[B-Greek] peri katharevousa kai demotikh

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Wed Oct 12 13:07:20 EDT 2005


You might have a look at the Wikipedia article which notes the  
polticization.

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharevousa

I would expect counter-claims from different areas of the Greek- 
speaking world on this.

On Oct 12, 2005, at 12:26 PM, Curtis Hinson wrote:

> GEIA SAS
>
> I have been doing a little investigation and reflection on the issue I
> brought up. I found one source from Kritis and one from Kypros,  
> both of
> which claim that katharevousa has a different phonology than demotiki.
> Kypros.org (a great resource by the way) actually gives technical
> details on the differences in pronunciation in their board archives.
>
> That would address the orthographic concern I had.  I also observe  
> that
> not all info out there is unbiased because of the politically charged
> nature of diglossia in Greece: there's propaganda out there, in other
> words, that wants to dismiss it as an artifice, but that may not be  
> the
> whole truth.  I encountered in a couple of places the claim that
> katharevousa has no native folk sayings of it's own -- seemingly a  
> false
> claim, as demotiki incorporates quite a number of stylistically
> identifiable "katharevousisms".
>
> I suspect katharevousa is not entirely an artificial creation, but a
> standardization or formalization of one or more subsets of the living
> language.  From looking at it I have suspected it has more in common
> with late Koine/Byzantine Greek than "classical" Greek (perhaps  
> liturgy
> had something to do with that).  I also suspect that due to  
> katharevousa
> falling somewhat into obscurity for the present generation in mainland
> Greece (but less Kypros, where it enjoys more harmony or co-usage with
> demotiki), the uninitiated Greek when encountering it would  
> pronounce it
> in a demotiki way.
>
> http://www.factbites.com/topics/Katharevousa
>
> Bless the Name
> Curtis Hinson
>
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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