This collection of essays grew out of the Logos Conference, which took place in London in September 2003. It brings together Greek and non-Greek scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, who address issues of control, prescription, planning, and perceptions of value over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. Central to all entries are the processes of establishing a standard and the practices and ideologies of standardization.
The editors together fashion the book’s foreword. Georgakopoulou takes the initiative in her introduction on “Greek Language-Standardizing, Past, Present and Future,” while Silk, in the first chapter of Part I, Establishing a Standard, offers his entry on “The Invention of Greek,” showing how the koine was the first Greek national language and, as such, marked the invention of Greek, but, at the same time, had the damaging effect of promoting a version of Greek which institutionalized the otherness of the great poetic traditions of the past.
Part I continues with three more essays. The first one is titled “The Greek Koine and the Logic of a Standard Language” and is written by Colvin, who looks at the factors that led to the rise of the koine, concluding that it is an idiom, which implies that the speakers know who they are (Greeks), and share this identity this everyone in their language community. Another essay, titled “Primary Education Teaching in a Non-Standard Language as a Tool of Social and National Integration,” by Kritikos, investigates how the language reform of 1929 brought literacy in vernacular Greek and offered a means of integration, cultural homogeneity, and communication between native and refugee citizens of the Greek state. A last essay in this part is titled “Greek with No Models, History or Standard,” by Bortone, who examines Muslim Pontic Greek, arguing how it has remained far more archaic than Modern Greek, even more archaic than “Christian” Pontic.
Part II focuses on standardization practices through seven essays. Its first entry by Strobel on “Standardization Practices,” focuses on the Atticist lexicographers and their methods through dictionaries that embodied and reinforced standards of correctness. Thoma, in “Grammatical Metaphor and the Function of Participles in High-Register Versions of the Life of Aesop,” shows that metaphor is an effective means of measuring the authority of a text regardless of discourse type and genre. Ricks, via “Orthographic Standardization of the Modern Greek Classics,” examines issues about orthographic standardization, asking how this imposes a monochrome color on even the central texts of a culturally heterogeneous Modern Greek tradition. Hirst, in “Correcting the Courtroom Cat,” illustrates discrepancies and systematic changes in the poetry of Cavafy that resulted from the poet’s sensitivity to the sound of his poetry and the editors’ attempts to “correct” and “modernize” his orthography. Tseronis and Iordanidou coauthor “Modern Greek Dictionaries and the Ideology of Standardization,” regarding the compilation of a dictionary as a public project that addresses a certain linguistic community. “Greek in Cyprus: Identity Oscillations and Language Planning,” by Karoulla-Vrikki, investigates the case of Greek in Cyprus and shows how it is associated with either civic nationalist (Cyprocentrism) or ethnic nationalist (Hellenocentrism) approaches to the identity of the Greek Cypriots. “Greeklish,” by Androutsopoulos, researches Latin-alphabet Greek as a feature of computer-mediated communication.
Part III examines ideologies and contestations and consists of six essays. “A Tradition of Anomaly,” by Kriaras, supports the further simplifying of the orthographic system as part of the necessary process of linguistic regularization. “Mothers and Daughters, Roots and Branches,” by Mackridge, argues that language is not a thing but rather many different things existing in different stages as he examines how the belief that Greek is a single language has greatly influenced its historical development and use. Gazi, in “Constructing a Science of Language,” shows how Hatzidakis’ linguistics became a field of “situated” knowledge directly related to the formation and segmentation of hegemonic political positions in twentieth-century Greece. “‘Language Issues’ after the ‘Language Question,’” by Moschonas, traces changes in standard languages through respective changes in language standards. Lastly, in “Competing Ideologies and Post-Diglossia Greek,” Goutsos suggests that the contestation of ideologies over post-diglossia Greek depends on conventional polarities and dichotomies. Then Beaton presents the Romantic quest of Korais for a national language and literature as a resource for the “new” genre of novel and the linguistic practice of its most accomplished practitioners.
This book is useful for folklorists who attend to systemic functional linguistics, historical geography, literary criticism, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Though it may be hard for a general audience to digest its linguistic terminology, this book is an important contribution for readers interested in orality-versus-literacy, cultures where the issue of diglossia has had a profound influence, and situations where language has been used as a cultural narrative of continuity, exceptionalism, “ethnic” premise, and even nation-building.
All of these essays manage to relate linguistic studies to standardization and the logic of a standard language as well as to the role of language in the construction of identities. As the editors agree, the aim of this project is not a comprehensive chronological survey or an exhaustive analysis, but rather a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of the Greek language and explore the nature of language standardization itself. I would note, however, that a conclusion is missing and more entries would be welcome on topics such as spoken-versus-written dialects, spoken Greeklish, and computer-mediated communication.
All in all, the authors in this book meditate on standards, coming to the conclusion that language standards or standard languages with a time-depth of three millennia (or even more) can never be… standard. They allow us to reflect on linguistic and sociocultural landscapes and to question whether in times of immigration, diaspora, mobility, and virtual worlds, any language belongs to only one group. Will the angels, after all, “who speak among themselves with music” (to paraphrase Greek poet Nikiforos Vrettakos’ meditations in “On the Greek Language”), “speak to us in Greek, when we meet them”? Or, according to Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis, will Greeks “be still given the Hellenic tongue on humble houses, on the sandy shores of Homer”? Or, is it going to be “Greek to us,” after all?
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[Review length: 1053 words • Review posted on February 9, 2011]