Greek Reactions to an Ancient Greek Primer for Turks

Abstract

In the simplest of all possible worlds, an Ancient Greek (AGk) primer for Turks would be of only moderate interest to (modern) Greeks. Americans do not normally get into fits of laughter when leafing through an American English textbook for Spanish speakers, and neither do Finns break into hysterics over the glossary of a Finnish reader for Russians. In this paper I will try to show why all the Greeks whom I invited to examine GrekCe: gramer ve syntaks [sic] [Ancient Greek: Grammar and syntax], by Zafer Tahlklio'lu ([Istanbul]: Edebiyat Fakiiltesi Matbaasi, 1968), burst out laughing at several points. There were two reasons for their amusement: (a) the stylistic specialization' which many Turkish loanwords have undergone in standard Modern Greek (MGk), and (b) the state of diglossia which exists in the Greek-speaking world.2 I have discussed elsewhere3 the stylistic demotion which a number of Turkish loanwords have suffered in MGk. As a result of (mostly) nineteenth-century efforts to purge the Greek language of its Turkisms, several Turkish loanwords were replaced by Ancient Greek or Ancient Greek-sounding terms. Although this replacement was particularly successful in elevated styles, everyday speech was also profoundly affected. The Turkisms thus replaced did not always join the ranks of obsolete words, but were often simply relegated to what are commonly regarded as lower styles. The new stylistic labels of those Turkisms range from merely familiar and expressive, through ironic and slangy, to pejorative and vulgar. What such labels have in common is that terms characterized by them are not likely to occur in the speech or the writings of people who are on their best linguistic behavior. One effect of the stylistic specialization (read demotion) of so many Turkisms in Greek has been a stylistic discrepancy between such words and their Turkish models. One example will do for many: to the stylistically unmarked (i.e., neutral) Turkish araba 'carriage, wagon, cart; car, automobile; carload, wagonload'4