Twenty years later I found my beloved, lost, polytonic system again! Being a good pupil I learned the polytonic system thoroughly in primary school. (Yes, I had a sufficient knowledge of it; those who say that it is very difficult to learn are lying. Can anything worthy be obtained in life without effort?) When I entered secondary school, barbarian accent-killers forced me to un-learn it. Today, I consider their act crude and abusive and I cannot forgive them. Progressively I became a mechanical writer of monotonic Greek; later on, on computers, I wrote “greeklish”. Years passed and the thought of a lost treasure quest became more and more mature. The desire to write polytonically became stronger and stronger but I hesitated in taking the decisive step and overcoming the (unfounded, as it finally proved) fear of technical difficulties of keyboarding the text on the computer. But the struggle of some people for our language has made me take this final step. A few months ago, I wrote my first impressions:
“Polytonic pleasure!
Finally it is easier than I thought; a little practise is all that is needed. It is a precious experience, the slight difficulty of which increases its satisfaction. Indeed, it is like finding an old lover from your teen age again, lost for 23 years, who now slowly and sensually reveals his/her joys, which you didn’t even had the time to suspect he/she possessed.
... And I look again at the monotonic text... How could we ever treat our beautiful letters in that way?
Don’t these vertical rough sharp accents cut holes in the letters, without an ounce of breathing to soften accentuation and to bring some color and beauty?
Like a mean denuding and deflowering of the letters, without a romantic supper with the candlelight flickering slightly like the surge of a circumflex, without a tender kiss on the lips, soft like the “h” of the rough breathing...”
And a female friend of mine, who likes to contradict me, made the following comment (I was referring to the curious rule of old style kathareuousa according to which the double rho in the middle of words takes a smooth and a rough breathing, for ex. “Παπαῤῥηγόπουλος”!):
Obsessions spread with funny grammar rules (“the first rho takes a smooth breathing” and so on). Woe betide us if some day we are doomed to encounter once again rough breathings, grave accents, smooth breathings and rhos with breathing in our education... What is the use of putting a breathing on a rho to understand the word? Do you pronounce ἡρωϊσμός as hηρωϊσμός and ἡδονή as hηδονή? Education needs other kinds of spirit (= breathing) than the abolished small Alexandrian signs...
And I replied:
«My friend, you have focused on the most rare sign —rather taken as a joke by the author— the “ῥ” of Παπαῤῥηγόπουλος (which even the most old-fashioned grammars not always agree upon). Come on! For some special occasions we may retrieve a rare wine from our cellar; but we can also eat well on a daily basis; don’t force us to eat in industrialized mutant fast-foods.
Independently of your comment, I would like to raise a point. I don’t understand (and it makes me sad; some people are, of course, predisposed, I don’t mean them) why some people consider accents as... the threatening canes of a severe teacher or the truncheon of a merciless policeman of a totalitarian state! And not as a proposal for beauty, finesse and delicacy; but also of consequence and devotion; and aristocracy and idealism and romantism and perfectionism, if we can say so, with the right meaning of the word.
Think of the utter cultural consequences. What would happen if the torrents of cheap textual pollution which are drowning us had to be polytonic (be it out of habit or due to common practice)! Could they exist? Maybe, through unknown cultural processes, the produced word and civilization would be different. The polytonic system is, why not, an anticonformistic way of life against the vulgarization and mercantility of our time. Christos Yannaras talks of “cultural diplomacy”. (What have the consequences of the style of altars in “modernized”—or not—temples been to our foreign policy in the last century? Questions, the existence of which we do not even suspect, but which remain important.)
“Do you pronounce ἡρωϊσμός as hηρωϊσμός and ἡδονή as hηδονή?”
Now that you mention it, this hηδονή with the slightly pronounced, implied, and sensual h, like a subtle and still not confessed sigh, like an implied and still decently unpronounced promise of lust... I imagine this h tenderly blown by lustfully contracted circumflex-like red women’s lips... Excuse me. (As for heroism, doesn’t it give a sense of idealism but also of something official?)
Since we speak primarily about writing and not about pronouncing, we should rather refer to the old and especially refined tradition of love letters, the style of which is exactly the opposite of current ordinary vulgar writing. Can you imagine a valiant knight attempting to move a gentle damsel by writing an... SMS?! God forbid!
Countless circumflex and grave accents, grave like my heart, written under torture with my tears and blood, will irrigate the parchment...”
This is what I wrote on December 2005. And today I’m happy with my decision to restart writing (and keyboarding) in polytonic.
Let us find, my friends, all of us, the lost treasure again! It is worth it!
...“Smooth breathing and an acute accent on an alfa. Isn’t it like a beautiful bow on a plait on the head of a beloved memory?” wrote an old friend...
Writing does not only carry information about how to speak. For that purpose we have the tape recorder (and the dedicated phonetic notation we find in dictionaries). Writing loses some elements of the spoken word, but adds some new ones: syntactic, morphological, etymological, historical, and even esthetic ones. Each one of them has been carved by millenia of tradition and is invaluable.
Even if ancient pronounciation is nolonger today, it is tightly connected with the structural elements of our language. It brings its entire history to the present. The rough accent, for example, has been a letter, whose presence is attested when composing words (but also in foreign, European languages, influenced by Greek). Homophone vowels and their different accentuations, independently of their current pronounciation, refer to different syntactic and etymological elements. The (“historic”) spelling is our very language. To know modern Greek sufficiently and to valorize it, you need to know and delve into its living history.
Our encounter with ancient Greek and our scholarly tradition requires, both for Greeks and for foreigners, the learning of accents and breathings. Their ostracism is our violent removal from our linguistic heritage. It transforms our nation into a populace of primitive natives without writing and without memory, to which some... (missionaries of industrial capitalism?) offer a simplistic means of functional transcription of their speach. And it separates us not only from our linguistic heritage but also from all of civilized mankind, which pores over it, through the Greek writing system. It is a national lobotomy, a patricide.
The Ancient Greeks didn’t write accents and breathings, but, at least, kept them (partly) alive in the pronounciation. But they didn’t even have, among other things, pen or paper to do calligraphy. “Ancient Greeks” as a sterile cliché vs. subsequent “decay” is a non-historic and outdated approach, leading to political and historical prejudices, and in the end harmful at a national level. But the “Ancient Greeks” as a classical model, when it comes to philology and grammar, are, precisely Alexandrians! They are our “ancient ones” when it comes to the art of writing, they invented accents, they perfected the archaic and still simplistic writing system they received (through marble and clay) so that our language might become universal and timeless. The development of the ornaments of our script is, therefore, an evolution, an enrichment of the ancient heritage; their ostracism is poverty and amputation. Defending the polytonic system is not a sterile “cult of our ancestors” but, on the contrary, an acceptance of evolution and a connection with our diachronic linguistic heritage. It is not the past, but a bridge to it, and from there back again to the present and the future. It is not a path backwards but a recycling of time, an abolition of temporal linearity and a constant revival of the past in the present and in the future.
Even the esthetics of writing has been modeled through the ages and the generations of our ancestors, just as the ages of Greek nature have modeled the little bays of our coasts. The finesse and grace of the ornaments of our writing system are reflected in the waves of the Aegean sea, the chapiters of our ancient temples, the coast lines of our islands and our mountains, our chapels and wines, as Elytis says, the folds of traditional fustanellas of liberty fighters during the war of liberation and the black pen-drawn eyebrows of our girls. The barbaric industrial equalization of our writing system, the fascist-like haircut of vowels, which makes our letters look like the unpleasant accessory tools produced by an industrial screw-cutting lathe, is a cultural crime, with inestimable consequences. (Translated by Y.H.)