Talk:Greek language question

Comments

"Phonological features: The Katharevousa contained various letter combinations which were hard to pronounce, as they did not originally fit the Modern Greek phonological system, e.g. φθ, σθ, ρθρ, ευδ. "

hard to pronounce? are words like αφθονος, αισθανομαι, αρθρο, ευδαιμονια hard to pronounce? I havent noticed all these years, I guess I'm good lol no really, this is so wrong, these words are used in everyday speech and i havent noticed that people who do use them appear to be struggling in any way.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.75.46.226 (talk • contribs) 23:25, 25 April 2008

That's precisely because --- contrary to the simplistic presentations one often sees of the Greek Language Question --- there is a *lot* of Katharevousa in Standard Modern Greek phonetics. "Hard to pronounce" should actually be "unfamiliar to unschooled speakers of Greek", which indeed 200 years ago they were --- the words you cite are hardly Demotic in origin. Opoudjis (talk) 11:03, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

---

The "Examples of the diglossia" section is unclear for those of us who don't read the Greek alphabet. Would someone who can, please post IPA versions of the two passages? Literal translations to English would be even better, though I understand if some phrases don't translate well. Bsonrisa (talk) 00:46, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

The first of the two examples of diglossia is also not what would normally be considered "katharevousa," but is more like an archaizing document one would find from the church, i.e. a continuation of Koine/Byzantine Greek with full ancient inflexion and syntax. Such archaism and "pure" Demotic Greek formed the two extremes between which Katharevousa attempted to find a middle ground. The katharevousa that was commonly used in public discourse, government, etc., didn't use the complicated syntax seen in this extract, but would have been more or less syntactically the same as the demotic passage, only changed by certain grammatical forms, case endings, etc. 136.242.166.137 (talk) 18:56, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

diglossia

1. Τὸ ὑποβληθὲν τῇ Ἱερᾷ Συνόδῳ ἐν χειρογράφῳ πόνημα Ὑμῶν ὑπὸ τὸν τίτλον «Βίος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ» ...

2. Το πόνημά σας που υποβλήθηκε σε χειρόγραφο στην Ιερά Σύνοδο με τον τίτλο «Βίος Ιησού Χριστού» ...

Comparison of these two passages reveals a couple of differences.

Katharevousa continued to use the old accentuation and breathing systems. It also retained the case system, e.g. τῇ (dative complete with circumflex accent and iota subscript).

The literal version of the opening words of the katharevousa is 'The submitted to the Holy Synod in manuscript work of you', while the 'demotic' simply uses a relative clause 'The work of you which has been submitted in manuscript to the HS ...'

It looks as if what was presumably felt to be the 'formal' Ὑμῶν (2nd p.pl., complete with capital letter) was abandoned in favour of the 'less formal' σας (2nd p. sing.), but I do not know enough about the language to say if this is true. Pamour (talk) 08:47, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

New source, and why the POV tag?

I've added a very useful new source (Mackridge 2009) and linked some citations to it. I'd like to expand the article a bit using material from this source (perhaps a paragraph about the Gospel Riots of 1901 to start with? And some of the other sections could do with more specific detail) but I want to ask about the POV tag first. It's been there for a year now, but I can't see any trace of a justification or even a discussion. Am I missing something here?

If someone can tell me what the POV problem is, or was, I'll try to use my edits to fix it. If not, I'll wait a week or two and then delete the tag as per WP:NPOVD. -- SteepLearningCurve (talk) 10:36, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

OK, it's been over a week with no objections, so I'm now removing the POV tag as per WP:NPOVD#Adding_a_tag_to_a_page.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 11:39, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Change Dimotiki to demotic?

Over on Talk:Katharevousa there's a proposal to change Dimotiki to demotic everywhere in that article. I'd like to do that here too, for three reasons: 1) The wider literature (including Mackridge 2009) uses demotic. 2) We need the words demoticism and demoticist; but we ought to be consistent, and I'm not prepared to write dimotikism ... 3) I think using Dimotiki is actively misleading. A reader might suppose that it meant something different from demotic - otherwise why use a different word?

If no-one objects over the next week or so, I'll go ahead and change it. -- SteepLearningCurve (talk) 15:58, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

OK, it's been six days, and no objections - so I'm making the change now.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 13:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

... and italicizing katharevousa throughout, to conform to Mackridge 2009 and WP conventions for foreign-language words.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 14:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Agree with all Dr K's revisions, except one.

brutal, brutally... POV. Agreed.
(Of course, ...) OR. Agreed. Pity, I liked this sentence, but it has no place in WP. I'll try to find a referenced instance of it actually happening.
This meant ... OR. Agreed. Unreferenced comment.
cn tag. Agreed. I'll work on this.

But I don't understand the revision of 17:32 - deleting the Colonels' intro para and the emblem caption. How are these OR? The intro para refers to a well-attested historical event (cn tag maybe, but OR?), and I thought the caption would be uncontroversial (it's based on a discussion in Mackridge 2009 p322 on changes in month-naming - should I have referenced this? I can give details ...) .

I'd also appreciate advice on quoting style. In the last three paras of the final section I've used the rule that part-sentences are footnoted, but complete sentences are attributed in-line. Is this good WP style? And am I over-quoting there?

Finally, I'm thinking of incorporating the ouzo-bottle image from the end of the German [Griechische Sprachenfrage] article, with translated caption, to illustrate survival of katharevousa into the 21st century - but I don't want to do this until I know why the Colonels' emblem caption was deleted. Any thoughts?--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 14:08, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi SLC. Thank you for letting me know on my talk about this. I will try to reply to your technical questions about quotation style a bit later but I will try to explain your question about the picture caption because it is a question directly concerning this edit which removed the following caption:

The Colonels' emblem.
The date of the coup, at the bottom, naturally uses the katharevousa long genitive form Απριλιου, "of April". On 21 April 1967 a small group of right-wing military officers seized power in a coup d'état and established the regime of the Colonels.

First of all this disregards the fact that in the Greece of the 60s and 70s everyone, not only the colonels, used the long form "Απριλίου" and almost never "Απρίλη". To attribute it solely to them or make allusions that they used it as if in their own "katharevousa" dictatorial bubble is inaccurate, and being your own personal observation, it is original research. Using also the term "naturally" is insinuating that they did it because it came "naturally" to them, which is meaningless, because it came naturally to almost everyone else in Greece at the time, in addition to it being original research. Even today the form "Απριλίου" is very widely used in Greece and if I had to guess it may even be the more common term rather than "Απρίλη". In the 60s and 70s and even beyond, only people talking the "μαλλιαρή" version of demotiki used "Απρίλη". Finally, to pick the date of their emblem is kind of a low point in demonstrating their katharevousa policies because it picks on a tiny detail and even that detail is not attributable to their dictatorial policies or attitude toward katharevousa. The rest of the caption, viz. On 21 April 1967 a small group of right-wing military officers seized power in a coup d'état and established the regime of the Colonels. is an unnecessary filler explaining the coup inside a picture caption. Picture captions exist to explain the pictures not the coups d'état. All in all I think the picture of the emblem does not belong in this article. In addition due to WP:FAIRUSE any usage of a fair-use image should be limited to the absolute minimum of articles and I don't think its use in this article is necessary. I hope this helps. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 15:46, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for taking the time to reply to a newbie!

OK, you've convinced me about the caption text The date of the coup, at the bottom, naturally uses the katharevousa long genitive form Απριλιου, "of April". It could give the misleading impression that Απριλιου was some special form invented and imposed by the Colonels. And the naturally goes too far. Agreed.

However the second half of the deletion, On 21 April 1967 a small group of right-wing military officers seized power in a coup d'état and established the regime of the Colonels, was not part of the image caption. It was the intro paragraph of the main text, intended as brief scene-setting for the section. Its closing full stop is still lying on the page. Did it really have to go too? Or did you perhaps delete up to the wrong pair of closing square brackets?

As for including the emblem itself, I thought it added to the information conveyed by the article because anyone seeing it would instantly understand what the Colonels themselves thought they were about. The striking image gives some essential historical background in an easy to assimilate form, possibly better than a paragraph describing their policies. No other available image would serve this purpose as well. (I did post a fair-use rationale on the image page before I inserted it; I think I might add the preceding sentences to it!)

Another reason (obviously not sufficient on its own, but supporting my case) is that it adds some visual interest to what is inevitably going to be a very text-based article, and acts as a landmark; anyone paging quickly through will see Oh, that's the Colonels' bit again.

This was going to be one reason for the ouzo-bottle image in the final section too ...

However I do recognize that the "adds visual interest" justification has to be used very sparingly. <rant> I do dislike those modern Physics textbooks where the designers - thinking that a page describing how a nuclear bomb works might not be "interesting" enough - always insert a childish cartoon of Einstein in a white coat! Do they think children don't notice when they're being patronized?</rant> Wouldn't want Wikipedia to go that way ... SteepLearningCurve (talk) 09:54, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, sorry about that, I thought On 21 April 1967 a small group of right-wing military officers seized power in a coup d'état and established the regime of the Colonels was part of the caption. I will put it back. As far as the 21 April image goes, you remind me of myself when I first started. I was very enthusiastic, like you, about images then. Since then I lost many of my fair-use uploads to deletion. After some heated image-related deletion discussions, I have come to accept the rationale of the people who delete unneeded fair use images and better understand the fair-use policy itself. The latter means never to attempt to stretch it. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 04:47, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Ha! Thought so! And thanks for restoring it. Now a newbie like me (who always previews at least three times before closing eyes, gritting teeth and pressing Save) wouldn't have made that mistake :)  ;) Seriously, thanks for your help with the caption. I'm relying very heavily on Mackridge and Horrocks, because my own Greek is barely tourist-phrasebook standard (and rusty too, or I would have remembered that my Teach Yourself SMG book says to use Απριλιου!!) and sometimes I misunderstand them out of ignorance of the language. I most certainly don't have an ear attuned to degrees of μαλλιαρή-ness (hence my mistake over-estimating the katharevousa-ness of Απριλιου) so I'm going to have to rely on you and other proper Greek-speakers to correct me.

As for the emblem, I borrowed it from the [Greek_military_junta_of_1967–1974] article thinking (rather superficially in retrospect) that if it's fair use there, it is here. But now I can see there is a difference: there, it's relevant to the article-title as a whole, whereas here, only to this one section. So am I stretching the policy here? I can see there's a line somewhere hereabouts but I'm not sure if I've stepped over it. You've read my informal fair-use rationale in my previous post; now I'll leave it to your judgement. If you think it is over the line, I won't object if you delete the image now or later. Or maybe put a fair-use tag on it and see what other people think? If you decide to leave it in place, I'll update the fair-use rationale on its image page to make it as convincing as I can.

On the other hand, the ouzo-bottle image is from the Commons, so I'm going with "visual interest" and putting that in now. And it does make the point that katharevousa forms are by no means extinct today. Perhaps you or another Greek-speaker might check the language in that caption for accuracy? (I adapted it from the German.)--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 13:04, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah I know. As a newbie I was really uptight making a mistake. With experience this has disappeared. I rarely make mistakes but when I do I am not uptight about them. Anyway I think the emblem is unsupportable under fair use and must go. I'll also check the caption of the ouzo picture. Best regards. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 03:47, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

I removed the ouzo picture because it was wrong on several counts as follows:

Katharevousa forms still find many uses in the 21st century-->Unsupported observation, WP:OR:
1. the ending -ν on the adjective κλασσικόν
2. polytonic accents on Ouzo-->polytonic accents existed for dimotiki also
3. οίκος rather than σπίτι--->Wrong, οίκος in this context means "establishment" not "house/spiti"
4. aorist passive participle ιδρυθείς
5. dative case τω... with year

I also have reservations regarding even the valid comments because per WP:NOTHOWTO or WP:NOTMANUAL we are not supposed to teach people the katharevousa forms. On the other hand a picture may be used, without the arrows, with a simple caption that the label is in katharevousa, but without elaboration. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 04:11, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Both agreed. As for linguistic errors in the ouzo-bottle caption, I'm shamelessly blaming them on the German original in the image file. Interestingly, the caption in the actual [1] article doesn't mention the word σπίτι, so maybe someone had already picked up the same mistake there.

Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the picture without numbered pointers, to go with the plain caption you suggest. Perhaps someone else has something suitable?

I'll have a look at WP:NOTHOWTO and WP:NOTMANUAL.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 17:18, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Am I Overquoting?

Just to clarify what I meant by "And am I overquoting there?" in my Agree with ... post yesterday, I'm talking about the last three paras in the whole article, from The end of mandatory ... to the end of the text. At the moment these are 90% quote, and in general I think this might be considered bad (or at least lazy) WP style. Am I right about this?

But in this case, where the paras are summing up the resolution of a question that was so controversial for so long, I thought it might be better to leave almost all of the actual last words to Professor Mackridge (who has spent a lifetime studying this) rather than to me (or WP).

Thoughts, anyone? Dr K?--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 12:27, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

From a cursory look I don't find your use of quotations excessive. Although quotes such as ... language they had imbibed with their mothers' milk was not... are rather amusing. It seems that Professor Mackridge thought that the language was divided into two distinct and separate entities: Dimotiki and Katharevousa. This is a myth of course. The actual language was, and still is, a mixture of the two. Nevermind how strongly pro-Dimotiki you may be, even in 2012, you still never use the more "hairy" forms of Dimotiki, such as the month genitives. For example "Ιούλη" is almost never used, while "Ιουλίου" is preferred; you say "Φεβρουαρίου" and rarely "Φλεβάρη", "25η Μαρτίου" and never "25 Μάρτη", "28 Οκτωβρίου" and almost never "28 Οκτώβρη" etc. And there are many more examples of mixed usage. Much of the difference between the two languages was a matter of a slightly different word ending such as "πόλ-ι" or "πόλ-η", hardly the stuff implied by "imbiding with the mother's milk" of the good professor. The language is a living thing not a binary entity. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 05:35, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for looking this over. To be fair to Mackridge 2009, the book as a whole does give a much more complete picture of the continuous spectrum of Greek forms. But one of his themes is that from (roughly) 1897 until 1976 the language really was quite polarized (artificially, and very much against the grain, as you say, for a living language). Writers in each camp made a consistent, conscious effort to avoid forms associated with the other, and this reduced the overlap until there actually were two versions of the language: diglossia. Of course many of the differences were very minor, like the examples you give, with little effect on mutual intelligibility, but they were enough to identify a given piece of writing as definitely one or the other. The people who wrote in both were very conscious of the binary switch from one to the other, quite unlike moving smoothly up- or down-register in English. Or so Mackridge and Horrocks say; I'll give detail and references for all this in my next few edits. Then the article and the conclusion will fit each other better! Of course all this changed after 1976; now SMG seems to be a normally integrated living language again.

And Mackridge is quite open about the fact that back in the late 60s and 70s he personally was cheering for the demoticists (see Mackridge 2009 p7), which does come through in the quotes. (Just in case that makes him seem too biased to be a useful source, he does have a review from P. M. Kitromilides of the University of Athens (traditional bastion of katharevousa) commending him on "... sound judgement ... complete and fair use of all available literature ..." and describing Mackridge 2009 as "authoritative".)

What I would quite like for balance (and haven't been able to find yet) is a good recent quote with translation, explaining the virtues of katharevousa, written in katharevousa, and preferably incorporating some of the "lexical and grammatical virtuosity" remarked on by Mackridge. Then the reader can decide whether it's "pretentious" or not. Or maybe that would belong in [Katharevousa]?

Meanwhile, I'll carry on expanding the article using Horrocks and Mackridge. And I'm learning a lot from this talk page. PS: Fine with your small edits yesterday. Good to have another eye on this. --SteepLearningCurve (talk) 13:10, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Again agree with all Dr K's edits, except one ...

All agreed again, except one: removal of (and therefore secure enough to risk controversy) at 05:10, 5 October 2012‎.

I know this does look a bit like an OR interpolation but this one is sourced. Mackridge 2009 p257 has "As a wealthy doctor rather than a poor schoolteacher, Fotiadis could afford to support demoticism and oppose the patriarchate."

I also think the deleted phrase conveys important information. The section immediately preceding this will (when I've written it!) deal with the fraught political atmosphere surrounding the Gospel Riots of 1901. A reader might then wonder "What was he thinking of, publishing a book like this only a year after the riots? Wasn't he just a bit apprehensive about the consequences?". My phrase was there to answer this point concisely and make the argument flow better.

Just in case you also have your eye on the Pinelopi Delta part, where "With a theme like this she could hardly be accused of spreading atheism or undermining the nation" might look like OR, this is condensed from Mackridge p281. I worded it as I did to point the contrast between her experience and Delmouzos' during exactly the same years, 1908 - 1914. Again, I'm anticipating the question "How did she get away with it and he didn't?". Because, according to Mackridge, "All of these books contributed both to familiarizing generations of children with written demotic and to making them aware of the national importance of Byzantine history and of the Greek national claims on Macedonia. In this respect Delta's children's novels were far more effective than any overt propaganda campaign. ... and her literary success allowed her to more or less ignore the language question from 1911 onwards." I've tried to make the same point more succinctly, with a nod to the Delmouzos trial.

I'm OK with all your edits to the Colonels' section. The sentence Many academics were dismissed ... demotic is copied word-for-word from Mackridge 2009, so that's all the detail I can supply at the moment. Both Mackridge and Horrocks 1997 are frustratingly short on detailed material for the time of the Colonels; it seems they both see themselves as historians of the ideas behind the language question, and since the Colonels (in their judgement) didn't contribute any new ideas, they don't deserve much space. They have details of the propaganda booklet and the education changes, but not enough specific detail about the rest of everyday life. I will look for new sources for this; I think it is important, in view of its role in swinging public opinion away from katharevousa.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 17:30, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarifications. I will put "and therefore secure enough to risk controversy" back accordingly. As to the academic dismissals I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else so I am a bit sceptical about it, given that the nature of such dismissals would have created some noise in the press at the time. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 18:52, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

And I didn't notice the Penelope Delta part but I do take your word for it. :) Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 19:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks!  :) --SteepLearningCurve (talk) 20:20, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Anytime. It is always a pleasure talking to you. :) Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 22:04, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Help needed transliterating book titles into Greek

I've had to give some book titles in Latin transliteration because that's the way Mackridge 2009 writes them. Here they should really be in Greek orthography appropriate to the period, but my own Greek isn't good enough to do it; I'd stumble over ι/η, and I have no clue where to put the polytonic accents. Can anyone help? Dr K perhaps?--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 17:32, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks but polytonic accents etc. would be a bit time-consuming for me at the moment. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 19:08, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Is GLQ too long?

I'm very conscious that this article is already well above the recommended maximum length, and I keep adding to it (rather more than the "paragraph about the Gospel Riots of 1901 to start with" I was envisaging two years ago). I think maybe it's time to give an explicit justification for this exceptional length, and then ask if I've made a convincing case for it. So, I think it has to be long because ...

First, the general shape of the topic. Some things naturally present themselves as spider-diagrams, like Moon, which naturally buds daughter-articles on Origin of ..., Exploration of ... and so on. But the GLQ is not like that. It is more like a 200-year long rope, with the same strands re-appearing periodically. It's a narrative, the minutes of a discussion that lasted for two centuries. There's no natural way of splitting it up into smaller chunks without obscuring its natural continuity.

And I do think continuity is important. The GLQ is a kind of spine running through recent Greek history, holding it together; but it also forces you to look at the world through the eyes of the people of the time, with all their (often unspoken) assumptions, hopes and fears, which changed a lot as the decades passed. It gives some historical perspective, and I think having all 200 years together in one place is important for that.

Next, the general principle that an article should be short enough to read in one sitting. Well, GLQ may be too long for this already. But I'd argue that with a strong narrative timeline, it's easy to pick up the thread again after a break.

We also have to consider the likely readers. With an article like Moon, which will be consulted by children doing their homework, you could argue that the main article should be fairly short and simple, with much of the detail pushed out into daughter articles. But GLQ is likely to be of most interest to people enthusiastic about history and sociolinguistics, who won't be put off by a long read, or footnotes. I think appropriate length depends very much on the expected audience.

Finally, there's the point that the information in this article is not readily available elsewhere unless you have access to Mackridge 2009 and Horrocks 1997. It could be argued that in general it is worth putting more detail into an article if that detail is hard to find elsewhere.

So that's my defence for the current length and level of detail of the article (and bear in mind that it will be longer still when I've filled in the 1922-67 gap). What do other people think? Too long? Too detailed? Or about right for its intended readers?

SteepLearningCurve (talk) 13:39, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

The article is long, but there is no prohibition against long articles in Wikipedia, when the topic warrants it. While I am far from being an expert on the subject, I find the article quite comprehensive, and I fully agree it should remain so rather than try to impose an artificial branching off of various sub-topics just to keep its size down. My two cents' worth of criticism on the article are elsewhere: a) it needs more references, it is a pity to have a product of so much work and not try to bring it to FA and have it featured on the main page one day, and b) at times (e.g. with headers such as "Temporary setback in 1921") it reads a bit partisan and even teleological, as if the Demotic form was the "correct" choice, the Katharevousa reactionary, and Demotic was destined to triumph in the end. This should be avoided. Constantine ✍ 14:42, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Point taken! And as a start, I've just changed "setback" to "reversal" which I hope is more neutral. (And many apologies for the rather long pause before replying - other stuff to take care of, exams to pass, etc. ...)

As for the teleological bias and inevitable triumph of demoticism, some at least of this does come from Mackridge 2009, obviously my main source so far. In the first few pages of the book, his "Aims and Approach" section concludes: "My teachers at Oxford, Robin Fletcher and Constantine Trypanis, left their students in no doubt that, in their view, demotic was the proper language of the modern Greeks – proper in the double sense that it was their genuine and authentic language, and that the adoption of demotic for all communicative purposes was the only sensible solution to the language question. ... Ever since my student days I have shared my teachers' attitudes on this subject." So no NPOV there ... but it’s his book, so it's entirely proper for him to express his own POV, especially since he warns us about it so clearly at the start.

Of course that means that in using his material on WP we ought to work doubly hard to be neutral; we can hardly say we weren't warned. And Horrocks (1997) seems to share Mackridge's POV. So I have tried to let all the participants speak in their own voices as far as possible (taking the minutes of a 200-year-long meeting, as I wrote above ...) but I suppose inevitably some Mackridge will filter through and have to be corrected. So please correct me!

Which leads on to your other point: more sources. One thing I have done in the last year or so is look for more, without much success. Bruce Merry's Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature (2004) has a lot of useful background information but not even an index entry for the GLQ.

I've looked especially for sources on the time of the Colonels, because Mackridge devotes only a few pages to that. The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels C.M.Woodhouse (1985) has nothing at all. The collection Greece under Military Rule edited by Richard Clogg and George Yannopoulos (1972) has a chapter on 'Traditionalism and Reaction in Greek Education' written by Anonymous, ("A leading Greek educationalist"; I assume anonymous because the Colonels were in power at the time) which devotes two pages to the GLQ, including the following:

"For by insisting on the teaching and use of katharevousa at school, Greek traditionalist education disturbs, irreparably in most cases, the children's linguistic abilities. ... Constant doubt over the use of words or grammatical forms, obsession with the correctness of the form of a word rather than concern over its proper meaning, have considerably reinforced some basic aspects of the Greek national character; vagueness, lack of precision, regard for appearance rather than essence. This may prove convenient to those in authority, of course, when it comes to concepts such as justice, democracy, authority and the like."

So no NPOV (or hard information) there either. Though one more voice, among so many others ...

To cut a long story short, I'm finding it very hard to come up with more sources. If anyone reading this can help, please do! In the meanwhile I'll carry on using Mackridge and Horrocks, and work on filling in the gaps in the article.--SteepLearningCurve (talk) 19:14, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

νηφοκοκκόζωμον or νηφοκοκκόζομον?

Which is the correct word νηφοκοκκόζωμον or νηφοκοκκόζομον (with omicron)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.149.61.139 (talk) 04:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

"(el)"

After the name "Georgios Vizyinos" (which is printed in red, and hence is not a link) is the abbreviation "(el)" in smaller letters, and in the standard blue for a link - if you click on the abbreviation you go to a full Greek-language article on G. V. However, it will surely not occur to most English-speaking users that "el" stands for ελληνικά ("elliniká" = Greek), since this is not a standard English abbreviation, and so they're unlikely to click on it in the first place. This means that readers will be denied information that is available elsewhere in Wikipedia. I've never before seen a link to an article in another language (and in this case another script) indicated in this confusing way. Can someone with the necessary technical skills please turn the name "Georgios Vizyinos" into a normal (blue) link and get rid of the "(el)"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.212.50.177 (talk) 11:26, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Moot—there's now a bluelinked article in English. Pol098 (talk) 21:15, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

1922 to 1967

The article apparently skips over everything that happened between 1922 and 1967. Can anyone provide a section or sections to cover this era? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 03:55, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

"diglossia was absent"

"It is notable that Psycharis, Eftaliotis and Pallis while all born on Greek soil and unfailingly patriotic, all spent much of their working lives in French- and English-speaking surroundings where diglossia was unknown and it was taken for granted that people wrote and spoke in the same language. This may have contributed to their shared perception that Greek diglossia was an exception, a problem that they could solve by energetic literary intervention."

We're gonna need a quote on that, because at the time diglossia was at its peak in france, and french was the spoken language of a minority of the population. (Psycharis grew up in Marseille, which was provençal-speaking).

77.205.152.84 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 15:59, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Excessive italics

I've done a bunch of WP:MOS cleanup on this article (though some remains to be done, especially MOS:FOREIGN work with {{lang|el|...}} and {{lang|el-Latn|...}}). In particular, I fixed the constant veering back and forth between "demotic" and "Demotic". It's "Demotic", per MOS:PROPER: all language and dialect names are proper names and thus take initial capitalization.

The most glaring issue I see remaining now: it's become apparent that every instance of "Katharevousa" has been marked up as ''Katharevousa'' for no legitimate reason. It is absolutely not normal to put the name of any language or dialect in italics (or in a {{lang}} template) when that is the usual name for it in English, as is there case here. That includes when the name is a native endonym and not anglicized. E.g. Inuinnaqtun is just Inuinnaqtun and does not have an anglicization like "Inuinnactinian", so it is simply written "Inuinnaqtun" not "Inuinnaqtun" or "Inuinnaqtun". Dialect and language names do not go in italics unless we are giving a non-English term and constrating it with the English one, as in: "the Scottish Gaelic language (Gàidhlig)".

I think what has been happening here is that someone with a bone to pick has been capitalizing and italicizing "Katharevousa" every single time simply to emphasize it, and then simultanenougly lowercasing "demotic" to denigrate it. I've undone the second half of that, but the pointless italics on the first half need to stop.

Unless there is a really, really compelling reason for italics (or lang markup also imposing italics) on every instance of "Katharevousa", I'm simply going to remove that non-standard markup.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:41, 14 July 2024 (UTC)