We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Every language one can think of, probably including those of preliterate societies, contains learnedisms – very roughly what the French call mots savants. In the case of Modern Greek, learnedisms are traditionally attributed to the influence of katharevousa. This may or may not be entirely true: much depends on one’s definition of the term katharevousa.
2. Cf. George I. Kourmoulis, 
2nd ed. (Athens, 1949).
3. This term is defined as follows in Ferguson, Charles A., ‘Diglossia’ (Wind, XV (1959), 325-40)Google Scholar: ‘[Diglossia is] one particular kind of standardization where two varieties of a language exist side by side diroughout the community, with each having a definite role to play.’
4. Cf.Kazazis, Kostas, ‘A Superficially Unusual Feature of Greek Diglossia’, Papers from the 12th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976), pp. 369-73.Google Scholar
5. See E. Kriaras, 
Vol. 100 (15 July 1976), 919-21).
6. The name is 
but it appears as Taktsis in the English translation of his novel 
: The Third Wedding, translated by Leslie Finer (London, 1967).
7. Cf. Kazazis, op. cit.
8.
was first published in 1962. The page numbers (in parentheses) refer to the fifth edition (Athens. Hermēs, 1974). The term 
however, as in 
often refers to a printing rather than to what is usually understood by edition in English.
9. ‘Collocation simply means the “placing together” of two or more words or phrases. In this sense “darling Mummy” or “bad man” are collocations, as is also “deleterious toadstools”,’ Wallwork, J. F., Language and Linguistics: An Introduction to the Study of Language (London, 1969), pp. 93-4 Google Scholar. According to Householder, , a collocation is ‘a particular semi-idiomatic combination of words,’ Householder, Fred W., Linguistic Speculations (Cambridge, 1971), p. 341 Google Scholar.
10. By ‘militant demoticism’ I mean not only what Professor George Babiniotis, of the University of Athens, labels ‘psycharism’ or ‘old demoticism’ but also what he calls ‘demoticism,’ i.e. the movement whose leading figure was Manolis Triandaphyllidis. Babiniotis used those terms in his paper ‘A Linguistic Approach to the Language Question in Greece’, read at the joint session of the American Philological Association and the Modern Greek Studies Association in Atlanta, Georgia, on 30 December 1977, and printed in this present volume of BMGS.
11. To the best of my recollection, there were only two differences worth mentioning between Taktsis’s Greek in The Third Wedding and my own native variety of Athenian. The first was his consistent use of 
(70 and passim), without initial 
where I have 
The second was his use of the forms 
(192 and passim), where I have 
–for me, 
is stylistically marked : I think of it as somewhat facetious, or, if the context warrants such a judgement, as slightly uneducated. Taktsis does, however, use 
in the collocation 
(232).
12. By this last remark I by no means wish to question the correctness of the demoticist claim (beginning with Psycharis, if I am not mistaken) that a great many nineteenth-century kadiarevousa turns of speech were themselves literal translations of similar phrases in the major west European languages and to that extent ‘un-Greek.”
13. Babiniotis refers to this form of Greek as ‘Modern Greek koine’, loc. cit. One should keep in mind, of course, that terms like demotic, katharevousa, and 
are relative and designate vague and largely indeterminate areas in a continuum.
14. One might mention in passing mat there is something like a precedent to this sort of ming in Modern Greek literature: Kazantzakis used his Odyssey also as a repository of dialectal Greek words which he hated to see disappear as a consequence of the replacement of the local dialects by the neohellenic koine. See Bien, Peter, Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature (Princeton, 1972)Google Scholar, especially chapter 7, ‘The Odyssey, Iliad, and Other Writings’, pp. 204ff.
15. See his review of
Langacker, Ronald W., Language and Its Structure. Some Fundamental Linguistic Concepts (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, in Language 45.4 (1969), 886-97, especially pp. 888-9, as well as op. cit., p. 131 and passim. It will not come as a surprise to those familiar with certain types of bilingualism that I have recorded a great many Greek ready-made phrases in the Arvanitika dialects of Albanian spoken in Corinthia, such as 
etc. A specific example is bilja e priftit embasiperiptosi u martua ‘at any rate the priest’s daughter got married’. Note that this is not an instance of code switching (from one language to another), just as we do not switch codes in English when we say ad nauseam, defacto, par excellence, and the like. In Arvanitika, 
behaves like a single item embasiperiptosi. In monolingual contexts, this is also known as ‘automatization’ : ‘We thus call automatization what, in the case of phrases, is sometimes called the lexicalization of phrases,’ Bohuslav Havránek, ‘The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language’, in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, selected and translated from the original Czech by Paul L. Garvin (Washington, 1964), p. 10.
16. In other words, there may be gaps in the paradigm for some speakers-I owe this formulation to Joseph Pentheroudakis. Although I have not run any experiments to test such a hypothesis, it is conceivable that a given speaker has something like the following paradigm, give or take a few details here and there: 
In most cases, the missing items in the 
-paradigm will in all probability be readily comprehensible (i.e. there will be no gaps in the receptive paradigm), even though the speaker may never use them himself – that is, the gaps exist in the paradigm only as far as mat speaker’s productive use of the language is concerned.
