The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens celebrates again this year the International Day of the Greek Language, a language that has been spoken continuously in the Eastern Mediterranean basin for more than 3,500 thousand years and which is the bearer of a culture which, through the classical works of antiquity, influenced key to the formation of the European, more generally of the West and even more generally in the modern era of world culture.
Greek is not older than the rest of the Indo-European languages, since they all go back to Proto-Indo-European, but it has the longest history in the sense that it has given us the oldest written records of all the surviving Indo-European languages, the Linear B syllabic tablets. It has thus essentially contributed to the re-synthesis of Proto-Indo-European.
The prestige of the Greek language, however, is not only due to the antiquity of its written monuments. This is mainly due to the fact that the great ancient Greek works, especially of the Classical Age, were written in this language, which are still read, analyzed and influence modern intellectual production: poetry, drama, history, rhetoric and philosophy. The need of their creators to express fine conceptual distinctions was why the language was cultivated so much and so early. The prestige of the Greek language was also one of the main reasons why it became the source of much of the scientific terminology developed after the Renaissance in Western European countries.
It was not only Greek that borrowed words from other languages. In its long history it borrowed many words from the languages with which it came into contact. We still recognize some of them as words of foreign origin (humor, elevator), but most of them have completely integrated into the language and the speakers have no idea that they are loans (grocer, shop, cart, door, house, skirt, pants, swing, brush, paint, castle, paradise, olive, sea). These words are of course not foreign, but completely Greek, because the language borrowed them, but has integrated them for centuries and has adapted them to its phonology and morphology. So we don’t need to fear for her future, because her ability to assimilate and Greekize foreign words is impressive.
In the three and a half millennia of its recorded life, the Greek language went through many adventures: it became an international language, mainly after the conquests of Alexander the Great, it was again limited by the spread of other languages, it was strengthened again by its use in the administration of the Byzantine Empire, it shrank again with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, it was wounded by the language issue, but it was characteristic of it that throughout this time its speakers did not dispute that it was a single language: with all its varieties, idioms, dialects, clear, vernacular, not never ceased to be the vehicle of Greek culture and Greek identity. From the Mycenaean plates of Linear B to today’s Greeklish of social media, from Homeric epics to folk songs, from ancient drama to Greek cinema, from lyric poetry to rebetiko and folk song, from the Hellenistic Common and its language ecclesiastical tradition in local dialects and dialect varieties in Cyprus, Asia Minor and Lower Italy, the Greek language was and is the main carrier of the identity of Greeks everywhere and the most important part of our material and immaterial culture.
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens supports the Greek language in many ways. The Philosophical School was one of the four schools created since its foundation in 1837 and since then it has continuously treated Greek Philology of all periods. Since 1881, the subject of Linguistics has been officially included in the faculty, and since the 1950s, the teaching of Modern Greek as a foreign language has begun in the University Club, which is more systematized with the establishment in 1994 of the Teaching of Modern Greek Language, which attracts hundreds of students each year.
The Didaskalio, to commemorate this day, organized an extraordinary event, in which its students, who come from all over the world, presented their own texts on the Greek language, read and sang poetry from Sappho to Seferis and Elytis and translated into Greek fairy tales from their countries, which they presented in various ways, even with a delightful animated film. Among the most successful elements of the event were the video responses to the question “What is your most favorite word in the Greek language?”. Next to the most expected ones sun, sea, freedom, Acropoliswords such as breathe, nostalgia, trahanas and mandarin!
The Department of Modern Greek Language and the entire National and Kapodistrian University of Athens promise on the occasion of this festive day that they will continue to make every effort to contribute substantially to the cultivation of Greek scientific discourse, to the scientific study of language and literature of all periods and in their dissemination to the rest of the world.