From jbutrica@morgan.ucs.mun.ca Sun Jan  7 09:08:35 2001
Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9])
	by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id JAA48534
	for <classics@lists.u.washington.edu>; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 09:08:34 -0800
Received: from cerberus.ucs.mun.ca (cerberus.ucs.mun.ca [134.153.2.162])
	by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id JAA00691
	for <classics@u.washington.edu>; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 09:08:34 -0800
Received: from [134.153.128.98] (drusus.clas.mun.ca [134.153.128.98])
	by cerberus.ucs.mun.ca (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA29684
	for <classics@u.washington.edu>; Sun, 7 Jan 2001 13:38:31 -0330 (NST)
X-Sender: jbutrica@pop.morgan.ucs.mun.ca
Message-Id: <l03110700b67e12d5a5ae@[134.153.128.98]>
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20010107073529.00a2fa60@idirect.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 13:44:11 +0100
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: James Butrica <jbutrica@morgan.ucs.mun.ca>
Subject: Re: Not in the latest Explorator


>Academicians warn of threat to alphabet
>Forty members of the Athens Academy have issued a declaration warning of
>the threat posed to the Greek alphabet by the increasing use of Western
>characters, and calling on all Greeks to protect their millennia-old
>writing system.
>In a text published yesterday, the group of Academicians deplore what they
>see as a tendency to replace Greek with Western letters.
>"This tendency is particularly evident in texts produced by computers,
>texts shown on television and even in exhortations by foreign radio
>stations," the declaration said. "This effort will deliver a severe blow to
>Greek thought and all aspects of Hellenic culture expressed through texts."
>Signatories include writers Tasos Athanassiadis, Galateia Sarandi and
>Iakovos Kambanellis, archaeologists Spyridon Iakovidis and Vassilios
>Petrakos, former Deputy Foreign Minister Angeliki Laiou and painter
>Panayiotis Tetsis.
>"We cannot accept the disguising of our writing," the text continued, "with
>the replacement of many letters by others that are supposedly phonetically
>similar."

It sounds as though they may be protesting a phenomenon comparable to one
that we sometimes see in English, only with Greek letters as the
interlopers (upper-case sigma often passes for E, for example; Canadian
list-members might remember an album cover from -- I think -- Loreena
McKennet a few years ago that was all in fake Greek characters, and I'm
sure I've seen other examples in advertisements).
It always bothers me when I see it, but because it strikes me as
pretentious and as a kind of insult to the Greek alphabet, not because I
worry about it taking over. And aren't they the same alphabet anyway, at
least in the same sense that Latin and French can be called the same
language?

James Lawrence Peter Butrica
Department of Classics
Memorial University
St. John's, Newfoundland  A1C 5S7
(709) 737-7914


.