By Steve Connor, Science Editor. Monday, 3 January 2011
An isolated community near the Black Sea coast in a remote part of north-eastern Turkey has been found to speak a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.
As few as 5,000 people speak the dialect but linguists believe that it is the closest, living language to ancient Greek and could provide an unprecedented insight into the language of Socrates and Plato and how it evolved.
The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus, a Greek colony that Jason and the Argonauts are supposed to have visited on their epic journey from Thessaly (now Thessaloniki) to recover the Golden Fleece from the land of Colchis (present-day Georgia). Pontus was also supposed to be the kingdom of the mythical Amazons, a fierce tribe of women who cut off their right breasts in order to handle their bows better in battle.
Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka’s vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language.
Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in romance philology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Romeyka preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an ancient Greek flavour to the dialect’s structure, traits that have been completely lost from other modern Greek varieties.
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Tags: Ancient Greek, Geek
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By Jake Miller. Published January 21, 2009
What was once traditional has now become a radical proposition: that Columbia College students be required to take Latin or ancient Greek, rather than a modern language. Yet there are good reasons for such a requirement: studying a classical language improves verbal skills and introduces students to other cultures more effectively than studying a modern language.
Because of the formalized study of grammar they entail, classical language courses improve verbal and analytical skills in a way that modern language courses do not. Classics majors have higher combined Graduate Record Examination scores than virtually any other students, including modern language majors. Of course, because of the third variable here—the self-selection bias—that statistic is irrelevant. However, it is surely relevant that the combined GRE scores of classics majors showed a drop at about the same time that classics programs began de-emphasizing the languages and teaching more civilization courses. This indicates a relationship between the verbal and analytical skills tested by the GRE and experience in the classical languages. These skills are most likely affected by the close analytical work required by the intensive study of grammar. As a student of French, Latin, and Greek, I can testify to the fact that the level of analytical and grammatical work I do in French is not comparable to the work I do in Latin or Greek. Nor could it be—most modern languages have much simpler grammars than Latin or Greek, and in any case, the emphasis in modern language courses is on communication, not on the formal study of grammar.
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Tags: Ancient Greek, Latin
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