Day: April 26, 2016

Positive Politeness vs Negative Politeness.

What say you Wikipedia?

• Negative politeness: Making a request less infringing, such as “If you don’t mind…” or “If it isn’t too much trouble…”; respects a person’s right to act freely. In other words, deference. There is a greater use of indirect speech acts.
• Positive politeness: Seeks to establish a positive relationship between parties; respects a person’s need to be liked and understood. 

Negative politeness, which is the norm in Northern Europe, is all about respecting people’s space—literally and figuratively. Which is why Southern Europeans think they’re a bunch of emotionless drones.

Positive politeness, which is the norm in Southern Europe, is all about eliminating space between people—literally and figuratively. Which is why Northern Europeans think they’re a bunch of obnoxious psychos.

• How much more regular and simple the grammar is, compared to Ancient Greek. Downside: extensive borrowings from Ancient Greek have messed it all up again.
• The bits of Latin, Venetian, Turkish, Slavic, and even Catalan in the vocabulary, that show you how Greek history did not end with Alexander. Downside: a lot of these have been whitewashed.
• The subtle variations in emphasis that come from free word order, that isn’t used just to fit the metre in poetry. Downside: reading a one size fits all word order in journalistic and prosaic Modern Greek.

If you have to ask the question, it’s already doomed. Linguists can only record the language; only the language community can give up on it.

If the  language community wants to hold on to it, linguists can give them tools. But it’s not easy.

EDIT: OP also asks:

Also, why should we teach our childs our mother tongue when we are living abroad (in a country with another language ) and also our first language is not in danger?

Because more languages—even if they aren’t much practical use—are a good in themselves.

It doesn’t look like I’ll get to have kids; if I did, I’d teach them Greek. Because  I’m proud to be Australian, and I’m proud to be Greek. And that’s something I’d want to share with my progeny.

My parents did not speak Greek to me until we moved to Greece. In retrospect, that’s heartbreaking.

No, but several letters have been claimed for him over the years, ranging from early apocrypha:

Letters of Jesus and Abgar

to early chain mail:

Letter from Jesus Christ

(See Himmelsbrief for the genre of “letters from Heaven”)