SDLC 105 Learning Journal #10

[Daniel Matthew Kunath]

If I were given a grant for a linguistic study of Greek, my first purchase would be a plane ticket. Once in Greece, I would go to Greek archaeologists and classical historians and talk to them to learn about ancient and classical Greece as much as I could. I would be interested to learn what the major differences are between classical and modern Greek, and what brought about these changes. In a nutshell, the modern version is simpler, using fewer types of accents and fewer cases than its ancestor. One hypothesis might be that the nation has developed a higher-context form of communication, so that the specificity and tedium of classical Greek would be made obsolete. Of course, to work on such a hypothesis, I would need to acquaint myself very familiarly with the culture of both modern and classical Greece. The studies of semantics and the branching out of languages could play an especially strong role in this study, as well as the readings on how a language dies. The research would raise the question of whether classical Greek is a dead language or preserved in the continuance of modern Greek. While I would find the research opportunity fascinating, I would likely cause more questions to be asked than answered.