|
Indeed Koine Greek is not ancient Greek, and while also being different from modern Greek, it's also different. The main difference being that Koine stems from the attic dialect and modern Greek from the dimotic dialect. To make matters even more complicated, the transition to make dimotic official happened in 1979 and thus there is still a living generation accustomed to read and write Koinè/kathareuousa Greek. This familiarity didn't end overnight and as these things often do they live on in a long tail, see for example Russian influence in many ex-soviet republics which is only waning with the youngest generations, or for example German influence that lasted in northern Croatia way longer than the austro-hungarian domination. That said, linguistics is full of traps. The common person on the street makes all sorts of assumption based on modern facets, often inverting the relationship between Prestige/low-education/provinciality with historical language change, i.e. often assuming that the poor illiterate provincial people are those who talk badly and distort the language, while in reality they often preserve archaic forms in some cases (while innovating in others). An example from contemporary coastal Tuscany in Italy: in the local dialect the word for rabbit is "cunigliolo" while the offician Italian is "coniglio". If you ask a random person from the street they would tell you that "cunigliolo" is not only an uneducated form but actually a silly deformation of the right word and that it's obviously so, because the suffix "-olo" sounds funny (probably because of the influence of the names of the seven dwarves in Italian, brontolo, cucciolo, mammolo, pisolo, ... all designed to sound cute to the ear of a modern italiano speaker). Turns out that the latin word for rabbit is "cuniculus". Now, did I say that linguistics is tricky? Turns out that the "-olo" suffix has been added to other words as well, like "ragnolo" which has no etymological explaination. They could be an innovation to regularize the perceived "funny local way of saying rabbit", perhaps modeled on the 7 dwarves, or not. Perhaps cunigliolo etymology is also wrong and I'm grasping at straws, but I think my main point still holds: don't trust the gut reaction of native speakers for anything other than their living language. |