Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

Jonathan Robie jonathan at texcel.no
Tue Jun 9 08:36:47 EDT 1998


This came out a little jumbled, so I'm reformatting it and posting it
again. For the record, no, I was not aware of the KAQAREUOUSA.

Jonathan


At 08:20 AM 7/9/98 -0400, Adam, Professor AKM wrote:
>Jonathan suggested that I forward this to the list--
 
Jonathan--

When you wrote, 

>The local Bishop wrote a 20 minute letter in a form of Greek
>which was neither New Testament nor modern, but seemed to be a flowery,
>archaic form of modern Greek.

it wasn't clear whether you knew that modern Greek persists in two
dialects, the DHMOTIKH and the KAQAREUOUSA. The former is the spoken
Greek of every day, what is truly "modern" Greek; the latter is (as you
suggest) a deliberately archaizing dialect of "purifying" Greek, used
for judicial, legislative, official documents. If I recall correctly, it
is something of a nineteenth-century invention which excised
identifiably "modern" innovations in demotic Greek (but allowed for some
development in vocabulary and syntax). 

Grace and peace
AKMA
akm.adam at ptsem.ed
Princeton Theological Seminary

"Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either
petulancy, ambition, or pride." J. Swift
 
jonathan at texcel.no
Texcel Research
http://www.texcel.no



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