The Renaissance of the First Century and the Origin of Standard Late Greek
Greece, once the mother at whose feet European civilization sat and learnt, has ever quickened to the inspiration of her own past. When at intervals her learning and literature have languished and all but died out, her steadfast awareness of her ancient glory has always stirred in her a new impulse...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1945
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| In: |
Traditio
Year: 1945, Volume: 3, Pages: 49-100 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Greece, once the mother at whose feet European civilization sat and learnt, has ever quickened to the inspiration of her own past. When at intervals her learning and literature have languished and all but died out, her steadfast awareness of her ancient glory has always stirred in her a new impulse and a new life. How like her, then, on the morrow of her emancipation from the Turk, to look back to the period of her greatness for an answer to the problem confronting her! Reborn Greece needed desperately a common tongue. She had at her disposal only local patois, and possessed neither a national literature nor a national language. It had been preeminently the strong sense of a history, the reawakening of the age-old urge to vie with antiquity, that had kindled her to revolt against her overlord. To revive the idiom of classic Athens, to make it the symbol and bond of a resurgent Hellas appealed irresistibly to the enthusiastic patriotism of the victors. Others with equal ardor espoused the cause of the vernacular. Thus arcse the strife over the katharevousa and the demotike, an ever-recurrent conflict of never reconciled elements in the nation's psychology, the tug of the past over against the insistence of the present. |
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| ISSN: | 2166-5508 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Traditio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S036215290001686X |