Cypriot Greek

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Arvaniti

Cypriot Greek is the dialect of Modern Greek spoken on the island of Cyprus by approximately 650,000 people and also by the substantial immigrant communities of Cypriots in the UK, North America, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. Due to lengthy isolation, Cypriot Greek is so distinct from Standard Greek as to be often unintelligible to speakers of the Standard. Greek Cypriot speakers, on the other hand, have considerably less difficulty understanding Greeks, since Standard Greek is the official language of Cyprus, and as such it is the medium of education and the language of the Cypriot media. However, in every day situations Cypriot Greek is the only variety used among Cypriots. Cypriot Greek is not homogeneous but exhibits considerable geographical variation (Newton 1972). The variety described here is that used by educated speakers, particularly the inhabitants of the capital, Nicosia. Although influenced by increasing contact with Standard Greek, Cypriot Greek retains most of its phonological and phonetic characteristics virtually intact. There is no established orthography for Cypriot Greek; however, certain, rather variable, conventions have emerged, based on Greek historical orthography but also including novel combinations of letters in order to represent sounds that do not exist in the Standard (e.g. σι for [∫]); a version of these conventions has been adopted here for the sample text. The transcription is based on the speech of an educated male speaker from Nicosia in his mid-thirties, who read the text twice at normal speed and in an informal manner, he also assisted in rendering the text from Standard to Cypriot Greek.

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-125
Author(s):  
Dimitris Tziovas

Periodically reviewing developments in a subject area and reflecting on the past and future directions of a discipline can be useful and instructive. In the case of Modern Greek Studies, this has rarely been done, and most of the reviews of the field come from USA.1So I take this opportunity to offer some thoughts on what has propelled changes in the field over the last forty years, on the fruitful (and occasionally trenchant) dialogue between Neohellenists inside and outside Greece and on the future of modern Greek studies as an academic discipline. During this period modern Greek studies have flourished with a number of new trends, debates and scholarly preoccupations emerging. At the same time many research students received their doctorates from departments of Modern Greek Studies, particularly in the United Kingdom, and were subsequently appointed to teaching posts at Greek, Cypriot or other European, American and Australian universities. Modern Greek departments in the UK have often been the driving force behind the discipline since the early 1980s. New approaches were introduced, challenging ideas were debated and influential publications emerged from those departments, which shaped the agenda for the study of modern Greek language, literature and culture. It should be noted that the influence of those departments in shaping the direction of modern Greek Studies has been out of all proportion to the number of staff teaching in them.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 385-398
Author(s):  
Peter Webster

The twentieth century saw the opening of wider spaces in which the settled historic Christianity of the UK could encounter other faiths. By the time Michael Ramsey became archbishop of Canterbury in 1961, developments both in England and in the international Anglican Communion made the task more present and more urgent. Ramsey was enabled by the expansion of air travel to visit more of the countries of the former empire in which Anglicans still worshipped, as Geoffrey Fisher before him had begun to do. Added to this was his willingness to intervene in international affairs, whether the war in Vietnam or the apartheid regime in South Africa. As such, there were new opportunities for Ramsey to come into contact with leaders of the other world faiths, and with local conflicts in other nations that had religious elements to them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
King Costa ◽  
Thelela Ngcetane-Vika

This paper is an exploration of theoretical aspects underpinning the practice of Corporate Governance (CG) in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Because of several corporate scandals and failures in the twenty and twenty first siècles, Corporate Governance has been a significant and crucial subject and field of study in business schools in recent years. Leadership and Management of business entities and alignment to prescripts that are statutory formulated for prevention of corporate decline and enhancement of sound business principles continue to be highly contentious issues. A theoretical and exploratory narrative synthesis was conducted to unearth the strengths and weaknesses of contextual explication, practice and legal application of Corporate Governance in both the United Kingdom and South Africa. In terms of the UK, the study found out that the CG is designed and benchmarked on international best practice, seamlessly fitting within all the Codes on Key Aspects of Corporate Governance. Secondly, another major element of strengths determination were found to be inherent in the practice of voluntary compliance. However, the greatest criticisms of Corporate Governance theories in the UK was the fact that their focus is largely on public corporations, especially those listed in London stock exchange and thus, leave behind small and medium enterprises. The cultural diversity is also found to be a cause for concern in terms of practice and legal application. On the other hand, in South Africa, the study found out that consideration for diversity is one of the greatest strengths in CG practice and legal application, which is likely to contribute effectively to good and sound decision-making, reflective of all people. Weaknesses continue to be the delay in realisation of board equity in terms of gender while on the other hand, corruption and lack of adherence to retributive prescripts remain problematic.


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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petros Karatsareas

Aim: To investigate whether the positive attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek and the mixture of positive and negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek that have been documented in Cyprus are also present in London’s Greek Cypriot community. Approach: Unlike previous quantitative works, the study reported in this article was qualitative and aimed at capturing the ways in which attitudes and attitude-driven practices are experienced by members of London’s diasporic community. Data and analysis: Data were collected by means of semi-structured, sociolinguistic interviews with 28 members of the community. All participants were second-generation heritage speakers, successive bilinguals in Cypriot Greek and English and successive bidialectal speakers in Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek. The data were analysed qualitatively (thematic analysis). Findings: Positive perceptions of Standard Modern Greek and mixed perceptions, both positive and negative, of Cypriot Greek are found in the context of London. As in Cyprus, Standard Modern Greek is perceived as a prestigious, proper and ‘correct’ variety of Greek. Cypriot Greek, in contrast, is described as a ‘villagey’, heavy and even broken variety. Greek complementary schools play a key role in engendering these attitudes. Unlike in Cyprus, in the London community, the use of Cypriot Greek is also discouraged in informal settings such as the home. Originality: Papapavlou and Pavlou contended that ‘there are no signs of negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek [in the UK]’ (2001, The interplay of language use and language maintenance and the cultural identity of Greek Cypriots in the UK. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11, 104). This research shows their claim to be false. Significance/implications: Negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek lead to a community-wide preference for the use of Standard Modern Greek in communication with other members of the Greek Cypriot community, which poses a great threat to the intergenerational transmission and maintenance of Cypriot Greek as a heritage language in London.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Lucia Della Torre

Not very long ago, scholars saw it fit to name a new and quite widespread phenomenon they had observed developing over the years as the “judicialization” of politics, meaning by it the expanding control of the judiciary at the expenses of the other powers of the State. Things seem yet to have begun to change, especially in Migration Law. Generally quite a marginal branch of the State's corpus iuris, this latter has already lent itself to different forms of experimentations which then, spilling over into other legislative disciplines, end up by becoming the new general rule. The new interaction between the judiciary and the executive in this specific field as it is unfolding in such countries as the UK and Switzerland may prove to be yet another example of these dynamics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-124
Author(s):  
Sandy Henderson ◽  
Ulrike Beland ◽  
Dimitrios Vonofakos

On or around 9 January 2019, twenty-two Listening Posts were conducted in nineteen countries: Canada, Chile, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Germany (Frankfurt and Berlin), Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy (two in Milan and one in the South), Peru, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the UK. This report synthesises the reports of those Listening Posts and organises the data yielded by them into common themes and patterns.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1


Author(s):  
Camelia Suleiman

Arabic became a minority language in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalise Arabic on the one hand, and secutise it on the other. The book delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. It combines qualitative methods not commonly used together in the study of Arabic in Israel, including ethnography, interviews with journalists and students, media discussions, and analysis of the production of knowledge on Arabic in Israeli academia.


Author(s):  
Carrol Clarkson

Carrol Clarkson’s chapter wrestles with the contentious question of Coetzee’s relation to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa of the 1970s and early 1980s, which took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon and found expression in the writings of Steve Biko. Clarkson focuses on the ways in which Coetzee departed from the ideas about writing and resistance that were circulating in his contemporary South Africa, particularly as articulated by novelist Nadine Gordimer. Clarkson discusses two related literary-critical problems: an ethics and politics of representation, and an ethics and politics of address, showing how Coetzee explores a tension between freedom of expression and responsibility to the other. In the slippage from saying to addressing we are led to further thought about modes and sites of consciousness—and hence accountabilities—in the interlocutory contact zones of the post-colony. The chapter invites a sharper appreciation of what a postcolonial philosophy might be.


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