Talk:Cretan Greek

Wow. What a Mess

Wow. What a mess this article is. I don't have time now or else I would start fixing it. It needs a thorough spell checking which will reveal grammatical constructs that are out of this world. I'll check back later but for now I wanted to report this.

In addition to this, I'd like to remark that the article entirely lacks any information on the dialect itself, i.e. in what is it different from Standard Greek? Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 23:14, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not right to look for differences between new Greek and Cretan, because the new Greek is a manipulated language. [Cretensis: ψιμιδευτή μιλιά, φτιασιδωμενη] it's not the same thing. Cretan dialect is a stand alone language, it's never been manipulated by ″intellectuals″ it's the oldest of the greek dialects survived to our days, actually is the only one survived.

If is required any array [check the Greek article] with differences between the Cretan and the new Greek, i will like to start it, can be used phonetic alphabet, and word's origines also.Idaeananvil (talk) 20:14, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

While at the beginning of Greek dialectology in the 19th century, it was thought (by non-Greek scholars) that the Modern Greek dialects directly continue the ancient ones, we now know that this is not the case. Cretan does not descend from the local Ancient Greek dialect. It is a descendant of Koine Greek just like all other Modern Greek dialects, with the sole exception of Tsakonian, which does indeed continue the local Doric dialect of Laconia, and is now clearly a separate language based on mutual intelligibility with other Modern Greek dialects (none exists, unsurprisingly, after millennia of divergence). However, similar to the case of Griko, modern Cretan Greek is thought to show traces of a Doric substratum. (Similarly, Pontic Greek is thought to have a Ionian substratum because it shows features that are quite distinct and the pronunciation of eta cannot be derived from Koine Greek.) Also, it is true that Cretan Greek differs significantly from Standard Modern Greek and was employed as a written language in the Middle Ages, when the modern standard did not exist yet. Sociolinguistically speaking, Cretan Greek was clearly once a language in its own right, with a significant literary production.

It should also be kept in mind that Cretan Greek and Standard Modern Greek have gone separate ways for many centuries, and according to Nick Nicholas, some characteristics that distinguish the modern dialects can be found as early as the 6th century AD, in Late Antiquity. This means that the separate development of non-Tsakonian dialects is well older than 1000 years, and the time-depth of non-Tsakonian Modern Greek is the same or greater than that of Slavic. See History & Diatopy of Greek.

On this basis, it is ridiculous to speak of a single "Greek language" and treat Griko, Pontic, Cappadocian etc., let alone Tsakonian, as mere dialects. Rather, Modern Greek is clearly a language family. Tsakonian alone suffices to disprove the "single language" meme, which is based on nothing but politics and rabid nationalism, which is particularly endemic in Greece, to the point of denying, even among educated people who should know better, that old ethnic minorities even exist in the country, and insisting that Greece has always been populated exclusively by Greeks, at least until the modern age. (If pressed, many Greeks would probably argue that Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Aegean Slavic, Albanian and possibly even Turkish descend from Ancient Greek. While Fallmerayer became the national enemy of Greece forever by positing that the ancient Greeks died out and were completely replaced by Slavs in the Middle Ages, Greeks themselves have driven the idiocy the other direction, by insisting that modern Greeks are pure descendants of ancient Greeks without any foreign influences, essentially an anti-Fallmerayer.) While Griko, Cappadocian and Pontic (where Mariupolitan is included within Pontic) are nowhere as divergent as Tsakonian, which is barely recognisable as Greek, they are distinct enough that they could also be treated as separate languages. Cretan and Cypriot Greek in turn are not as divergent as these, but still distinctive enough to treat them as separate languages as well. Indeed, were it not for politics, linguistically speaking, one could easily treat isolated "mainstream" dialects such as Old Athenian or Maniot as languages in their own right as well, and perhaps even call some of the less readily mutually intelligible "mainstream Modern Greek" varieties within Greece and Southern Albania "languages".

(I do not have personal experience with these varieties however and no impressionistic judgment of their divergence from the modern standard, although the deletion of high vowels in part of Northern Greek should alone affect mutual intelligibility significantly and is probably also of considerable age, given the likely not completely accidental parallel with the Slavic developments that happened between the 9th and 11th centuries. However, it should be kept in mind that lexical differences usually impede communication even more. Also, the continuum between the broadest rural traditional dialects and more "moderate" dialect forms needs to be considered. Only the thickest and most archaic dialectal speech probably qualifies for separate language status, and unfortunately appears to be on the brink of extinction, or already effectively disappeared, in most places. This looks like it will effectively solve the whole dialect issue all on its own, but as long as there is still a single Tsakonian speaker left, Greek is definitely in no meaningful way a single language.)

See also Talk:Tsakonian language#70% similarity, where it is made clear that "dialects" for Tsakonian, Pontic and Cappadocian is a misnomer based on politics (although confusion caused by the originally differing meanings and connotations of dialect in English and διάλεκτος in Greek may also play a role). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:25, 5 February 2015 (UTC)