το άνευ κλίσι Ελληνικό: Introduction

[The external origin of the language] [The internal origin of the language]
[Assumptions made about the Greek of WHAT] [Aims]

The external origin of the language

Το Άνευ Κλίσι Ελληνικό (Greek without inflexions), also now known by the acronym ΤΑΚΕ¹ (formerly known as ΕΑΚ or EAK, as explained below), owes 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) on the Internet. A look at his introduction page will show that Philip has developed the 'modern Greek without inflexions' model. But he also wrote on that page: "[I] came up with some [ideas] of my own as well to create this particular variety of Greek sans inflections. Others are welcome to do the same if they'd like."

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 άνευ κλίσι Ελληνικό is the result or, more strictly, the partial result, as the work is still in progress.

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."

The internal origin of the language

I decided from the start that only classical & early Koine Greek should be used. 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 on Conlang, the following scenario has been assumed.

Alexander, having defeated the Persians and taken over their Empire (including Egypt), survived his illness and, instead of looking eastward and brooding that he wanted more places to conquer, remembered 'Magna Graeca', i.e. all those Greeks living in southern Italy. So turning westward, he brought them firmly under his control which brought him into conflict with the Etruscan further north. He duly conquered them, engulfing a small, little place called Rome in the process.

Having brought the whole of Italy under his control, alarm bells rang in Carthage which at that time controlled the western Mediterranean. An inevitable death or glory struggle for the mastery of the Meditteranean ensued between Carthage and Alexander's Empire. The Greeks won and became masters of Africa north of the Sahara, of southern Gaul and the Iberian Peninsular. Eventually, of course, they brought the whole of Gaul under their command and moved into Britain, before the Empire overreached itself and began to crumble. By that time the peoples of south-western Europe and Italy, as well ,of course, of Greece and parts of north Africa were speaking 'Vulgar Greek' from which eventually different Hellenic languages derived. Greek became the prestige language of western & central Europe as well as of eastern Europe, and the Greek alphabet became the most commonly used alphabet in the world.

At sometime in the early 20th century a certain Ιώσηφος Πεάνου (Josephos* Peanou) decided to revive classical Greek, but without its inflexions, as an international auxiliary language.

Ιώσηφος (Josephos) was his baptismal name, and the form of his name which he used on formal occasions; in his native Italiote he was known as Γιώσειπο ['ʤosipo], but I will use his formal baptismal name in these pages.

Benct Philip Jonsson has dubbed this alternative world the "Western Hellenism Alternate Timeline" or WHAT for short. I shall adopt that acronym in these pages. I have no intention of developing any more detailed alternative history than that which I have outlined above. There would, of course, in WHAT be no Latin and therefore no Romance languages and, what is important for this project, no Latin alphabet. If any other conlangers wish to develop the history of WHAT or 'discover' the modern Hellenic languages of WHAT, please do so. I am concerning myself solely with το άνευ κλίσι Ελληνικό.

Assumptions made about the Greek of WHAT

That itacism did not become universal; that, in fact, in Vulgar Greek eta was pronounced [e:] as its reflexes in the modern Hellenic languages of south-western Europe clearly show.
That upsilon remained [y] in most areas in the Vulgar Greek period.
While there is evidence of monophthongization of the diphthongs ending in iota during the Vulgar Greek period, the dipthongs in upsilon clearly remained, the second element retaining high back rounded sound, until the development of the early Hellenic languages, as their treatment in the different languages shows.
That aspiration of vowels was lost completely in Vulgar Greek (as indeed it was in our world in both Vulgar Latin and Byzantine Greek) and, at the same time, the aspirated plosives became fricatives.
That although there was a tendency for intervocalic voiced plosives to be fricativized, the plosive pronunciation was retained in initial positions throughout the Vulgar Greek period and, indeed, into the Hellenic languages of south-western Europe.
That (just as in our world) the old pitch accent gave way to one of stress on the same syllable as the pitch accent had been. This led to the breakdown of phonemic contrast of long and short vowels.

Aims

To retain the vocabulary of common Greek of the late classical period and early Koine (4th century BCE to 1st century CE). Thus, e.g., -σσ- is used instead of the purely Attic -ττ-, and λαός is used rather than Attic λεώς.
To produce a language truly without inflexions, thus adopting an isolating syntax.

Finally, it should be pointed out that although in WHAT Josephos Peanou proposed this language as an international auxiliary language, I am NOT making a similar proposal in this world!