Modern Greek has so much continuity with ancient that, if you know ancient, you can read plenty of signs and pick your way through pamphlets at museums and archaeological sites. Every Greek I have known has valued that continuity and history. The proposed change -- rendering any text printed prior to the revision obsolete and eventually unreadable -- amounts to cultural suicide.
Maybe you can recognize the continuity as a native Greek speaker. As someone who has learnt Ancient Greek that didn't help at all when I visited Greece. I mean even the letters (some) are now used differently.
I know just Ancient Greek. When I was in the country, I was consistently blown away by how much I could understand, even without knowing Modern Greek.
A billboard for cigarettes contained their equivalent of the surgeon general's warning, using the word "βλάπτεται." βλάπτειν in Ancient Greek means "to injure." βλάπτεται is best read as a middle-voice form: "causes harm."
In a doctor's office in Athens I'd been waiting for a while, so I approached the nurse's station, and a visibly impatient nurse said to me before I could open my mouth "περιμένετε, παρακάλω."
"μένειν" in Ancient Greek means "wait." "μένετε" is a polite imperative, in the present tense ("do or keep doing something"). "περί" as a verbal prefix often means something similar to its meaning as a preposition: "around." "παρακάλω" means in this context exactly what it did 2,500 years ago: "I ask," i.e. "please." I could understand exactly the intended sense: "please continue to wait."
My jaw dropped. I was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare at her. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and switched to English: "Please wait!"
On my first morning in the country I bought a drink called μύθος, not realizing I'd purchased cheap beer (with a delicious tiropita). Same word, same sense: "mythos."
There are limits, definitely. The vocab, grammar, and syntax are different, often very different. The pronunciation letter by letter is broadly the same as it has been for millenia, though, since the changes that turned Ancient Greek into Koine, isn't it?
Still, the similarities and, to some extent, mutual intelligibility of Ancient and Modern Greek are mind-blowing, particularly for someone who grew up speaking English, which didn't even exist two thousand years ago, except, maybe, as some subtle quirk of proto-germanic on a weird little island off the coast of Europe proper.
The continuity is to some extent artificial, as there was a re-Hellenization effort in Greece after the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire. Even where the Ottoman Empire's cultural and linguistic influence were somewhat escapable, though, there's a shocking degree of linguistic continuity. Mani, an isolated, culturally distinct region of the deep Peloponnese, retains features of the Doric dialect that its residents spoke in Archaic Greece around the time the texts of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were taking shape.
I've been reading Sacred Scripture in Greek these days, thanks to a free Bible study app with the approved translations. And it's extremely eye-opening to see the level of wordplay in the Gospels, that's sometimes hinted by modern homilists, but it goes to a depth you just wouldn't believe.
I thought I could "get by" in Greek just from my knowledge through medical and scientific terms, but there's a lot more to it!
One of the other exciting experiences was to attend a Greek Orthodox liturgy that was sung/chanted in Greek, too. I don't know exactly what variety of liturgical Greek is used, but speaking as someone who knows English and Spanish, and I can recognize many other languages, to hear the Greek chanted and pronounced so eloquently like that was transcendent, and sometimes surprisingly "foreign".
Whenever I see a film or TV of modern Greek signs, I try to sound out the words and decipher as much as possible. I feel like there is some "signal loss" since ancient times, with the musical tone, the rough breathing, etc. But it's definitely exciting to experience some comprehension across several millennia!
This is so nice to hear! I regret not spending more time with the New Testament when I had the opportunity (my time for Greek is essentially nil at this point). It's such a treat to run across people who savor the language the way you do, and it really is dumbfounding to hear those echoes across the milennia, isn't it?
The ways scripture intersects with more ancient literature is its own fascinating area of study, too. Take John 1:1: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. If you've read Hesiod's Theogony, the contrast could't be starker: ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος. In Hesiod, the birth of the cosmos and the gods is physical. The first things that comes into being, Χάος, is just the absence of anything else. In the New Testament, by contrast, the beginning is not physical, nor is there any absence. It's something like an idea or something like rational intelligibility (ὁ λόγος). This is so wildly different from so-called Pagan religion: the universe not only makes sense; it makes sense in ways that human beings can access. Divinity isn't power and violence. It's intelligence. This reminds me, now that I mention it, of Augustine's view that evil is absence -- specifically the absence of good.
There's so, so much of this. I didn't know about the wordplay though! Wordplay has such a wonderful history in ancient literature. I distinctly remember a lightbuld moment, when I was reading Plato's Republic, where the god Wealth is described as a "blind (tuphlos) leader." In Plato's time, that "ph" is pronounced "p-h", not "f." And the word wealth, of course, is Plutos. So tuphlos is an phonetic anagram of Plutos.
Thanks for the substantial comment. So I guess your Ancient Greek is much better than mine. On the other hand when I learned the language I was suprised how many "foreign words" (in German) now started to make a lot more sense because I was able to decipher their constituents. Things like "telescope" or combinations with "peri" (as you said), "meta" and so on. Going to recap some things now :)
This would sever the connection to the ancient language, which is central to Greek identity. We would have a better chance of an English spelling reform—arguably more essential given its lingua franca status and absurd spelling. But we know that’s not going to happen.
Regardless, a fun exercise. I’ve thought a lot about the sound drift, case merging, loss of the infinitive and such. Good to see someone else’s ideas on the topic.
Has nobody tried to create an alternative English spelling a bit like the Chinese have done with Pinyin. This would be more for the benefit of learners rather than trying to change Greek identity.
Actually, last time the greek alphabet changed, it was not a revision, but more like political statement, after a turbulant period by a military junta. The conflict goes back a couple of centuries, after the Greek revolution and the need for a "pure" and united, at least linguistically, nation. In a nutcell it was Purists vs common people. If anyone is interensted, this debate is called the "Greek language question".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question
I support the creation of new letter shapes for one reason only: historical linguists on TikTok constantly have Greek speakers incorrectly correcting their ancient Greek pronunciation to sound modern. New/reinvigorated letter shapes and ligatures could mitigate this.
Interesting take, but as a sibling commented: όχι.
> αι = ε
> αι already sounds identical to ε in Modern Greek, so the digraph is dropped.
sounds the same, but the distinction actually helps semantically (helps identify passive voice vs active notably).
> ει, οι, υι, η, υ = ι
> all these spellings produce the same /i/ sound. This does however remove spelling distinctions that currently encode grammatical information like gender, number, and verb conjugation.
why would you drop something that communicates information ?
the distinctions encode meaning (what you already mentioned + etymology)
> ου = Ȣ ȣ
> the common digraph gets its own single character. The historic ligature ou.
I read the sample text and automatically parsed this as θ because the surrounding text, otherwise it's an 8 in my eyes.
(although to be honest, you'll see a similar symbol in some byzantine iconography)
> ντ = D d
> the digraph that produces /d/ becomes a single letter.
ντ and D d do not produce the same sound. ντ is meant to be pronounced 'n' followed by 't'. Notice where your tongue goes when pronouncing n / t / d => these are not the same sound.
> μπ = Б b
> the digraph that produces /b/ becomes a single letter. The uppercase uses cyrillic Б to avoid confusion with Β (Vita).
same as above. 'μπ' is the 'm' sound followed closely by 'p'. This one is harder to hear in isolation, but for example when saying 'αμπέλι' (grape vine) you actually hear the 'm'.
> γκ = γγ = G g
> the digraphs that produce /ɡ/ become a single letter.
again, the sound is different, i.e: άγγελος. it is not pronounced agelos (hard g), but rather ang-gelos (notice how in english the word becomes 'angel' with an extra 'n' ?)
> σ, ς = ϲ
> all lowercase sigmas are unified into the lunate sigma ϲ, eliminating positional variants.
ς is used only when it's the last letter of the word. That's all the complexity there is.
if this is meant to help foreign speakers learn the language, then I weep for the moment they encounter the sea: Ȣάλαϲϲα. is it a soft c (as in 'copper') or a hard c (as in 'face') ? is it somehow changed by the fact there are two of them ?
> ω = ο
> lowercase omega merges with omicron. They already share the same /o/ sound in Modern Greek, so the distinction is dropped.
phonetically, ω is supposedly longer ο, though it's quite hard to hear (I have rarely heard people where you consistently hear the difference). OTOH, orthographic distinction remains for etymological reasons.
οστικός => related to bones
ωστικός => related to pushing
change the omega to an omicron, and you just created an homograph (+ homophone) out of nowhere. queue future learners wondering why those crazy Greeks decided it would be appropriate to use the same spelling and pronunciation for two entirely different meanings.
the changes look arbitrary in order to simplify the rules for _some_ learners, but end up making it more complicated. What you saved in spelling, you definitely lost in semantics.
Thank you so much for this thorough analysis. Really appreciate it.
I'm pretty convinced now that my experiment just proved my theory that I could somehow improve on the language - wrong.
Mostly, like I said in other comments, losing all of the grammar encoded in words is just not worth it just to make it somewhat easier to read (to someone who doesn't already know Greek).
I guess I had to see it for myself to understand it, so I feel like it was still a worthwhile little experiment.
Warning: This website has audio which is activated when you press the letters, despite not giving any fair warning indication of this. Not a nice surprise if you're at work!
IMHO lowercase phi should definitely be that symbol that sort of looks like an extravagant cursive p (), not the one that looks like an o with a slash through it.
A fun excercise but lots of corner cases not covered. For example the words ακριβός (expensive) and ακριβώς (exactly) would have exactly the same spelling
34 comments
A billboard for cigarettes contained their equivalent of the surgeon general's warning, using the word "βλάπτεται." βλάπτειν in Ancient Greek means "to injure." βλάπτεται is best read as a middle-voice form: "causes harm."
In a doctor's office in Athens I'd been waiting for a while, so I approached the nurse's station, and a visibly impatient nurse said to me before I could open my mouth "περιμένετε, παρακάλω."
"μένειν" in Ancient Greek means "wait." "μένετε" is a polite imperative, in the present tense ("do or keep doing something"). "περί" as a verbal prefix often means something similar to its meaning as a preposition: "around." "παρακάλω" means in this context exactly what it did 2,500 years ago: "I ask," i.e. "please." I could understand exactly the intended sense: "please continue to wait."
My jaw dropped. I was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare at her. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and switched to English: "Please wait!"
On my first morning in the country I bought a drink called μύθος, not realizing I'd purchased cheap beer (with a delicious tiropita). Same word, same sense: "mythos."
There are limits, definitely. The vocab, grammar, and syntax are different, often very different. The pronunciation letter by letter is broadly the same as it has been for millenia, though, since the changes that turned Ancient Greek into Koine, isn't it?
Still, the similarities and, to some extent, mutual intelligibility of Ancient and Modern Greek are mind-blowing, particularly for someone who grew up speaking English, which didn't even exist two thousand years ago, except, maybe, as some subtle quirk of proto-germanic on a weird little island off the coast of Europe proper.
The continuity is to some extent artificial, as there was a re-Hellenization effort in Greece after the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire. Even where the Ottoman Empire's cultural and linguistic influence were somewhat escapable, though, there's a shocking degree of linguistic continuity. Mani, an isolated, culturally distinct region of the deep Peloponnese, retains features of the Doric dialect that its residents spoke in Archaic Greece around the time the texts of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were taking shape.
I thought I could "get by" in Greek just from my knowledge through medical and scientific terms, but there's a lot more to it!
One of the other exciting experiences was to attend a Greek Orthodox liturgy that was sung/chanted in Greek, too. I don't know exactly what variety of liturgical Greek is used, but speaking as someone who knows English and Spanish, and I can recognize many other languages, to hear the Greek chanted and pronounced so eloquently like that was transcendent, and sometimes surprisingly "foreign".
Whenever I see a film or TV of modern Greek signs, I try to sound out the words and decipher as much as possible. I feel like there is some "signal loss" since ancient times, with the musical tone, the rough breathing, etc. But it's definitely exciting to experience some comprehension across several millennia!
The ways scripture intersects with more ancient literature is its own fascinating area of study, too. Take John 1:1: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. If you've read Hesiod's Theogony, the contrast could't be starker: ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος. In Hesiod, the birth of the cosmos and the gods is physical. The first things that comes into being, Χάος, is just the absence of anything else. In the New Testament, by contrast, the beginning is not physical, nor is there any absence. It's something like an idea or something like rational intelligibility (ὁ λόγος). This is so wildly different from so-called Pagan religion: the universe not only makes sense; it makes sense in ways that human beings can access. Divinity isn't power and violence. It's intelligence. This reminds me, now that I mention it, of Augustine's view that evil is absence -- specifically the absence of good.
There's so, so much of this. I didn't know about the wordplay though! Wordplay has such a wonderful history in ancient literature. I distinctly remember a lightbuld moment, when I was reading Plato's Republic, where the god Wealth is described as a "blind (tuphlos) leader." In Plato's time, that "ph" is pronounced "p-h", not "f." And the word wealth, of course, is Plutos. So tuphlos is an phonetic anagram of Plutos.
Regardless, a fun exercise. I’ve thought a lot about the sound drift, case merging, loss of the infinitive and such. Good to see someone else’s ideas on the topic.
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.html
> αι = ε > αι already sounds identical to ε in Modern Greek, so the digraph is dropped.
sounds the same, but the distinction actually helps semantically (helps identify passive voice vs active notably).
> ει, οι, υι, η, υ = ι > all these spellings produce the same /i/ sound. This does however remove spelling distinctions that currently encode grammatical information like gender, number, and verb conjugation.
why would you drop something that communicates information ? the distinctions encode meaning (what you already mentioned + etymology)
> ου = Ȣ ȣ > the common digraph gets its own single character. The historic ligature ou.
I read the sample text and automatically parsed this as θ because the surrounding text, otherwise it's an 8 in my eyes. (although to be honest, you'll see a similar symbol in some byzantine iconography)
> ντ = D d > the digraph that produces /d/ becomes a single letter.
ντ and D d do not produce the same sound. ντ is meant to be pronounced 'n' followed by 't'. Notice where your tongue goes when pronouncing n / t / d => these are not the same sound.
> μπ = Б b > the digraph that produces /b/ becomes a single letter. The uppercase uses cyrillic Б to avoid confusion with Β (Vita).
same as above. 'μπ' is the 'm' sound followed closely by 'p'. This one is harder to hear in isolation, but for example when saying 'αμπέλι' (grape vine) you actually hear the 'm'.
> γκ = γγ = G g > the digraphs that produce /ɡ/ become a single letter.
again, the sound is different, i.e: άγγελος. it is not pronounced agelos (hard g), but rather ang-gelos (notice how in english the word becomes 'angel' with an extra 'n' ?)
> σ, ς = ϲ > all lowercase sigmas are unified into the lunate sigma ϲ, eliminating positional variants.
ς is used only when it's the last letter of the word. That's all the complexity there is.
if this is meant to help foreign speakers learn the language, then I weep for the moment they encounter the sea: Ȣάλαϲϲα. is it a soft c (as in 'copper') or a hard c (as in 'face') ? is it somehow changed by the fact there are two of them ?
> ω = ο > lowercase omega merges with omicron. They already share the same /o/ sound in Modern Greek, so the distinction is dropped.
phonetically, ω is supposedly longer ο, though it's quite hard to hear (I have rarely heard people where you consistently hear the difference). OTOH, orthographic distinction remains for etymological reasons. οστικός => related to bones ωστικός => related to pushing
change the omega to an omicron, and you just created an homograph (+ homophone) out of nowhere. queue future learners wondering why those crazy Greeks decided it would be appropriate to use the same spelling and pronunciation for two entirely different meanings.
the changes look arbitrary in order to simplify the rules for _some_ learners, but end up making it more complicated. What you saved in spelling, you definitely lost in semantics.
Mostly, like I said in other comments, losing all of the grammar encoded in words is just not worth it just to make it somewhat easier to read (to someone who doesn't already know Greek).
I guess I had to see it for myself to understand it, so I feel like it was still a worthwhile little experiment.
уоэа (uoea) юёея -> ÿöëä
And do something about all those bees : ВБбьыъ