Greece without the Greek alphabet
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Heaven forbid!
"When Greece Was About to Swap the Greek Alphabet for Latin", Philip Chrysopoulos, Greek Reporter (1/17/25)
It seems unthinkable.
In the mid 1970s when Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis proposed changing the Greek alphabet to Latin and making the Greek language phonetic, the minister of culture and a Parliament member threatened to resign.
I don't know why anyone would say the Greek alphabet is not phonetic. In general, its letters correspond to consistent sounds, making pronunciation of its words relatively predictable. Both in Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, most letters of the alphabet have a stable symbol-to-sound relationship.
The unusual idea of the conservative PM came as a shock to those who learned of his proposal. It was quite unexpected coming from him.
Konstantinos Karamanlis returned triumphantly to Greece on July 24, 1974 following the fall of the seven-year military dictatorship. Upon becoming Greece’s PM, his vision was to introduce crucial reforms to make Greece a true, modern European country. The same day, he was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece and the most suitable person to unite Greece after a tumultuous seven-year period.
The former Greek Prime Minister was on self-exile in Paris after the April 21, 1967 military coup of Georgios Papadopoulos. While in France, he formed a friendship with French Minister of Finance Valerie Giscard D’Estaing.
…
Towards the end of the 1970s, the Greek politician flirted with the idea of furthering Greece’s progress and European identity by introducing the Latin alphabet to the Greek language and making the writing phonetic.
Again, here comes the idea that the Greek alphabet is not phonetic.
On July 25, 1999, in an article by renowned journalist and newspaper editor of To Vima, Stavros Psycharis reported that the Greek Prime Minister had proposed the establishment of the Latin alphabet and phonetic writing. He described the proposal as a “crisis.”
Psycharis recounted a meeting in which Karamanlis met with Culture Minister Konstantinos Tsatsos and prominent educator and MP Evangelos Papanoutsos to discuss education issues:
“The first time the crisis broke out was in a meeting between Karamanlis and Konstantinos Tsatsos, before becoming President of the Republic, when he was minister of culture, and the late Evangelos Papanoutsos. The prime minister had invited them to his office to discuss Education issues. At one point Karamanlis told them that they should consider the possibility of combining the Greek alphabet with the Latin one, even considering the issue of phonetic writing.”
“Karamanlis’ interlocutors jumped up like springs. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears!’ Konstantinos Tsatsos would say several years later. In any case, the two interlocutors of the then prime minister declared that they would resign, and Karamanlis withdrew the proposal.”
The reason that Karamanlis shocked the two politicians was that he was not known for his involvement in language issues, and such an initiative surprised his party colleagues.
The unexpected proposal to radically change the writing of a language with a tradition of thousands of years of uninterrupted continuity, in which great works were written, would result in damaging Greece’s identity and legacy.
It was no surprise that the issue was not discussed further. Rather, it became an anecdote that very few would even consider repeating.
….
China without Chinese characters.
Unthinkable, except for men like Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Qian Xuantong (1887-1939).
Selected readings
- "Chinese characters written in Greek letters" (7/12/20)
- "Transletteration" (8/11/09)
- "'The world's oldest in-use writing system'?" (5/12/12)
[Thanks to Arthur Waldron]
Martin said,
February 13, 2025 @ 8:22 am
Modern Greek is not phonetic in the sense that there is not a one-to-one sound-to-symbol relationship. The vowels and diphthongs of Classical Greek are still used in writing but represent a much reduced range of sounds.
Just as in English, the argument of continuity with an existing written tradition is a strong one, but it's certainly not the case that there isn't a problem to solve.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 13, 2025 @ 8:49 am
This is just a terminological thing. The general population use the phrase "this language is phonetic" in a sense that is (a) quite loose (but that's to be expected given the level of linguistic awareness in the general population) and (b) at odds with how a linguist would understand it.
This is demonstrated in the first quote above.
Saying that "an alphabet [rather than language] is (not) phonetic" is just a notch better but still rather vague.
To start with, an ideal alphabet would probably be phonemic, not phonetic, in that the general idea of an alphabet is to show the distinctive sounds of the language, aka phonemes. I can't think, off the top of my head, of an alphabet that would go below this level to show the actual phonetics (i.e. allophones).
In that sense, all alphabets are largely phonemic.
What the problem is here is what @Martin points to above. In terms of the grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) correspondences, you can have one-to-one (the ideal situation, and this is what is meant by the layperson's phrase "X is phonetic"), many-to-one (which is the typical situation, from the archetype of French to more subtle cases such as Spanish or German), and many-to-many (where English is the standard scary example).
For the non-linguist, the boundary between "phonetic" and "not phonetic" probably falls in fact in the middle of the second category, where French would be considered "not phonetic", and Spanish — "phonetic". Correct me if I'm wrong.
Coby said,
February 13, 2025 @ 9:32 am
There are two ways in which the alphabet of a language can be "phonetic".
It can be reader-friendly (that is, there is no doubt about how to pronounce a written word) or writer-friendly (there is no doubt about how to spell a spoken word).
Modern Greek is a good example of the former (except that μπ may be /b/ or /mb/, and ντ may be /d/ or /nd/), but it is far from writer-friendly: there are five ways of writing /i/.
Other examples: Spanish is reader-friendly (except for some ambiguity with x), Italian is writer-friendly (except for hai, ha, hanno). Finnish and Macedonian, as far as I know, are both.
J.W. Brewer said,
February 13, 2025 @ 9:55 am
Coby's distinction seems the right way to be thinking about such things. You can obviously have spelling reform to eliminate some of the complexity when due to historical sound changes multiple spellings all point to the same phoneme. A good example would be Russian where ѳ and ф had come over time to represent the same phoneme, so early 20th-century spelling reform eliminated the former and respelled the words that had used it with the latter. This simplifies one problem while creating a separate problem of loss of historical continuity and etymological transparency. (And of course some diehards, especially those not living under Soviet rule, stuck to the older spelling.)
Jerry Packard said,
February 13, 2025 @ 9:58 am
@Jarek Weckwerth
Sounds exactly right to me.
Garrett Wollman said,
February 13, 2025 @ 1:09 pm
@Coby: there is also the issue of morphological transparency: some languages' writing systems deliberately obscure the phonetics, to make regular derivation more transparent. (The converse of this can be seen in Finnish, where there are many different classes of verb and noun, most of which are actually instances of fewer and more general rules made opaque by the strict phonemic correspondence of the writing system.)
J.W. Brewer said,
February 13, 2025 @ 1:45 pm
One obstacle to a "perfect" 1:1 phonemic orthography for Standard Modern Greek would be that, per wikipedia, "Greek linguists do not agree on which consonants to count as phonemes in their own right, and which to count as conditional allophones." This is presumably not the only language for which there is a similar lack of consensus.
Bybo said,
February 13, 2025 @ 2:31 pm
Turkey. The Maldives (yes, I know …). Central Asia, with centuries worth of classical literature in Perso-Arabic script. I'm not saying that it's necessarily a nice turn of events, but such things happen, of course.
martin schwartz said,
February 13, 2025 @ 8:57 pm
Coby has stated the situation well. I would qualify the
/nd/ vs. /d/and /mb/ vs. /b/ and .g. vs. /g/ (postvocalic) alternation by noting that the nasal tends to be southern and the plain voiced stop
northern, but some words are pronounced by all with just voiced nasal stop, e.g. /adío/ = Italian addio (Span. adiós). And, to supplement the matter of the different rspellings merging as /i/, note that
upsilon = /i/ and omicron + upsilon = /u/, but alpha + upsilon
and epsilon + upsilon = resp. /av/ and /ev/ (/af/, /ef/ before voiceless sounds). One can go on ….
Martin Schwartz
Steve Morrison said,
February 13, 2025 @ 9:27 pm
Hmm. This is the same newspaper and the same contributor who, several years ago, published a very far-out article claiming that archeologists had found the Trojan Horse! (link goes to a blog post refuting the claim)
I don’t know anything against the trustworthiness of the present article, but I thought I’d better note this.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
February 14, 2025 @ 3:46 am
Perhaps, Karamalis wanted to propel Greece into a sort of Great Leap Forward like Mao with his Hanzi simplifications. In this case, to connect more easily with the "Western world." The result would have been the same…a fruit without a kernel.
Andreas Johansson said,
February 14, 2025 @ 6:42 am
I can't think, off the top of my head, of an alphabet that would go below this level to show the actual phonetics (i.e. allophones).
There may be no script that does this consistently, but there certainly ones that do it at least some of time. Sanskrit and sundry other Indian language distinguish more nasals in writing than they have nasal phonemes, frex.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 14, 2025 @ 7:06 am
@ Andreas Johansson: OK, thanks! I don't know quite enough about Indian languages. Is this really allophony, or just many-to-one as a result of a merger, like, I dunno, z and s in Latin American Spanish, or for that matter THOUGHT-NORTH-FORCE in e.g. Southern British?
Andreas Johansson said,
February 14, 2025 @ 9:32 am
It's really allophony, Sanskrit never had a five-way phonemic contrast in nasals.
(It does have in oral stops however, so the reason the subphonemic writing of nasals is presumably that it makes the script more symmetric.)
Joshua K. said,
February 14, 2025 @ 11:55 am
This would have been around the same time that the Greek government abolished Katharevousa in favor of Demotic. I don't know what to call those two variants — "registers"? — nor how to analogize them to any language I'm more familiar with.
Peter Taylor said,
February 15, 2025 @ 7:07 am
@Coby, there are some additional sporadic exceptions in Spanish, particularly with loan-words. I vaguely recall an advertising campaign for a pizza brand which referenced the various ways in which Spaniards pronounce pizza (without even taking into account seseo, aka the lisp/non-lisp dialect distinction).
The issue of non-writer-friendliness for me is exemplified by a note left for me by a Cuban friend who omitted most word-final s when speaking. I had to decide from context whether e meant he (I have as auxiliary verb), es (he/she/it is), or e (and before a word starting with /i/).
Lucas Christopoulos said,
February 15, 2025 @ 7:51 am
@ Joshua
Yes, the transition from Katharevousa to Demotic (coming from the Hellenistic form of Koine or Attic or New Testament Greek[a]), was officialized in 1976, and later they abolished the polytonic system of writing for both Demotic and Katharevousa. Here below mainly why it happened:
Katharevousa was a form of Modern Greek created in the 19th century as a "purified" version of the language.
:
1. Cultural Identity: Demotic Greek, the vernacular form of the language spoken by the general population, was seen as a more authentic representation of Greek culture and identity. After Greece gained independence from Ottoman rule in the 19th century, there was a strong desire to reconnect with the national heritage.
2. Accessibility: Katharevousa was often viewed as elitist and difficult for the average person to understand. As Greece modernized, there was a push for a language that was accessible to all citizens, which Demotic Greek provided.
3. Political Factors: The debate between Katharevousa and Demotic Greek was not just linguistic but also political. The use of Demotic Greek became associated with progressive and democratic movements, while Katharevousa was often linked to conservative elements and the monarchy.
4. Educational Reforms: In the 20th century, educational reforms emphasized teaching in Demotic Greek, making it the standard in schools and official documents. This shift in education helped solidify Demotic as the preferred language.
5. Official Recognition: By the late 20th century, particularly after the fall of the military junta in 1974, Demotic Greek was officially recognized as the standard language of Greece, further entrenching its status and leading to the decline of Katharevousa.
Rodger C said,
February 15, 2025 @ 11:08 am
At DLI in 1969 I saw newspapers in Katharevousa. Having had Ancient Greek, I found them easier to read than Demotic, but of course it was the other way around for the students of Modern Greek there. I felt it was basically a pointless compromise.
David Marjanović said,
February 25, 2025 @ 11:38 am
A spelling reform to make Greek spelling in Greek letters much closer to phonemic was in fact carried out in the Soviet Union (for Greek spoken in and around Crimea and in Georgia for example). It was quite radical, but simple: /a e i o u/ were respelled as α ε ι ο υ (not ου!) without any regard for etymology, the letters η and ω were abolished.
One additional reason why Katharévousa was abandoned is that it was, somewhat paradoxically, not standardized. Some writers used almost Classical Attic, others came pretty close to Dhimotikí, and yet others filled the entire range in between as far as I understand.
Vedic didn't. The Prakrits all did. Classical Sanskrit therefore did if you take two or three loans from Prakrit into account. Writing was introduced in India in Prakrit-speaking times, and it shows.