Page 273 - Beholding Liberty!

The linguistic imprint of the National Regeneration
Dr Maria Kamilaki
Head of the Parliamentary Library Department
INTRODUCTION
T wo hundred years after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1821, the distant echo of those earth-shak- ing events, which marked the passage of the Greeks from slavery to freedom, revives for us through the pages of written narratives (e.g. Memoirs), historical heirlooms of Fighters, such as muskets, rapiers and cartridge pouches, as well as artworks, mainly of philhellenic origin, such as paintings, engravings and
all kinds of artistic creations (vases, plates, inkpots etc.).
The lived experience, however, of the people who revolted against the Turcs was expressed with pronounced words, yells and military slogans of uprising. It was with vibrating speech that the chieftains heartened their brave men in the battlefields and the inhabitants of Hydra, Psara and Spetses contrived naval plans on their ships; words of anguish conveyed the drama of the inhabitants of Missolonghi before their heroic Exodus; it was through dialogue that the plenipotentiaries in the National Assemblies debated, when drafting the constitutional texts of the Modern Greek state. The course of the Greeks towards attaining Freedom was mediated by language, hence our national poet Dionysios Solomos in his Dialogue exclaims: «Does anything else occupy my mind but liberty and language?».1
The study of the idiolect and linguistic pratices of the fighters of 1821 focuses, in effect, on preserved written sources, given the lack of oral records, and is confined to the investigation in them of secondary elements of orality. Moreover, a parameter that makes the reconstruction of the oral register less feasible is the habit written texts to be recorded in a scholarly/learned form, since already in the Hellenistic period and onwards
2 writtenGreekdivergesfromspokenone,atvariousdegreesofstratificationandvariation. Thus,theFighters’
live word is transformed into a curated archaistic form, with grammatical and syntactical features far apart from the spoken reality of the time, being, though, invested with high sociolinguistic prestige, due to their connection to ancient Greek, as a cultivated language-bearer of the ancient Greek literature.
Furthermore, given that literacy was limited to the classes of scholars and the clergy, the wide popular mass- es remaining cut off from reading and writing, the transfer from oral to written language was undertaken by «grammaticians», namely educated secretaries, who had access to literacy, as opposed to the vast majority of the chieftains and the simple people who took up arms against the Turks. Therefore, the written texts that we have at our disposal (with a few exceptions, as for example the Memoirs of Makrygiannis) do not come directly from the mouth/hand of the narrators themselves, but are conveyed by their recorders, a small group with specific sociolinguistic characteristics, as compared to the entire number of agents of the time, which in turn results in polyphony3 of varying degree and extent: in these texts (at least two)4 different voices co-exist and «are heard», that of the «speaking subject», who bears the responsibility of the said, and the other of the grammatician. Although the latter, due to his position, has to capture faithfully the spirit and letter of the dictated speeches, in actual fact, the degree of observing this commitment is indecipherable, given that «me- diators» do not limit themselves to a simple transcription (as for instance a secretary would do in our days, recording a report that her director dictates to her); on the contrary, a transformation of the text takes place
View of the Propylaea
with the Acropolis
at the background
(part) coloured aquatint, Illustration in Edward Dodwell, Views in Greece, Λονδίνο 1821 Library of the Hellenic Parliament
1. The work, which was written in 1824/25 but was published much later in 1859, two years after the poet’s death,
is one of the earliest attempts to theoretically support the use of everyday spoken language in written discourse (Horrocks 2006: 625).
2. The dual tradition of the Greek language traverses the entire Byzantine period either silently, with parallel concurrence of the two stratified variations, the learned and the demotic one, or with surges and peaks, like the Byzantine Atticism at the end of the 11th
century, in circumstances under which the Byzantine Empire was facing a Turkish/Islamic threat from the East and a Latin/Catholic one from the West, finding refuge, as a result, in
the achievements of the past, which provided the most secure confirmation of its Greek identity (see indicatively, Andriotis 1974: 264; Babiniotis 2011; Μackridge 2014).
3. Polyphony was used by Bakhtine as
an analytical tool for the study of literary texts (Todorov 1981), its use subsequently expanding in sciences such as sociolinguistics and anthropology
of language (see, Gee 1996; Koutsousimou-Tsinoglou 2000).
4. Quite often in someone’s service there were more than one secretaries: i.e. it
is said that in 1827 Th. Kolokotronis employed simultaneously «six secretaries and they were writing day and night [...]» (see, Sarantakos 2020: 9).
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