Greek Personal Names 1
Greek Personal Names 1 GREEK PERSONAL NAMES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY 1 June 1962 Revised and Updated by Anastasia Parianou 2007 Greek Personal Names 2 (Above) Greece and its immediate neighbors Below Map of contemporary Greece and neighbors Bulgaria Macedonia Alexandroupolis Turkey Albania Thessaloniki • • Mount Olympus • Aegean Sea Ionian Athens Sea * Rhodes Mediterranean Sea Crete Greek Personal Names 3 Evaluative Foreword Greek Personal Names provides the reader with essential information about Greek names in a manner that is easily understood by the non-Greek speaker. The article is divided into two parts: Part I provides background information on the number of Greek speakers and recent transformations of the language. Part II focuses more exclusively on Modern Greek names. Part I (The Greek Language), provides background information to the Greek language. It identifies the number of speakers of the Greek language dating back to 1959 as well as important changes within the language. (According to Eurostat, Greece's population has grown to 11,047,000 in 2004.) More importantly, though, there is a description of the conflict between καθαρεύουζα (katharevousa) and δημοηική (dimotiki), the so-called 'γλωζζικό ζήηημα’ ('language question'). The Greek government solved this conflict when in 1976 it voted dimotiki as the official written and spoken language of Greece. In 1982, the monotonic system, which uses a single accent, was officially substituted for the polytonic system with its multiple accents. Part II accurately and precisely describes the structure of Greek names and the tradition of name-giving in Modern Greece. Here as elsewhere, the examples are numerous and illustrative. For instance, the description correctly notes that children receive their grandparents' names, although recently there has been a tendency of giving fashionable names to Greek children, such as Ariadne, Daphne, Maria Nefeli (Nefeli is also popular by itself) for girls and Alexandros, Konstantinos, Iason, Phoebus for boys.
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