoenicia. This gave them a most flexible tool that allowed them to write down their thoughts, ideas and arguments without the cumbersome baggage of the ideographic system prevailing in Asia. In fact, the Persian King Darius was so attracted by the alphabetical notation that in 522BC he had decreed Aramaic - an alphabetical Semitic language - to be the administrative language of the empire even though the Persian royalty, belonging to the Achaemenid clan did not speak a word of it.
Darius might have chosen to adopt only the Aramaic alphabet - much like Kemal Ataturk imposed the Latin script for Turkish in 1925 - but refrained from doing so lest Persian would be seen to become too informal, too degraded for imperial use. As it happened, the Aramaic script did not catch up and was abandoned by 338BC, ie before the fall of the Persian Empire to the Greeks. However, its demise was not without consequences: the use of Aramaic for two centuries as a kind of lingua franca separate from the vernacular languages created the structures for the rapid spread of Greek to serve for the same administrative purposes after the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander and his successors. It was thus that Greek flowed for the next two centuries through channels opened originally for and by Aramaic.
This was the first instance of unstable bilingualism. The second such phenomenon in history emerged in the relations between Greek and Latin in the Roman Empire, the former dominating the cultural and the latter the political life. Ever since Alexander's conquest there followed a general linguistic streamlining in the Middle East with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages in the area. Interestingly, although Aramaic had close links with Hebrew, Greek was to become the preferred language of Jewish intellectuals (especially those in Egypt) as proved by the translation into Greek - known as the Septuagint - of the Hebrew scriptures forming the Old Testament. This formidable task, believed to have been the work of 72 scholars from 308 to 246BC was commissioned by Ptolemy II in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander's death. Obviously, the Jews had realised at that time that a sophisticated language like Greek, created by people who had invented logic, tragedy and elective government, brought with it a mass of perceptions, judgements and inspirations that would prove most appropriate to make their scriptures accessible to a larger audience of educated readers.
The same proved true for Christians who chose Greek for their New Testament (even though Jesus spoke Aramaic) because it was free of any Jewish associations and because it appealed to the world of the Gentiles; Aramaic did not and never would. The Ptolemies did their best to spread the use of Greek, relegating the Egyptian language to the extremes of the sacred and the profane, ie to the temples on the one hand and the lips of the common people on the other. The Alexandrian elite spoke exclusively Greek. Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule, from 51 to 30BC, was the first to learn Egyptian and is believed to have conducted her amours with Caesar and Anthony in Greek.
The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek, much more so than any military, political or economic considerations. In contrast, the Phoenicians' language, known as Punic because it was used in the Phoenician colony of Carthage, seems to have remained largely unknown outside the Phoenician settlements, thus proving once again that the language of trade is after all that of the customer rather than that of the provider. Even in Carthage, Greek became established during the last couple of centuries BC as the most appropriate language for international discourse. It was even used in the Carthaginian army, made up as it was of mercenaries from all over the Mediterranean lands. The coins struck by the soldiers during the great mutiny in 241-238BC were inscribed in both Greek and Punic. It is also a fact that the annalists Silenos and Sossylos, who accompanied Hannibal, put up a plaque recording his exploits in a temple of Hera in Sicily written in both Greek and Punic.
"Greek," Nicolas Ostler points out, "like English, was spread through a variety of means - speculative commerce, naked imperialism and cultural allure." Athens remained for centuries the cultural centre of the world until the Roman Emperor Justinian closed its famous school in AD529. The language survived because, having been shaped mainly for public use, it remained in the eyes of its Roman users a valuable tool for argument, rhetoric and philosophy. Greek also remained attractive in the eyes of the Roman bons viveurs who appreciated haute cuisine, wine, music and frolics with either sex. The Latin word pergraecari (to act like a Greek) meant devotion not to high culture but to high living.
Greek may have dominated the cultural life within the Roman Empire, but it never branched out because its users worldwide belonged mostly to an educated elite keen to keep the language as pure and as close as possible to the great texts of Greek art and philosophy that inspired them. "The cult of Atticism," notes Nicholas Ostler, "has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2,500 years - but to no avail... People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of classical Attic when in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks." Even after the Renaissance took hold of Europe, Greek did enjoy a kind of revival as a source of Aristotelian wisdom, even if by then Latin had established itself as the lingua franca. By contrast with Greek, the Roman conquests proved much more permanent in their linguistic effects as Romans settled all over Europe, mixed with the natives and shaped in common with them many of the local languages.
Modern Greek - the language of the nation-state of Greece that emerged in 1830 after a long war of independence - went also through a phase during which 'Atticising' purists tried to 'cleanse' it from its mainly Turkish accretions. The controversy, now over, produced a language enriched with much of the vocabulary of its prestigious past and the freshness and spontaneity of its 'demotic' present. Interestingly, once again Greek has started these days to travel beyond Greece's borders and not just among the Southeast European would-be immigrants wishing to work and settle in Greece. A list compiled by Greece's education ministry in 2006 shows that 344 courses in Modern Greek Studies at university level are today operating in five continents. Most (179) are in Europe, 63 are in the US, 10 in Latin America, 9 in Canada, 54 in the former USSR, 22 in Asia and 27 in Africa. It seems as though Greek is gaining new popularity thanks to the literature and especially the poetry written in it (Greece boasts two Nobel Prize winners, Seferis and Elytis, among its many poets) and the worldwide attraction of Greece as a tourist destination with a difference, due to its cultural heritage.
There is undoubtedly some life left in the language of a country of which Kazantzakis said in his Journey to Morea: "The face of Greece is a palimpsest bearing twelve successive inscriptions: Contemporary, the period since 1821; the Turkish yoke; the Frankish sway; the Byzantine; the Roman; the Hellenistic epoch; the Classic; the Dorian Middle Ages; the Mycenean; the Aegean; and the Stone Age."
And Alexander did not only prove to be a brilliant strategist, but he also possessed a secret cultural weapon: the Greek language.