Standard Modern Greek

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Arvaniti

Modem Greek is a descendant of Classical Greek and is spoken today by approximately 11,000,000 people living in Greece. In addition, it is spoken (with various modifications) in large Greek immigrant communities in North America, Australia and elsewhere. Although the Modern Greek dialects had largely been shaped by the 10th c. A.D. (Browning 1983), the linguistic situation in Greece has been one ofdiglossiafrom the middle 19th c. (the early beginnings of the independent Greek state) and until 1976. The High and Low varieties of Greek diglossia are known asKatharevousaandDhimotikirespectively. Katharevousa was a purist, partly invented, variety that was heavily influenced by Classical Greek; the term Dhimotiki, on the other hand, loosely describes the mother tongue of the Greeks, which was confined to oral communication. In 1976 the use of Katharevousa was officially abolished and gradually a new standard based on Dhimotiki as spoken in Athens has emerged. This variety is adopted by an increasingly large number of educated speakers all over Greece, who choose it over regional varieties (Mackridge 1985). In spelling, Modern Greek has kept many of the conventions of Ancient Greek, although several simplifications have taken place since 1976. Perhaps the most dramatic of these has been the decision to stop using accent and breath marks (which have not had phonetic correspondents in the language for nearly 2,000 years); these marks were replaced by one accent on the stressed vowel of each word with two or more syllables. The variety described here is Standard Modern Greek as spoken by Athenians. The sample text in particular is based on recordings of two Athenian speakers, a male in his mid-twenties and a female in her mid-thirties. Both speakers read the passage twice in relatively informal style.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jerneja Kavčič

Focusing on Agnello and Orlando (1998), Elliger and Fink (1986), Weileder and Mayerhöfer (2013), Mihevc-Gabrovec (1978) and Keller and Russell (2012), I discuss attempts at introducing elements of Modern Greek into teaching its ancient predecessor. My analysis, which is based on the etymologies of LKN (Λεξικό της Κοινής Νεοελληνικής), shows that approximately half of the words in the textbooks investigated in this study retain the same written forms and meanings in Modern Greek as in Ancient Greek; the term word in this analysis subsumes headwords introducing lexical entries. On the other hand, words with the same written forms and different meanings in Ancient and Modern Greek are significantly less frequent, accounting for 5 to 11% of all words in the textbooks. Furthermore, these textbooks contain between 12 and 16% of words that retain the same meaning in Ancient and Modern Greek, and also show significant formal change. As a result, their written forms are different in Ancient than in Modern Greek. It is also found, however, that at least some inflected forms of the words belonging to the latter class retain in the modern language the same written forms and meanings as in Ancient Greek. These data suggest that it is possible to introduce elements of Modern Greek into teaching its ancient predecessor without drawing attention to grammatical and semantic differences between Ancient and Modern Greek. Based on these data I also evaluate at the end of the article existing attempts at incorporating elements of Modern Greek into teaching the ancient language.


Author(s):  
Christo Lombaard

This contribution is the second in a series on methodology and Biblical Spirituality. In the first article, ‘Biblical spirituality and interdisciplinarity: The discipline at cross-methodological intersection’, the matter was explored in relationship to the broader academic discipline of Spirituality. In this contribution, the focus is narrowed to the more specific aspect of mysticism within Spirituality Studies. It is not rare for Old Testament texts to be understood in relationship to mystical contexts. One the one hand, when Old Testament texts are interpreted from a mystical perspective, the methods with which such interpretations are studied are familiar. The same holds true, on the other hand, if texts in the Old Testament, dating from the Hellenistic period, are identified as mystic. However, African mission history has taught us that the Western interpretative framework, based on ancient Greek philosophical suppositions (most directly the concepts rendered by Plato and Aristotle) and rhetorical orientations, is so strong that it transposes that which it encounters in other cultures into its terms, thus rendering the initial cultural understandings inaccessible. This is precisely the case too with Old Testament texts dating from pre-Hellenistic times, identified as mystic. What are the methodological parameters required to understand such texts on their own terms? In fact, is such an understanding even possible?


Author(s):  
Lars Albinus

The purpose of the article is to show how the negative dialectics of Adorno gets involved with a concept of myth that is questionable in several respects. First of all, Adorno tries to combine, but rather conflates, two understandings of myth. On the one hand, the concept of myth is defined as the ancient Greek mythos, in which the subject of man is projected on to nature; on the other hand, myth is defined as the backfire of enlightenment, in which self-reflection becomes the blind spot of instrumental reason. Along these lines of argument, Adorno’s interpretation of Homer, which, at any rate, is highly inspiring, attempts to demonstrate that Odysseus is already enlightened in that he keeps the myth at bay in order to gain his self. The point is, as a matter of dialectic necessity, that he just ends up in myth once again, albeit in the second sense, namely by being a victim of his own self-denial. A question that seems to remain unanswered, though, is how the two kinds of myth are related. Further, Adorno draws on a problematic distinction between myth and literature in order to claim that Homer separates himself from the realm of myth. By adopting Adorno’s own game of interpretation, however, it is possible to regard myth as such, including the Homeric one, as being contingently open-ended rather than just a matter of dialectic determination.


Author(s):  
Paolo Calvetti

If, on the one hand, Japanese language, with its richness of marked allomorphs used for honorifics, has been considered one of the most attractive languages to investigate the phenomenon of politeness, on the other hand, a very small number of studies have been devoted to Japanese impoliteness, most of them limited to BBSs’ (Bulletin Board System) chats on Internet. Interestingly, Japanese native speakers declare, in general, that their language has a very limited number of offensive expressions and that ‘impoliteness’ is not a characteristic of their mother tongue. I tried to analyse some samples of spontaneous conversations taken from YouTube and other multimedia repertoires, in order to detect the main strategies used in Japanese real conversations to cause offence or to show a threatening attitude toward the partner’s face. It seems possible to state that, notwithstanding the different ‘cultural’ peculiarities, impoliteness shows, also in Japanese, a set of strategies common to other languages and that impoliteness, in terms of morphology, is not a mirror counterpart of keigo.


2008 ◽  
Vol 43 (No. 4) ◽  
pp. 142-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Dvořák ◽  
M. Tomšovský ◽  
L. Jankovský ◽  
D. Novotný

This study provides new data on Dutch elm disease in the Czech Republic. <I>Ophiostoma novo-ulmi</I> is reported for the first time in the area of the Czech Republic, as well as both subspecies ssp. <I>novo-ulmi</I> (indigenous in the area of the Ukraine and Moldavia), and ssp. <I>Americana</I> indigenous in North America. The majority of the recorded strains belonged to <I>O. n.-u.</I> ssp. <I>novo-ulmi</I>, while <I>O. n.-u.</I> ssp. <I>Americana</I> and hybrids of these two subspecies were found less frequently. On the other hand, <I>Ophiostoma ulmi</I> was not found at all in the investigated samples. Identification on the subspecies level was performed by methods of molecular biology, i.e. PCR and RFLP of gene regions<I> cu</I> and <I>col1</I>.


2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim A. Railey

Parry and Kelly (1987) argued for a causal link between expedient technologies and sedentism, and their explanation has widely influenced lithic analysts. There are some problems with their explanation, however, including disconnects in the reported timing of the shifts to expedient technologies, agricultural intensification, and sedentism. On the other hand, across much of North America the transition to an expedient technology appears to correlate more closely to the arrival of the bow and arrow. This is supported by data from a large excavation project in southern New Mexico, which shows that indicators of the shift to an expedient technology cannot be attributed to reduced mobility or any observable changes in subsistence practices, but do appear to correlate temporally with the appearance of arrow points.


1940 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-221
Author(s):  
S. A. Rochlin

Writing about life in Mecca in 1884–5 Professor C. Snouck Hurgronje made this observation: ”A class of Jâwah who dwell outside the geographical boundaries but who in late years have made regular pilgrimages to Mekka are people from the Cape of Good Hope. They are derived from Malays, formerly brought to the Cape by the Dutch, with a small mixture of Dutch blood. Some words of their Malay speech have passed into the strange, clipped Dutch dialect of the Boers. On the other hand they have exchanged their mother tongue for Cape Dutch, of course retaining many Malay expressions. Taking into consideration the genuinely Dutch names of many of these Ahl Kâf (as they are called in Mekka) one is tempted to believe that degenerated Dutch have been drawn by them into their religion, and many types among them increase the probability of this suggestion. Separated from intercourse with other Moslims they would scarcely have had the moral strength to hold their religion had not eager co-religionists come to them from abroad. When and whence these came is not known to me; however this may be, the mosques in Cape Colony have been more fervently supported in the last twenty years than ever before, more trouble is taken in teaching religion and every year some of the Ahl Kâf fare on pilgrimage to the Holy City.“


2018 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Norbert Ostrowski

Abstract When analysing Old Lithuanian texts from the 16th and the first half of the 17th century, one can notice that comparatives with the -jaussuffix tend to appear in comparative constructions with connectives containing negation, e.g. Bet eschdaugiaus dirbau / neig kursai isch yũ‘but I laboured more abundantly than they all’ (VEE 102: 16-17; 1 Corinthians 15: 10). This is the “particle comparative” in Stassen’s terms (1985; 2001). On the other hand, authors avoided comparatives with the -jaus suffix in other types of comparative constructions (with the preposition užand the genitive). Philological and etymological analysis of neg(i)and nei(gi)‘than’ shows that these connectives developed out of former sentence negations. This sheds some light on the syntactic environment in which the grammaticalization of the comparative suffix -jausoccurred. The Lithuanian comparative suffix -jaũ (OLith. -jau-s, e.g. geriaus‘better’) goes back to the postposed focus particle -jaũ, which functions as a marker of emphatic assertion of identity (König 1991). The primary contrastive function of the ‑jau-ssuffix can be compared to Ancient Greek -τερος (Sanskrit -taraḥ) in such usages as δεξίτερος ‘right(-hand)’. The grammaticalization of the focus marker jau(s)has occurred in sentences consisting of juxtaposed and contrasted clauses - the “conjoined comparative” in Stassen’s terms (1985: 38, 44), and in these sentences, -jausfilled the role of pragmatic marker and focalizer, emphasizing one of two compared, oppositional items.


2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Weeks

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nationality as an “ordering principle” became for the first time a significant factor for Russian imperial policy. Among the most thorny issues facing the imperial bureaucracy was the delimitation of the boundaries of the “Russian nation.” As is well known, St Petersburg never accepted either Ukrainians (at the time more often referred to as “Little Russians”) or Belarusians as separate nations. On the other hand, official Russia also did not deny the linguistic and cultural difference of these two groups entirely. Categories used in the 1897 census reflect this: under the category “mother tongue” (not surprisingly, no specific category of “nation” or “ethnicity” was included), those surveyed could respond “Great Russian,” “Little Russian,” or “Belarusian.” All three of these categories were then, however, subsumed into the larger category “Russian.” In a similar way, Russian officials never denied that Belarusians were in certain respects different from their brethren in central Russia. They did, however, indignantly reject the idea that these differences were so great as to exclude Belarusians from membership in the Russian nation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Tanner

Abstract I. parviflora is an exceptionally successful invader of many European countries. Its spread has been rapid, it is abundant in many parts of its exotic range and is one of few plants to successfully invade undisturbed forest vegetation. It is consequently regarded as undesirable by some, though there is little evidence of negative economic, social or environmental impacts. Further spread in central Europe is not likely as the species is already very abundant. In North America, on the other hand, it is still very localized. Even without clear evidence for impacts, a further spread there should not be encouraged by deliberate or careless transport of the species.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document