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Day: February 2, 2016
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 […]
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 […]