Jeffreys,
Michael J. “The Literary Emergence of
Vernacular Greek.” Mosaic 8, no. 4 (Summer 1975), 1-24.
This first article discusses how
the modern vernacular Greek came about and the issues surrounding the
language. The author’s conclusions rest within
the modern world, but the first half of his article explains the linguistic and
literary nuances during the Byzantine period.
He focuses especially on the middle and late Byzantine period. Jeffreys explains that during the Byzantine
period Greek had three levels.
The first and most prestigious of these levels
was Attic Greek. This language was
static, archaic, and spoken and read by only the most educated of
scholars. This language was learned in
order to read the ancient classics, and scholars also used the language to
write high literature and treatises.
Those scholars intentionally kept the language archaic and preserved the
language without adding in new vocabulary.
This functioned much the same way that Egyptian hieroglyphs did for the
Egyptians. It was an archaic form of
writing and language that was only kept alive due to the prestige the language
held.
The second level of the medieval
Greek language was Koine. This form of Greek was the widest used
literary language of Byzantium. Koine means “common,” and it was the
dialect adopted by the ancient Macedonians (not the Byzantine Macedonians) and
spread as the lingua franca of the
Hellenistic kingdoms. It also happened
to be the language of the Greek New Testament.
Because of this Koine gained
much respect as a literary language and eventually outlasted Latin as a
literary language in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Koine was not as rigid as
Attic Greek. Writers often coined new
words and employed foreign words as the situation demanded. A good example of this is when Anna Komnena
describes a crossbow to her readers in her Alexiad. Before this the Greeks only had an archaic
Latin word for the deadly weapon, but Anna changed this. Anna herself may not have coined the word,
but the Alexiad is the first example
of the use of the word crossbow in Greek literature. Koine
was also the administrative language of the Byzantine state by the eighth
century. Despite being more malleable
than Attic Greek, koine was more
static than the language spoken by the ordinary people of Byzantium. Students still had to rigorously study koine in order to master its use.
The third level of medieval
Greek was Demotike. This comes from the word demos which means “people.” This
language developed at a much quicker pace than koine. This was probably
because demotike was not a literary
language and could be heavily influenced by local dialects and foreign
languages. This was the language of
merchants and frontier farmers. These
two groups often came into contact with foreigners and they would have borrowed
words from these different languages.
Greece also had, and still has, many different dialects. These were all classified as demotike because they were spoken by the
common people. Demotike had a rich poetic tradition that began to be written down
in the later Byzantine period. Most of
this literature deals with the exploits of the akritoi (frontier warrior farmers) against the Seljuk and Ottoman
Turks. These heroes were seen in much
the same light as the various knights of the King Arthur’s court, and these
stories seem to have some basis in the epic tradition of ancient Greece.
No comments:
Post a Comment