Το ῎Ανευ Κλίσι Ελληνική
Greek Without Inflexions

The origin of the language

Το Ἄνευ Κλίσι Ἑλληνική (Greek without inflexions), also now known by the acronym ΤΑΚΕ¹ (formerly known as ΕΑΚ or EAK, as explained below), owed its origin to a chance observation made in February 2006 in reply to an error I had made in an email on the Conlang list. The dog Latin name², "Graeca sine flexione" stuck, giving rise to a thread on what Greek might be like if stripped of its inflexions in the manner similar to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione. During the thread, the language came to be known by the acronym GSF; but the thread eventually petered out. It floundered, I think, because we were conflating ancient and modern Greek and thus producing neither an ancient Greek nor a modern Greek without inflexions, but a sterile hybrid.

Early in May 2007 Philip Newton published Akļiteļiņika or Greek sans flexions (GSF). This 'modern Greek without inflexions' model; but it is no longer live on the Internet.

This led to another thread on the Conlang list which began as 'GSF revisited' but soon turned into EAK (an acronym for the ungrammatically named Ελληνικό άνευ Κλίσι). In this I outlined various ideas for a 'classical Greek without inflexions.' το ἄνευ κλίσι Ἑλληνική was the partially developed result.

¹A fellow Conlanger, Henrik Theiling, has pointed out that ΤΑΚΕ nicely complements GIVE (Greek Inflexions Vanished Easily).
²In 'Latino sine flexione' the name would be "Graeco sine flexione", and in Classical Latin, as prepositional phrases normally function only as adverbs, we would have something like "Graecum sine flexionibus transformatum."

2010/ 2011 Revision

I decided from the start that classical & Koine Greek should be used and not modern Greek. On the Conlang list we tried to imagine a scenario in which someone might want to produce an 'ancient Greek without inflexions' in a way analogous to 'Latino sine flexione.' After some discussion, a scenario developed in which Alexander the Great did not die young in Persia, but lived on, turned westward bringing 'Magna Graeca' of southern Italy under his control and going on to conquer the rest of Italy as well as southern Gaul and the Iberian peninsular. The western part of the Hellenic alternative time-line (HATL) was dubbed WHATL, and later my own version of the HATL, both east and west, was dubbed RHATL.

I found more and more that without developing the alternate history I had constantly to make arbitrary and, possibly, implausible assumptions. Clearly to develop an alternative western Hellenic history together with the various alternative Hellenic languages instead of the Romance languages of our timeline would be a work of many years; so in September 2010, I decided to abandon it entirely and declared that:

• RHATL had passed out of all existence, virtual or otherwise.
• Ιωσήφ Πεάνου (Joseph Peanou), Giuseppe Peano's doppelgänger in RHATL had passed away, since the universe in which he existed had passed out of existence.

So the short-lived EAK became TAKE, a purely intellectual exercise to produce an ancient Greek without inflexions, aiming to retain the vocabulary of common Greek of the Classical and early Koine (e.g., -σσ- is used instead of the -ττ- peculiar to Attic, Boiotian & Cretan; λαός is used rather than Attic λεώς etc.) and to produce a language truly without inflexions, thus adopting an isolating syntax. In the past fourteen years there has been almost no interest shown this exercise and I have taken down the pages from this site. Archived versions, however, can be found on the Wayback Machine.

It may be, however, that some Conlangers are 'discovering' the Hellenic languages of WHAT or, indeed, some other HATL; it may even be that Giuseppe Peano has a doppelgänger in one or more of these HATLs. But, if so, all I ask is that ΤΑΚΕ is not associated with any of them.