Page 277 - Beholding Liberty!

viduals addressed to the Administration about the development of military operations, securing of food and ammunition supplies, establishment of schools, but also about the disputes and occasional upsets of balance, these historical documents record with liveliness the touching effort of the revolted nation of the Greeks to pass from the state of slavery and hetero-determination to the condition of citizenship - a process not at all self-evident, straightforward or bloodless.
With regard to its linguistic garment, it is a heterogeneous textual material, primarily formal and institutional, all the same. The writers of the documents are Phanariots, priests, scholars, grammaticians, people educat- ed for the standards of the time. Despite the fact that the language of the AGR is, to a great extent, the scholarly/learned variety, we are now going to make an attempt to demonstrate that in them one can trace several elements of orality, rendering their overall style an interesting compromise between the spoken and written varieties, which in any case is differentiated from the strictly archaistic trend that the Greek language acquired after 1830. Obviously, in the present study we shall content ourselves with preliminary remarks, which stem from the investigation of a small subset of a vast textual body, the thorough metalinguistic doc- umentation of which requires more systematic research.
The bulk of the AGR texts belong to various sub-texts of the administrative-institutional-political discourse (preliminary decrees, decisions, minutes, diplomatic documents etc.). In these, as it is expected, formal style dominates. For instance, in decree 540 of the Executive for the specification of the shape, colour and symbols of the national ensigns (Corinth, 15 March 1822, AGR, vol. 1, p. 322)24 we read the description of the navy’s flag (also constituting Greece’s contemporary national flag): «Κατά της μεν διά τα πολεμικά πλοία το εμβαδόν θέλει διαιρείσθαι εις εννέα οριζόντια παραλληλόγραμμα, παραμειβομένων εις αυτά των χρωμάτων λευκού και κυανού· εις την άνω δε προς τα έσω γωνίαν τούτου του εμβαδού θέλει σχηματισθή τετράγωνον κυανόχρουν, διηρημένον εν τω μέσω δι’ ενός σταυρού λευκοχρόου/ For that of the warships the surface shall be divided into nine horizontal rectangles, with the colours white and blue alternating in them; in the upper inner corner of this surface a blue square shall be formed, divided in the middle by a white cross». In the excerpt there is an accumulation of learned elements, such as the adjectives κυανόχρους/blue and λευκόχρους/white, the phrasal formation of the future tense with the auxiliary θέλει + infinitive or subjunctive (instead of the index θα),25 the structure of genitive absolute (παραμειβομένων....κυανού), the prepositional phrases with εις, εν, διά etc.
As it is expected, the language of the Constitutions of the Struggle is also edited and formal. In the first Greek Constitution, the Provisional Constitution of Greece (1st January 1822), it is determined that: «Όσοι αυτόχθονες κάτοικοι της επικρατείας της Ελλάδος πιστεύουσιν εις Χριστόν εισίν Έλληνες/All those indigenous inhabitants of the territory of Greece who believe in Christ are Greeks». Apart from the archaistic linguistic elements, like the verb types πιστεύουσιν and εισίν, of interest, in the present excerpt, is also the choice of the national name
24. In the present study citations correspond to the edited volumes of the AGR.
25. See, Μanolessou 2013.
The linguistic imprint of the National Regeneration 277
Decree (no 540) of the Executive for the definition of the shape, colour and symbols
of the national ensigns
(Corinth, 15 March 1822) Archives of the Greek Regeneration, vol. 1, no 322 [p. 322]
Library of the Hellenic Parliament [cat. no ΙΙ.2.1]