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Of Greek Words 379 THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE A Descriptive Analysis of Standard Modern Greek PETER MACKRIDGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1985 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP London New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York © Peter Mackridge 1985 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mackridge, Peter The Modern Greek language: a descriptive analysis of Standard Modern Greek. 1. Greek language, Modern /. Title 489*.3 PA1050 ISBN 0-19-815770-3 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mackridge, Peter A, The modern Greek language. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Greek language, Modern—Grammar. I. Title. PA1057.M27 1985 489\35 84-18934 ISBN 0-19-815770-3 Set by Joshua Associates, Oxford Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd. Guildford In memoriam Irene Pickering Mackridge (1919-1980) PREFACE This book is an attempt to present a fairly comprehensive account of the structure and usage of Standard Modern Greek (SMG), which is defined as the language ordinarily spoken and written at the present day by moderately educated people in the large urban centres of Greece. Today, despite the view frequently expressed by Greeks that the Modern Greek language is in a state of chaos, there is nevertheless a broad consensus about the general principles (and about most of the details) of the language. The observations contained in this book are based on my own experience of learning to understand and to use the Athenian spoken language since 1965, and on a large amount of spoken and written material collected systematically since 1974, the date at which the military dictatorship fell and the 'language question' suddenly became close to being resolved through the virtual abandonment of what had hitherto been the official language {katharevousa). This material con- sists of articles in newspapers and magazines and recordings both of radio and television broadcasts and of live conversations and discus- sions. Especially close attention has been paid to the linguistic features employed by people who are speaking naturally and with no intention of impressing by their use of Greek. This is one of the reasons why only a few examples have been taken from creative literature. Most weight has been attached to the utterances of people born and bred in Athens who have completed their high-school education, since these are the chief bearers of SMG; but the speech of Greeks from other areas and from different educational backgrounds has also been studied by way of comparison. Although questionnaires have been employed to elicit which form out of a range of alternatives a speaker uses, and native informants have been consulted as to the acceptability of utterances recorded from other speakers, most of the spoken material was col- lected from the speech of people who were unaware that their use of the language was being studied. The reason for this is the unreliability of answers to direct questions about what form a Greek speaker uses, since, owing to the highly normative nature of language teaching in Greece, the speaker will usually specify the form which (s)he thinks PREFACE vii (s)he uses or ought to use, a response which is often contradicted in practice by his/her use of a different form in informal conversation. Examples taken from written texts are usually assigned a reference (enclosed in brackets); in most cases where such a reference is lacking, the example is either a commonly used phrase or has been noted from oral usage. This book is not intended in any way to be a grammar. It does not possess any of the kinds of 'adequacy* which, according to Chomsky, are required of a grammar. Instead, it confines itself to an analysis, not without certain generalizations, of a large amount of material, which is not, however, treated as a finite corpus. I should also stress that I have no intention in this book of making any contribution to the study either of linguistic theory or of linguistic universale. It may be thought presumptuous that someone who is not a linguist in the modern sense, but a 4language-and-literature' man, should write a descriptive analysis of contemporary Greek. As a student of Modern Greek literature as well as language, I am acutely conscious of the fact that certain forms of the language are normally acceptable only in certain situations, and that the gap which separates the grammar of much of Modern Greek literature from that of SMG is sometimes wide. In view of the existence of alternative forms, I feel that close attention must be paid to surface structures (that is, the structure of actual utterances) so that one is fully aware of the possibilities of variation which might not be accounted for in some 'model' of the language. I therefore make no apology for concentrating on the fluid situation which prevails on the surface of Modern Greek rather than attempting to discover the unchanging general principles underlying this surface structure. Although I have been helped tremendously by the writings of modern linguists on Modern Greek, the present book should perhaps be seen as a parallel study to the work of the transformationalists, examining the language in a way which differs from theirs without attempting to vie with it. Since the language controversy in Greece is an issue that has polarized those who talk and write about Modern Greek, I must make clear where I stand on the matter. As a student of Modern Greek literature, I could hardly be anything but a supporter of demotic in its struggle against katharevousa. On the other hand, I can see a danger that demoticists might see this book as being 'reactionary', since it appears to condone the use of a whole host of katharevousa elements that are not strictly compatible with the grammar of traditional demotic. Such readers must viii PREFACE bear in mind that this book is an attempt at a descriptive, not a pre- scriptive, approach to Modern Greek. Thus, when I introduce certain katharevousa elements I may be far from approving of them; I am simply stating that such is the usage of at least some educated people. Hardly ever has there been attempted a description, on a large scale, of the speech and writing of educated Greeks. Until the last couple of decades, linguists tended to view Modern Greek as two separate codes, demotic and katharevousa, and to study only the former, dismissing katharevousa influence on spoken Greek as interference between codes. The pioneering work of Thumb (1895) was a comprehensive description of the speech of the less educated; and, although Trianda- phyllidis (1941) made many compromises with the language of the educated in his Grammar, the ideological aim of the descriptive and prescriptive grammarians of Modern Greek has usually been to promote demotic at the expense of katharevousa, as did Mirambel (1959). Now that katharevousa has more oi less ceased to exist as a separate code, it is my task to show just how far it has affected the everyday usage of educated Greeks, and not to try (as do some demoticists) to revive 'genuine popular forms' which, having been displaced under katharevousa influence, do not appear in that usage. Nevertheless, Mirambel's book has been a great inspiration to me; and I have been fortunate in that (as the bibliography to the present volume indicates) a remarkable amount of highly illuminating work has been done on Modern Greek since the publication of Mirambel's Description. I readily admit that much of my own book draws heavily on the results of this work; thus this book is as much a synthesis of work done by others as it is based on my own research. Throughout this book I have borne in mind that readers may not have a thorough acquaintance with MG. It is for this reason (and because there is no grammar of the language available to the English-speaking reader, except Pring (1950)) that I have felt it necessary to include some sample paradigms in Appendix I. In the Greek examples I have used the simplified historical ortho- graphy. When I have quoted from printed texts I have made the spelling conform with this system, although I have preserved the original punctuation. In my English renderings I have attempted to adhere as closely as possible to the original: in these renderings, square brackets indicate a word or words which do(es) not appear in the Greek, while parentheses indicate a word or words which appear(s) in the Greek but would be omitted in English. In the Greek examples, square brackets PREFACE ix indicate that what appears between them may optionally be deleted. Often, however, English renderings are followed by literal translations: just how literal these are depends on the circumstances. Outside Chapter 1, neither the International Phonetic Alphabet nor strictly phonemic representations are normally used: when words or parts of words are transliterated, a semi-phonetic transcription is given. The initial stages of the research for this book were carried out with the assistance of the Hay ter Travel Fund, University of London. The bulk of the research was funded by the British Academy.
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