Greek linguistic conservatism

[Otto Kretschmer]

Has the high urbanization and literacy rate in Greece from Antiquity onward been a factor adls to why the language change has been dlower than average? Greek is somewhere close to Icelandic in terms of how conservative it is, texts . over a millenium ago are easily readable provided they are written in actual (non atticized) language. Even the New Testament is comprehensible evrn though it was written down in 2nd century AD

[Vijay]

No idea, but IIRC, it isn't until recently that people started writing in a form of Greek that's closer to what's spoken today anyway.

[Linguoboy]

Has the high urbanization and literacy rate in Greece from Antiquity onward been a factor adls to why the language change has been dlower than average?

How do we know what the Greek literacy rate was from Antiquity onward?

Was it higher than in China? Because Greece certainly wasn't more urbanised.

[Otto Kretschmer]

I've seen estimates of approx 30% of adult population in Greece. Note that even in Roman period all largest cities with exception of Rome itself were in the East. Literacy rates also did not change at all in the East while after the fall of WRE they dropped significantly in the West and all cities became almost empty. Rome itself went from a city of 1 mln people to a town of 50,000 and it was the largest urban settlement by far for several centuries.

[Linguoboy]

I've seen estimates of approx 30% of adult population in Greece.

Based on what? You haven't actually answered my question.

Note that even in Roman period all largest cities with exception of Rome itself were in the East. Literacy rates also did not change at all in the East while after the fall of WRE they dropped significantly in the West and all cities became almost empty. Rome itself went from a city of 1 mln people to a town of 50,000 and it was the largest urban settlement by far for several centuries.

I'm not comparing Greek to Rome, though; I'm comparing it to China. Do you think the relatively high urbanization and literacy rate in China throughout most of its history combined to make the rate of linguistic change (however you're measuring that) "slower than average" (however you're calculating that)? Why or why not?

[Otto Kretschmer]

As for Greece https://erenow.net/ancient/ancient-gree ... et/257.php

As for Chinese, no as Chinese script is not phonetic. It gives you an idea of the text's meaning but not how to pronounce it. Like when seeing 40 you pronounce it as forty in English, czterdzieści in Polish and sorok in Russian.

As for comprehension - modern Greek speakers can read the New Testament (written in 2nd century AD) without much difficulty, some Greeks compare it to reading Early Modern English for an English speaker. I doubr any Germanic spekaer could read a Proto Germanic text from 200 AD and Italian speakers would struggle with even Vulgar Latin of that period.

Another language that has changed at a slow rate is Persian. Texts from 9th century are alraedy called Early Modern Persian.

[Linguoboy]

As for Greece https://erenow.net/ancient/ancient-gree ... et/257.php

Okay, so you have one secondary source for this estimate which cites no primary sources or peer-reviewed scholarly work. That alone is not going to shift the discussion.

As for Chinese, no as Chinese script is not phonetic. It gives you an idea of the text's meaning but not how to pronounce it. Like when seeing 40 you pronounce it as forty in English, czterdzieści in Polish and sorok in Russian.

So what are you saying exactly? Are you making a further claim about the relationship between linguistic change and the nature of the orthography? If so, what claim and what basis is there for it?

As for comprehension - modern Greek speakers can read the New Testament (written in 2nd century AD) without much difficulty, some Greeks compare it to reading Early Modern English for an English speaker.

[citation needed] (FWIW, the Greeks I went to high school with don't agree.)

I doubr any Germanic spekaer could read a Proto Germanic text from 200 AD

Probably because these don't exist.

Another language that has changed at a slow rate is Persian. Texts from 9th century are alraedy called Early Modern Persian.

I'm not exactly sure what this supposed to prove except that the periodisation of Persian is unlike the periodisation of most European languages. If we didn't use the term "Latin" and called the stage of the language during the Roman Empire "Old Romance", when do you think we'd start talking about "New Romance"? (BTW, in English at least, we don't call this stage "Modern Persian" but "New Persian". "Classical Persian" is actually a stage of "New Persian" as opposed to a preceding stage as in the case of Latin and Greek. This is why the terms themselves don't necessarily tell you much about the nature of the entities they refer to.)

[Ares Land]

There are many factors explaining the relative conservative state of the Greek languages, but urbanisation or literacy don't factor a lot.

• MG orthography is very conservative (especially back when they used polytonic orthographic!)
• Besides, in Greek usage, modern pronunciation is used for Ancient Greek.
• The whole 'Greek language question.' Katharevousa was specifically designed as conservative (some were even in favor of using Attic!).
• In the 19th century, innovation from recent centuries were systematically rejected, for several reasons; including most anything with a whiff of Turkish about it.
• The Greeks use Demotic now, but two centuries of all literary or official writing done in Katharevousa has left its mark.
• The New Testament always was of prime cultural influence.
• In essence this all worked as Classical/Koine words and construction being reborrowed into modern Greek.
• And besides, parts of the New Testament was written in fairly simple Koine (some even say bad Greek!) by non native speakers. (I'm told some books in the NT are harder than others; the Septuagint, by contrast, is a lot harder to understand; Plato is very difficult.)
• Familiarity with ancient idioms, sayings, constructions and vocabulary. I don't think, say, μολὼν λαϐέ works in Modern Greek but people do know and understand the phrase.

Literacy and urbanization played a part, but not how you'd think. I think increasing literacy in the 19th century, and widespread literacy in the 20th century both played a part, as did the expansion of Athens, populated in two centuries by people from very different origins brought together. (It was barely a village in the 20th century, and its original MG dialect is I believe entirely lost.)

It's worth comparing the situation with Italian, where a national identity and a national language were also built from scratch in the 19th century; as it happens Standard Italian is very conservative too. (It's still pretty close to 13th century Toscan, though of course Italians today struggle with Dante.)

While we're discussing linguistic conservative, I'd be curious to have the straight dope on Icelandic too. Much like everyone, I heard that bit about how Icelanders can read easily the Edda but I'd love to know how true that is!

[Travis B.]

While we're discussing linguistic conservative, I'd be curious to have the straight dope on Icelandic too. Much like everyone, I heard that bit about how Icelanders can read easily the Edda but I'd love to know how true that is!

From what I gather the conservatism of Icelandic is in many ways orthographic - it just happened that the largest amount of change happened in the phonology, in a largely regular fashion, so the orthography did not have to change much, but the pronunciation changed pretty drastically.

[Linguoboy]

From what I gather the conservatism of Icelandic is in many ways orthographic - it just happened that the largest amount of change happened in the phonology, in a largely regular fashion, so the orthography did not have to change much, but the pronunciation changed pretty drastically.

It all depends what you're comparing it too. Compared to Faroese, it's still pretty conservative, and when contrasted to Danish it's hardly changed at all.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

As for comprehension - modern Greek speakers can read the New Testament (written in 2nd century AD) without much difficulty, some Greeks compare it to reading Early Modern English for an English speaker.

[citation needed] (FWIW, the Greeks I went to high school with don't agree.)

A lot of schoolchildren also have trouble with Shakespeare when they first encounter him, too. Some of him is very straightforward, but some is not, especially when he has Gower serve as the chorus in one of his plays, speaking something that was archaic to Shakespeare himself.

[zompist]

As for Chinese, no as Chinese script is not phonetic. It gives you an idea of the text's meaning but not how to pronounce it. Like when seeing 40 you pronounce it as forty in English, czterdzieści in Polish and sorok in Russian.

This is not entirely false, but not really true either. Chinese writing is not ideographic. It's true that 四十 doesn't give any hint on pronunciation, but the characters stand for the Chinese words sìshí. (Or whatever dialect or historical variety you prefer.)

On the other hand, 什 'miscellaneous' and 辻 'street' absolutely give you the pronunciation (shí), and 计 jì 'plan' gives a hint at least.

There is, heaven knows, a lot of memorization required to learn Chinese characters, but it's a Western myth that the system does not include phonetic information. The vast majority of Chinese characters do include it.

More to the point, the example of modern Japanese shows that an even more complicated system is no barrier to universal literacy.

[Kuchigakatai]

As for comprehension - modern Greek speakers can read the New Testament (written in 2nd century AD) without much difficulty, some Greeks compare it to reading Early Modern English for an English speaker.

[citation needed] (FWIW, the Greeks I went to high school with don't agree.)

A lot of schoolchildren also have trouble with Shakespeare when they first encounter him, too. Some of him is very straightforward, but some is not, especially when he has Gower serve as the chorus in one of his plays, speaking something that was archaic to Shakespeare himself.

I've seen linguists claim the same thing about modern Spanish speakers and 13th-century Spanish, but I disagree. While it's true phonology has changed little (/h/ was lost, three pairs merged into /θ s x/, more recently /ʎ ʝ/ merged as /ʝ/, that's about it for standard pronunciation), the changes in vocabulary and grammar are serious, and an obstacle.

[Vijay]

[citation needed] (FWIW, the Greeks I went to high school with don't agree.)

A lot of schoolchildren also have trouble with Shakespeare when they first encounter him, too. Some of him is very straightforward, but some is not, especially when he has Gower serve as the chorus in one of his plays, speaking something that was archaic to Shakespeare himself.

I've seen linguists claim the same thing about modern Spanish speakers and 13th-century Spanish, but I disagree. While it's true phonology has changed little (/h/ was lost, three pairs merged into /θ s x/, more recently /ʎ ʝ/ merged as /ʝ/, that's about it for standard pronunciation), the changes in vocabulary and grammar are serious, and an obstacle.

As minor as the phonological changes may be, do you think those are also an obstacle for modern Spanish speakers? I definitely remember being in a class reading (somewhat modernized versions of) classics like El Cantar de mio Cid with a few native speakers (including our teacher). IIRC, they were from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua(?), and (our teacher was from) Ecuador, and they were thrown off by those as well.

[Kuchigakatai]

A lot of schoolchildren also have trouble with Shakespeare when they first encounter him, too. Some of him is very straightforward, but some is not, especially when he has Gower serve as the chorus in one of his plays, speaking something that was archaic to Shakespeare himself.

I've seen linguists claim the same thing about modern Spanish speakers and 13th-century Spanish, but I disagree. While it's true phonology has changed little (/h/ was lost, three pairs merged into /θ s x/, more recently /ʎ ʝ/ merged as /ʝ/, that's about it for standard pronunciation), the changes in vocabulary and grammar are serious, and an obstacle.

As minor as the phonological changes may be, do you think those are also an obstacle for modern Spanish speakers?

I really don't think so. Some might be lightly annoyed by the necessity to mentally transform <x> into modern <j> (caxa > caja, dexar > dejar), especially if the teacher doesn't tell them that's a regular change they can rely on (why do teachers often don't tell students "tricks" of this sort?), but that's about it. It's the grammar and vocab where it's at (for example, it's near-impossible to guess çinxe is the old preterite of çeñir > ceñir, and for many it's hard to guess what people in the 13th century might've meant by "çeñir espada").

I can see how some of the minor sound changes might be annoying though (for example judgar > juzgar). And the RAE did us no favours when it introduced etymological b/v in the late 18th century (they changed bever to beber, because Latin bibere...).

[Vijay]

What if they just haven't noticed which sounds changed to what?

[Pabappa]

i dont have much to add, though i find it amusing that Wiktionary has a template that shows the pronunciation of a given Greek word from the 5th century BC to the 15th century AD, all without needing to account for spelling changes, implying that for 2000 years the spelling was absolutely stable even as the phonology thinned out. Japanese is the only other language i know of them doing that with, but that's not as remarkable since kanji are not susceptible to respelling in the same manner as the letters of an alphabet.

[Kuchigakatai]

What if they just haven't noticed which sounds changed to what?

Well, I'm assuming in my posts that there's a competent teacher or textbook that tells them that <x> -> <j>, so that they don't have to figure it out on their own. If there isn't, then oh well, one more annoyance for them to get over. It still doesn't compare to, say, 13th-century Old French, where many modern <ou> or <eu> are <o> or even <u>, and many modern etymological letters are absent...

I am just saying Spanish is phonologically conservative enough the difficulties lean way more on grammar/vocab compared to, say, French and English, since even the spelling is not a lot different once you account for straightforward orthographic reforms. Not that the phonological difficulties are zero.

[Vijay]

i dont have much to add, though i find it amusing that Wiktionary has a template that shows the pronunciation of a given Greek word from the 5th century BC to the 15th century AD, all without needing to account for spelling changes, implying that for 2000 years the spelling was absolutely stable even as the phonology thinned out.

This is pretty common. As I tried to say in my first post in this thread, vernacular Greek wasn't written until relatively recently.

[Linguoboy]

i dont have much to add, though i find it amusing that Wiktionary has a template that shows the pronunciation of a given Greek word from the 5th century BC to the 15th century AD, all without needing to account for spelling changes, implying that for 2000 years the spelling was absolutely stable even as the phonology thinned out.

This is pretty common.

Honestly, they could do the exact same thing for Latin if they wanted. The only additional complication would be picking a particular normative pronunciation for Mediaeval Latin given that it varied from country to country.