Subscribe to Blog via Email
December 2024 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Are Greeks an ethnoreligious group?
Weeell… in the Ottoman Empire (and in the Byzantine Empire before it), identity was primarily credal, organised as Millets (Ottoman Empire). As far as everyone in the Ottoman Empire was concerned, there were:
- Muslims
- Franks (Catholic)
- Romans (Orthodox)
- Armenians
- Jews
See Albanians or Bulgarians in that list? Me neither. In fact, Bulgarians were only able to assert a distinct national identity by establishing a distinct ecclesiastical identity, through the Bulgarian Exarchate.
Ethnicity as we understand it did not factor much in how people understood identity. The Catholics of the Greek islands were ethnic Greeks, as were the Muslims of Crete; that didn’t matter. In the Millet way of thinking, Markos Vamvakaris was as much a Frank as Édith Piaf; and no distinction was to be made between a Muslim from Iraklio and a Muslim from Damascus.
That delayed the establishment of national identities in the Balkans. People were aware of the Albanian language, and had words for Albanians, for example; but Albanians were either Franks, Romans, or Muslims first, and Albanians second. That’s why it was so important for the Albanian nationalists to assert “the religion of Albania is Albanianism”. And why Greeks historically used the odd construction “Turk-Albanians” (who are just Muslim Albanians).
So. There are a lot of longstanding ethnic minorities in Greece, who identified as Romans through the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods, and transitioned to a Greek national identity after Greek Independence. That includes Arvanites (Albanian-speaking) and Aromanians (Romance-speaking), who may not have spoken a word of Greek but fought the Turks, because their identity was Orthodox.
Things with Slavic-speakers got a lot more contentious, of course, and I’ll wisely decide to avoid getting into it. There was some contentiousness with Aromanians too. But I will mention the entertaining case of the Kızderbent Trakatroukides:
- Settled in Northeastern Turkey from southern Bulgaria.
- Unlike the other Bulgarian villages of Northeastern Turkey, did not join the Bulgarian Exarchate but stayed with the Greek Orthodox church.
- Therefore did not join the other Bulgarians in leaving Turkey for Bulgaria in 1919.
- Therefore instead were persecuted as Greeks and fled to Greece in 1923.
- And the majority of them were settled in the village of Polypetro…
- … whose local population spoke Makedonski.
The sum of the anecdotes is: Greek identity may not be ethnoreligious now, but “Roman” identity was ethnoreligious for a long time. Greek identity is in many ways a successor to “Roman” identity, so who ended up called “Greek” was not unrelated to who was called “Roman”.
And of course those historically non-Grecophone populations get very touchy if you tell them they aren’t Greek.
EDIT: Dimitra edited her answer in light of mine. I am now reciprocating.
Let’s set some parameters. There were three names in play.
* Romans (Ρωμιοί), which meant the Rum millet, and included everyone Greek Orthodox. I’ll claim that’s the ethnoreligious identity.
* Hellenes (Έλληνες), which meant the Ancient Greeks, and which the intelligentsia towards the end of the Ottomans started promoting over the other two names. That’s the modern name for Greeks; and though that may not have been the original intent it includes Greek nationals of all creeds (including Jews and Armenians—and though many Greeks may wince to acknowledge it, Muslims as well). I’ll claim that that’s the civic identity. Inasmuch as is there such a thing in Greece.
* Graikoi (Γραικοί), which was used less than the other names, but which I have seen used for ethnic Greeks. (The Aromanian writer Giorgos Exarchos is a quite loyal Greek, but he makes a point of distinguishing Graikoi Hellenes from Vlach Hellenes.) The word of course is just Greek for “Greek”. I’ll claim that that’s the ethnic identity.
Dimitra’s conclusion is that Greeks in Ottoman times were not ethnoreligious, because “If Greek Then Orthodox” did not map to “If Orthodox Then Greek”.
Now the equation “If Roman Then Orthodox” did map to “If Orthodox Then Roman”. Roman was an ethnoreligious identity; and Bulgarians, Albanians and Aromanians were Roman.
It is true that the Graikoi were a privileged group within the Romans. They had control of the Patriarchate (which ran the Rum millet), and they were quite happy for Graikoi and Romans to be conflated, at the expense of the other ethnicities.
BUT the culture they were privileging wasn’t a culture of modern vernacular Greek: it was Hellenic culture (Ancient Greek). And here’s the catch: Graikoi were only somewhat more privileged in their access to Hellenic culture than Bulgarians and Albanians. Remember that people did not always consider Ancient Greek the same language as Modern Greek. Greeks themselves called Modern Greek Romaic until independence; and their Western contemporaries often did too. And if Graikoi had to learn how to write in good Hellenic, well, so could Albanians and Bulgarians. (And of course, they did.)
So the equation Hellenes = Graikoi was disrupted: non-Grecophones had access to Hellenic culture. The equation Romans = Graikoi was disrupted: non-Grecophones were Orthodox. And the equation Hellenes = Romans was disrupted: the true Hellenes were pagans, and people were well aware of the discontinuity between Ancient and Mediaeval civilisation.
But the equation Roman iff Orthodox, of course, was not disrupted: it was a definition.
(It is now that Romios means something different—alignment with Greek identity through low rather than high culture—Hellene being the high culture, of course. Vamvakaris was a Frank not a Roman, but Greeks now will happily claim him as a Romios. I’ve heard Greek Christians claim that any Greek Jew who loves Kazantzidis must be a Romios.)
So:
Was the definition of Roman = Orthodox forced on Graikoi, Bulgarians, Albanians, Aromanians etc by the Ottomans? I suspect it wasn’t, and that it was inherited from Byzantium. If you were Orthodox, you followed the Emperor’s creed; if you were Catholic or Muslim, you were a foreigner, and if you were Jewish, you were a second class citizen. I don’t think the Byzantines overly worried about what your ethnicity was, whether you were Bulgarian (like John Koukouzelis) or Georgian (like John Tzetzes) or Armenian (like half the emperors). As long as you were Orthodox and wrote in Ancientish Greek, you were a good subject of the Roman Empire.
Were the Graikoi or the Bulgarians worried about ethnicity in Ottoman times? Again, I don’t think so. Partly because the term Graikoi was so rarely used to begin with, partly because you don’t hear much mention of the minority ethnicities at all.
I *think* I’m in agreement with Dimitra overall: Greeks as Hellenes are a civic identity now (Greek Jew, Έλληνας Εβραίος, is not a contradiction in terms); Greeks as Romans were an ethnoreligious identity back in the day. And this having been a reasonably recent transition, it has been a little bumpy.
“Greek Muslim”. Έλληνας Μουσουλμάνος. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that Christian Greeks are still uncomfortable with the concept.
(Google gives me 177 hits for Έλληνας Μουσουλμάνος, vs 2170 hits for Έλληνας Εβραίος. There are 98,000 Muslims in Greece and 5,000 Jews in Greece.)
Do I need a good understanding of mathematics in order to excel at linguistics?
IMHO: for most disciplines no.
Steve Rapaport has spoken on Applied Linguistics; but Applied Linguistics is a very different discipline to Theoretical/General. Phonetics is an experimental science, so you’ll need statistics there.
Reconstructing in historical linguistics requires a degree of rigour and thinking in terms of rules which is a bit like maths, but only a bit. Ditto phonology and syntax, and I guess morphology. The other branches not so much.
Formal semantics has much in common with mathematical logic. But you’ll get more out of philosophy than mathematics if you go that way.
What do you look like when you speak Ancient Greek (Koine) in Greece today?
How soon my fellow respondents forget Katharevousa. Just as well they do, too.
Katharevousa (Puristic Greek), the project of purifying Greek of the last 2000 years of linguistic evolution, was a motley, incoherent, and rarely lovely thing. Some of its grammar was Attic, a lot more of it was Koine, and by accident it ended up most similar to Mediaeval Greek (purists were winding back the clock as much as was feasible, and not much was feasible).
Nonetheless, a Frank such as OP, trying to speak Koine in Greece with Modern Greek pronunciation, would be taken for a valiant attempt to speak a somewhat over the top Katharevousa. And given how much of a moving target Katharevousa was, they would probably get away with it too.
So 130 years ago, OP would be fêted and complimented for their excellent Greek by the elite—who would mutter to each other “Look you, the Frank speaks better Hellenic than us!” The common herd would bow and walk away, with their prejudice confirmed that the Franks speak the same gibberish as the high and mighty.
80 years ago, OP would be complimented for their excellent Greek by the establishment. Not fêted though. The more atticising versions of Katharevousa had already died out, so even the establishment would have started thinking OP odd. Since noone used Katharevousa in literature after 1900 (Cavafy doesn’t count), the intelligentsia would look askance at OP, and probably play practical jokes on them. The communists would beat OP up in an alley, convinced they were a British spy.
30 years ago, OP would have been greeted with gales of laughter. Katharevousa died 40 years ago, and it died through ridicule, as much as it did through guilt by association with the Colonels’ regime. Any survivals of Katharevousa by 1980 were jocular.
Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors?
The feeling has been there for a very long time. Theodore Metochites in the 14th century lamented that the Ancients had said everything that needed to be said, so there was nothing left for his contemporaries to do. The Greek peasantry would make up stories about the pagan giants who built the inexplicable structures all around them.
The more superficial have translated the feeling of inferiority into the bombastic (“When we were building Parthenons, you guys were eating acorns”—noone that feels secure in themselves bothers to say that to Westerners). The more sensitive have had the feeling of failure gnaw at them. Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer does well to quite Seferis—who after all, as a professional diplomat, had plenty of opportunity to compare Greece to the West and reflect on what went wrong.
My sense is the feeling has dissipated somewhat as Greece became more integrated into Europe; there was a palpable difference I felt between my stay in 1983 and my return in 1995.
Why is ‘pronounciation’ spelled as ‘pronunciation’ in English?
Brian Collins’ answer is impeccably correct for why pronunciation was not spelled pronounciation after the combination of the Great English Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic laxing (a long vowel three syllables back is shortened, as in insane ~ insanity). But all the answers aren’t really answering why pronunciation is still being pronounced pronunciation.
Let’s look at another instance of trisyllabic laxing: private ~ privacy.
In Britain, privacy has a short vowel, following the same rule as insanity and pronunciation. In the US and Australia, it’s a long vowel.
Is that because the US and Australia are illiterate? Why then, so are the British, when they say pirate ~ piracy, with a long vowel. (I’m told piracy still has a short vowel among laywers.)
No, it’s because trisyllabic laxing has resulted in a lack of morphological transparency. The change in vowel looks wrong: if privacy comes from private, they should sound the same. And they’ve been made to sound the same again, a few centuries later, by analogy.
Well, just as piracy has come to sound more like pirate by analogy, and privacy has come to sound more like private, now it’s pronunciation‘s turn. People are tempted to pronounce it pronounciation, for the same reason. I do. And it’s not currently considered correct, but it may yet.
Why isn’t Cyprus part of Greece?
Greece got most of the Aegean islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, after the Balkan Wars. There were three exceptions:
- Greece did not get Imbros and Tenedos (Gökçeada and Bozcaada), because of their strategic importance right outside the Dardanelles. When the invasion at Gallipoli happened, the British (and ANZACs) were based at the next island down, Lemnos.
- The Dodecanese, which Italy got from Turkey just before 1913.
- Cyprus, which Turkey had sold to the British in 1878.
Half the island (well, a third) is culturally Turkish; but if Cyprus had still been under Turkish rule in 1913, it’s not impossible that it would have been ceded to Greece. And the Turkish element in Cyprus would likely have been expelled under the 1923 population exchange, as happened in the rest of Greece outside of Thrace—and as did not happen in the Dodecanese, which still weren’t in Greece. (That only happened in 1946.)
Cyprus remained under British rule until the Cyprus Emergency of 1955–60. The intent of the Greek Cypriot militants EOKA was union with Greece, Enosis. That did not happen, not least because of the Turkish minority asserting itself and Cypriot intercommunal violence. The Republic of Cyprus arose as a compromise.
Much water has flown under the bridge since then. The Republic of Cyprus no longer has a substantial Turkish population, because of the continued intercommunity violence and the de facto partition of the island. But fifty five years on, even though most Greek Cypriots do not identify as Cypriots first Greeks second, they are quite used to being a separate country, and don’t feel any urge for Enosis.
What other logical languages are there other than Lojban?
Lojban is begotten from Loglan; Lojban is a schism of Loglan, and seems to have taken most of the Loglanists with it. Loglan also begat Guaspi, although I don’t think that it got much of a following (and its inventor is also a Lojbanist).
That’s the Loglan family of logical artificial languages that I know of.
Why do we need to capitalize “I” and the days of the weeks in English?
No disagreement with the answers here. I’ll philosophise a bit more generally:
Each language authority or community ends up with a particular set of conventions about punctuation and capitalisation—or borrows them from a more prestigious language. You only become aware of alternate ways of doing things if you’re exposed to other communities. And it only becomes a problem if your language does not align to a single community. (This is a problem for languages like Esperanto or Ancient Greek, which is often capitalised and punctuated differently according to the country printing the text.)
The conventions about punctuation and capitalisation are memes, and they are only partly selected in response to functional needs.
So you can argue that I was capitalised because i looks odd (and ambiguous with Roman number 1); note that the older and dialectal variant ich (which shows up in King Lear) is not capitalised. And capitalising nouns does make some sense as a disambiguation, especially in a language with zero morphology like English.
But mostly it’s just a matter of fashion. It’s also an in-group marker: this person follows the community’s rules, so they are declaring allegiance to our community.
Fashion does change (English got rid of capitalised nouns); but conscious innovation by a single person does not usually get far.
As someone whose other language (Greek) borrowed its punctuation from French, I cannot tell you how much better English would be if it used French’s quotation dash. All those stupid “he said”s and “she said”s and “he expostulated” would just disappear: the dash would tell you all you need to know. Joyce thought the same thing, and he used quotation dashes.
And no one else in English does, because the quotation mark and “he said” convention has stuck.
And why has the convention stuck? Why don’t you get to be a mountain goat instead of a sheep?
Because language use does not usually reward the unconventional. People just scratch their heads and think you’re odd. Just like no one got fired for buying IBM, no one gets fired for following the language community’s rules.
You can violate the community’s rules to make a point. If you’re a poet, or an entertaining storyteller, you may be heard appreciatively. If the medium is part of your message—if you’re foregrounding the language, you can start your own memes, and be an agent in language change.
But much of the time, and particularly in formal writing, no one cares about how witty or innovative you are. They just want the content, and then they move on. So being a mountain goat in most contexts just makes you annoying. And wit and idiosyncrasy are a currency you should use sparingly in any case: the more persistently you do it, the less effective your deviations become.
Is it true that some non-American children who watch American TV shows have adopted that accent?
My parents were first generation immigrants to Australia. My mother had no English when she came here. My father had high school English, but no Australian accent. My parents worked in their fish and chip shop attached to the house, so much of the daytime I was reared by Sesame Street; I interacted with my parents in the evening.
Outcome 1. I did not speak until I was two years old. I presume that was because I was getting mixed English and Greek from them. I was reading pretty early, but not speaking.
Outcome 2. My parents asked their GP what to do about me not speaking. This being the ’70s, the advice was to use just one language (not: one language per context or per parent). My parents (to my surprise now) chose English. Had we not moved back to Greece when I was 8, I would never really have learned Greek.
Outcome 3. I did not really interact with any native speakers of English until I went to kindergarten. Therefore, having been reared by Sesame Street, unsurprisingly I spoke with an American accent. In fact I did not acquire an Australian accent until after we moved back to Australia, when I was 12. My first year back of schooling I was teased a fair bit about the accent.
(Long gone now, though after three years of living in the States at 28, I was starting to do American things with my vocal equipment, and they come back if I speak for ten minutes with an American.)
Why is the word “all” spelled this way instead of “aal”?
Billy Kerr’s answer to Why is the word “all” spelled this way instead of “aal”? is right, but lemme add a bit to it.
While English spelling looks pretty random, there is a predictability to it if you assume that it used to make sense in Middle English. So through a particular vowel change in Middle English, a before l tends to be pronounced as /ɑː/ or /ɔː/, depending on dialect. walk, call, paltry, etc. And the presence of the l is a cue to us that the a will do that. (Unless we know the word isn’t English, of course, as in palimony or banal.)
Now. You speak a version of English that has enough distance from standard English, both in terms of national identity and language structure, that it might as well be a separate language. Which means you get to spell it differently than English. And in that language, the l after a drops off. How do you spell all now?
I speak, of course, of Scots.
You could keep spelling it as all, and introduce a rule that l(l) after a is silent. It’s not like English hasn’t done things like that. But:
- It’s hard enough to get people to write and read in Scots to begin with; you don’t want to introduce more crazy spelling rules.
- Part of the point of a Scots spelling is that it looks different from English, to people who already know how to write in English. You show them <all>, they’ll just pronounce it as /ɑːlˠ/.
You could start with all, and then put in an apostrophe to indicate that the l has fallen off: a’ . Because the apostrophe means an l has fallen off, you know that the a’ will be pronounced as /ɑː/.
That’s what Robbie Burns did. The problem with that though, is that it takes Middle English as a starting point: you’re writing an apostrophe because there used to be a letter there in Middle English. And there still is a letter there in Modern English. Which means your spelling system is derived from English a little too obviously. No wonder that convention is now called the Apologetic apostrophe.
You could decide that the English spelling all can get stuffed, and you’ll spell the word phonetically—using the closest spelling English orthography allows you. That gives you aw. Which I believe is the current Modern Scots recommendation, and is also what Scots was written like in its literary heyday.
OR: In between Robbie Burns and now, you could say that the Sassenach can be buggered, and you’ll invent a brand new spelling for a brand new language, that owes nothing to those Southern fiends, and that doesn’t expect you to know that an l used to be there. And if your new spelling looks a bit more Viking than English, so much the better.
Hence: aa.
And if you retrofit Scots spelling onto English all, you get aal.
Which I suspect is what OP is doing. I don’t see where else he’d have gotten <aa> from: <aa> is not otherwise used in English for anything.