Page 276 - Beholding Liberty!

Adamantios Korais
Forewords in various authors Published by Korais
(second edition)
s.l. 1815
Library of the Hellenic Parliament [cat. no I.2.12]
18. See Hellenic Nomarchy / Ελληνική Νομαρχία, N. V. Tomadakis (ed.), Athens, 1948, p. 176, note.
19. See, Dimaras 1984 (vol. Α ́): 51.
20. See, Baggioni 1997.
21. See, Κehagioglou 1999a: 220-221.
22. See, Stavridi-Patrikiou 1999: 11.
23. See relatedly, https://paligenesia. parliament.gr/.
children of the Greeks would be enlightened, if lectures on sciences were given in our simple dialect. If only one day the young writers would enrich and honour our language with their essays».18
Placed between the two extremes of the metalinguistic continuum, is Adamantios Korais (1748-1833), who, contending that the national self-determination of the Greeks depended directly on the reassessment of the ancient Greek linguistic resources, supported the «middle road» as a compromising solution: conforming to the grammar and syntax of the modern oral language stands as the only realistic choice, in parallel, though, purifying it from «the weeds of vulgarity».19
To sum up, if in the European area –already from the 16th and the 17th century, with the first ecolinguistic revolution-20 spoken languages come to the fore as languages of literacy, pushing aside Latin, the case of the Greek-speaking linguistic community was not that simple, due to the peculiarity of the dual tradition of the Greek language, along with the subsequent sociolinguistic and ideological load that this bore. Although the demotic had gained ground in the written word in kinds such as literature, utilitarian handbooks (e.g. portolan charts, handbooks of domestic economy, astrologers), notarial documents (e.g. wills, dowry agreements, lease agreements), handbooks of orality and rhetorics (e.g. Rhetorical Art/Τέχνη Ρητορικής of Frankiskos Skoufos, Teachings/Διδαχαί of Ilias Miniatis et al.),21 this transition was not accomplished without conflict between the traditional institutions of education, such as the Church, and the new rising social powers of publishers, merchants and industrialists, who expressed more directly the new conditions of life.22
THE LANGUAGE OF THE FIGHTERS: THE CASE OF THE AGR
As opposed to the scholars of expatriate Hellenism, who ponder over language, for the people of action, who took up the arms and revolted, language is something self-contained and natural, which functions as the expressive background of a relentless struggle. They do not talk about language, they simply speak it. It is this language of the Fighters, oral and written, that we are going to investigate, using 120 documents of the AGR as a corpus.
The textual body of the AGR, which has been edited and is digitally available,23 comprises 38 codices and 10.000 loose documents, dating from the beginning of the Struggle for Independence to the election of the first «king of Greece» Otto (1821-1832). With its inexhaustible wealth, AGR offer the researcher a unique op- portunity to witness the dialectic relation between public and private, macro-history and microhistories of the Revolution: from the constitutional texts and the local regimes, the documents that derive from the National Assemblies and the local organizations, the acts of the Legislative and Executive Body, the documents of the Kapodistrian period to and from the Governor et al., to the letters of (more or less «eponymous») private indi-
276 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!