Greek Language Question - Linguistic Background of The Problem

Linguistic Background of The Problem

While demotic was the mother tongue of the Greeks, katharevousa was an archaic and formal variant that was pronounced like modern Greek, but adopted both lexical and morphological features of ancient Greek that the spoken language had lost over time. Examples of this are:

• Morphological features: Strict katharevousa still contained the ancient dative case, many participles and various additional tenses and conjugational patterns of verbs.
• Phonological features: katharevousa contained various spelling pronunciations which did not fit the Modern Greek phonological system. For example, νδρ (Ancient and Demotic /ndr/, katharevousa /nðr/), φθ, υθ, υθ (Ancient /pʰtʰ/, Demotic /ft/, katharevousa /fθ/ ), σθ, ρθρ.
• Syntactical features: While the language of the people mostly consisted of simple sentences, katharevousa often applied ancient Greek syntax to form sentences which would appear as educated speech, that is, long and complex.
• Lexical features: The proponents of the formal language discarded many popular Greek words that the Greek language had obtained from other languages over time, mainly from the Turkish and Latin or Italian languages, and either replaced them with ancient Greek words or with neologisms. Similarly, words of ancient Greek origin but by now modern in form were archaicised or replaced by their standard ancient Greek equivalents (like the Ancient Greek ἰχθύς for ψάρι fish or the archaicised εξωκλήσσιον from the modern form ξωκλήσι small chapel).

These differences meant that katharevousa was only partly intelligible to a Greek without higher education. There was no single katharevousa. Instead, proponents of the formal language utilized ever-changing variants that never were standardized. These variants were nearly Attic in extreme cases, but they could also be closer to spoken Greek and could be understood by the majority of the people.