KLERI ANGELIDOU

THE GREEK LANGUAGE

The language of one people gives prominence to its cultutal identity. It constitutes the measure for the evaluation of the spiritual creativeness of such a people which, without a language, would not have been able to express its own thoughts, its own experiences and "kosmotheoria", or vision of the world. We are alive only if we are able to express ourselves. Because life is movement and action.

The peoples that were able to record their own historical vicissitudes by means of their logos, the word, have not disappeared fom the scene of history.

The Greek language has been able to preserve through the centuries its own structure, its own beauty, its own expressiveness and above all its wealth. Nothing in the Greek language has ever been static and immovable.

The ancient Greek language, characterised by a great logic and a vast number of synonyms, could be defined the queen of all languages, since Homer and the ancient tragic poets made use of it to write their sublime works. And it received its living changes from the people while it was evolving through the centuries. The present-day demotic form of the Greek language, the language spoken today by the people, is the result of a harmonic development that took place in the course of history in its own natural environment and in the light of the Mediterranean. Words that entered into Greek from the languages of various conquering populations, have become incorporated with the Greek language so dynamically that nobody considers such words as foreign elements any more. There has been a process of total assimilation thanks to the great plasticity of the Greek language.

The "glottoplastic" ability of many of our writers, and of our poets in particular, has enriched our already immense linguistic patrimony with hundreds of "new" words willingly accepted by the Greek people which identifies itself with its own language and with the writers and poets who create literature, because the people is a creator itself. Not only architects and learned persons, but also fishermen, carpenters, greengrocers and bricklayers express themselves spontaneously, and in so doing express the content of their thoughts and souls without any hesitation or limitation. This is how our Greek language transforms itself continuously, and appears always renewed and fresh as a rosebud ready to bloom. «It is like a river that keeps flowing from Homer's epoch to the present day». Another praiseworthy aspect of the Greek language lies in its ability to convey terms and roots to many modern European languages, and this has also favored its conservation. Greeks, moreover, from their very first appearance on the scene of history, never suffered from "agoraphobia". On the contrary, they always set out with thrir ships in all directions of the earth in order to converse with other peoples and communicate to them their own spiritual wealth which touched all fields of human thought and of human possibilities: poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, physics and what transcended physics, such as music, art, mathematics, navigation.

No field had remained unexplored. With the natural passion for research that characterises our people, our Greek ancestors created the miracle of civilization, of Greek civilization. Today, when we try to value the path they covered, we are astounded when we look at the Qau'ma, the miracle they created with the scanty technical means they had at their disposal. But they did possess great insight, depth of thought and desire to research. They were possessed with imagination. What they were not able to interpret by means of the Logos (reason, logic), they transformed into Myth. The mythology of the Greeks is estremely logic, it is not constituted by fairy tales. We Greeks, no matter in which part of the earth happen to be, still live and create with these myths.

The new dimotikì we create daily is not the artificial one imposed from high above, but the genuine every day language spoken by the people. We use it to sing our wonderful popular songs that constitute an ornament for all the other languages of the world; we use this language to write our fables, our proverbs full of wisdom, and with it we develop philosophical thoughts with the same ease with which we talk. To speak with sagacity is one of our more familiar abilities. What we Greeks of today lack is self-esteem and the recognition of our abilities. We are characterised by a "xenomania" that becomes more and more intense with every passing day, maybe because of the limitless technology and of the television mania that pervade all aspects of lie. It is time we looked into ourselves in order value our own weaknesses and stand with dignity in front of the other peoples. We must recover our ancient supremacy not to boast about it, but because it will enable us to be alive and create some spiritual goods for ourselves, for our children and for our neighbours.

Our linguistic wealth is immense. Let us use it then for the common advantage, by expressing the thoughts and visions of our generation. this is a must for our generation, but above all for those who will come in the future.

The language of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, of Romanos o Melodos, of the Gospels and of popular songs must be maintained pure, as a river of knowledge and of wisdom, as a hymn to Greece that renews itself and proceeds within a Europe that has always welcomed the messages coming from the Greek spirit, from Greek philosophy, from the Greek language ever since the time of the Renaissance.

It is therefore a must of our generation to maintain our language, the Greek language.

Kleri Angelidou

From Efthyni, n° 311, 1997, pp. 501-502

Transl. by Mauro Giachetti