When Greek meets Greek

There have been strong and mutual links between Greece and Britain for many centuries: from the visits of the more adventurous Tourists in the eighteenth century, through Byron's gallant if quixotic efforts to expel the Turks in the nineteenth, to the respective armies fighting alongside each other during the Second World War.  There is also a close parallel between the way in which the Greek Empire and its artistic and philosophical achievements were assimilated by the Romans in the last years of the pre-Christian epoch, and the similar take-over of Britain's imperial role and cultural assumptions by the Americans in the 1950s. 

The two peoples also have much in common linguistically.  Greek obviously has the more ancient literary tradition, but English can trace back its roots to an equivalent epoch.  The language of Homer, probably dating from around 700 BC, though treating of events five hundred years before, is essentially that of a heroic society of warriors who were primarily concerned with matters of war and its contingent conflicts of love and honour.  In Anglo-Saxon there is the Beowulf epic, composed around 750 AD, but located in the fourth or fifth century AD, which deals with precisely these same themes.  Indeed, even the poetic technique used by each – the so-called oral-formulaic approach of set, almost cliched phrases woven together to form a new and brilliant tapestry - is identical. 

Thereafter the trajectory of both languages is remarkably close.  Both became subject tongues: Greek became the secondary language to first Latin and then later to Turkish, while English was subsidiary to the Anglo-Norman spoken by the invaders of 1066.  The effect of these centuries-long subjugations was the same; both languages lost much of their original complexity as the ruling classes, hitherto the guardians of correct morphology and grammar, switched to the speech of the conqueror. 

Partly as a result of this erosion, and partly through the increased importance of the accented syllable, English reduced most unaccented vowels to the 'schwa' sound; so 'photographer', becomes 'fuh-tog-ruh-fuh’.  Modern Greek has analogously reduced many of its vowel sounds to that of 'ee'.  One language is now full of thuds, and the other of squeaks.

Modern Greek does, however, differ from English in one crucial regard: a few years back the decision was taken to 'simplify' the spelling by removing most of the ancient accents, reducing them to just one.  Logical enough in the sense that nothing was lost in terms of pronunciation.  But as the recent uproar over the proposed simplification of French orthography showed, language has little to do with logic.  Rather, it is an organic record of a speech, of a nation; in its crazy, archaic forms it presents fossils for us to recognise and admire. The fear must be - as the French rightly feared - that fiddling with the orthography would eventually lead to one of those emasculated factitious spelling systems periodically proposed by various do-gooders and cranks.  Greece's misguided simplification of its accents might be just the first step along this slippery road to deracination.  Let us hope that in this respect at least, English does not follow suit, and that if any attempts are made to do so, that there will be a suitable tug of war over our words.

(25.12.91)

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