Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 310 Write retro orthodox characters and be a pure Greek

Of course, these cases can only make Guo Kang judge that "the Greeks would have problems without Rome."The really serious things are actually yet to come.

As we all know, the alphabet and language used by Europeans developed correspondingly.And this also brings up a problem: as the accent changes, the words and writing methods are actually changing all the time.

According to Guo Kang's thinking, this is a very normal phenomenon.Not to mention alphabetic characters, even Chinese characters, the most stable single seedling, will continue to develop and change.Only a dead language will stop changing.

This is why, in the end, Latin became an academic language—it was essentially dead, but it happened to survive relatively intact.This way, there is no ambiguity in terms and proper nouns that change frequently with daily use.

But the Greeks at that time didn't think so.

They are also aware of the various changes that occur in language, but have a hard time accepting it.Because according to the prevailing logic at the time, it was obvious that the Greek of the classical age was the authentic Greek.If you want to revive Greece, you have to start from ancient times, abandon the ignorant "vernacular" Greek, and use classical Greek that is more in line with enlightenment and progress.

The biggest problem here is that Western Europeans can praise ancient Greece and Rome at will, and advocate antiquity and enlightenment, because they have almost no ancient history.Therefore, as long as you make up an idealized "ancient" at will, you can use the past to speak to the present, and you don't have to face other people's doubts based on historical facts, or bear other side effects.

But for the Greeks, they really have a testable ancient time, which is a big problem...

The upper-class Greek literati at that time quickly defined: Greek vernacular is not normal Greek, because Greek has been polluted by barbarian languages ​​in the process of development!The sinking of the Greek nation is also directly related to this cultural barbarism.Therefore, in order to make Greece great again, these "huddled" parts must be removed and repaired with the rules of classical language.

In fact, this kind of theory is not limited to them, even Guo Kang has seen it before.The difference is that the Greeks really believed it.

However, the Greek language in the classical era and modern times has undergone tremendous changes and cannot be used directly.So, the scholar Klaus and others (that is, the one who refused to admit that he was a Roman) created a new Greek language.They eliminated a large number of Italian and Turkish words, and created new words directly from ancient roots.In this way, a new Greek language was created that was neither classical nor modern.

People call it "pure Greek".However, this purity mainly means to purify, and I don’t know how to translate it well.Considering that it is mainly advocating its orthodox ancient attributes, maybe it can be called "Greek orthodox characters"...

But the biggest problem is that this language is man-made after all.The creator was a Greek who had been educated in France and lived in Paris most of his life.His works are not for the convenience of users, but for the pursuit of a hypothesis.Even he himself believes that this language can only be used as a transition, allowing people to eventually return to classical languages.Because compared with the classical characters of "classical Chinese", this kind of half-literate and half-white language is even more embarrassing.

Many contemporary anti-Roman literati opposed this.This patchwork language, they argued, was more "Roman," more "Oriental," and more backward than colloquial Greek.As for the reason... there may be no need for a reason.Because Rome is gone, everyone can assume that Roman elements are backward.No one cares who owns the Roman elements, and whether there is any relationship between these elements. Anyway, you can discuss it anyway.

As for further solutions, the Greeks did not make it until the end.This language has been "transitioning" until the late twentieth century, and finally faded out of the ranks of official languages.After more than 100 years of tossing, everyone has returned to vernacular Greek...

In Guo Kang's view, this is a kind of Wang Mang's behavior - everyone is just talking about retro, but you take it seriously.It's a pity that the history of the Greeks is still not rich enough to realize it.

And, it wasn't long before their theory began to face serious blows.

Also around 1830, the Austrian historian Valmeyer published a book called "The History of the Morea Peninsula in the Middle Ages".Varmeyer has always disliked the "pro-Greek" atmosphere that was popular in South Germany at that time, and believes that this is a completely wrong assumption.

So, he analyzed various place names in the Greek region and found that many of the names were Slavic words.On this basis, after collecting a series of evidence, Valmeyer concluded that the current Greeks have almost no clear relationship with the Greeks of the classical era, but are descendants of the Slavs.

According to his own words, "the Greek race has been completely extinct. There is not a single drop of classical Greek blood in the veins of Greek Christians today." The spiritual heritage of ancient Greece has long been recognized by the Romans, Goths, Slavs and Albanians and other waves of conquerors destroyed.

So, a group of Slavs, don't leave it there to embarrass ancient Greece.It didn't matter at all, and I just made a name for myself.The revival advocated by the Greeks has no possibility of realization at all—it has long been gone, and who else can be revived.

This view was gradually disproved in later generations.But at the time, it still had a big impact.This kind of discourse did not only affect Greece. Guo Kang also often encountered this kind of argumentation mode in the East.

For the Greeks at that time, Vermeyer's theory was quite terrible.

According to the popular saying in Europe and Greece at that time, the end of ancient Greek history was the Battle of Chaeronia in 338 BC.The Macedonian Kingdom defeated the Athens-Thebes coalition forces in this battle and wiped out the most elite Thebes Holy Order among the Greeks.From then until the Revolution of 1821, Greece was ruled by foreigners.This is also the theoretical basis for their request to return to the classical age.

But this gap is really too big...

The Yuan Dynasty was less than 100 years old, and Zhu Yuanzhang did not deny its legal authority in terms of jurisprudence, so as to avoid various follow-up problems and theoretical contradictions.It stands to reason that this is the basic quality of a politician.However, the Greeks ruled out more than 2000 years at once... It would be strange if there were no problems.

Valmeyer's "Greek Pseudo-History Theory" had an influence beyond the theoretical level-because he really let the Greek literati collectively break their defenses.

Although it is not very correct, it directly hits the most problematic part of this nation-building theory: if according to the Enlightenment, it is determined that the classical era and the subsequent period are separated and opposed, then how to prove that after 2000 years , Why did this modern Greece suddenly appear again?
Therefore, even if the Romans are considered to be foreigners, the Greeks cannot ignore this part in their own legal narrative.

(End of this chapter)