There is a rumoured signal: Jonathan Brill is the TW liaison, among his other titles, and he makes a point of following all TWs. I have seen speculation (don’t remember where) that if Brill follows you, you are a candidate for the Quill.
Then again, Brill follows me too, and I’m a sans-culotte…
To start with: the default assumption in Greek historical linguistics is that the ancient dialects vanished under the Koine, and that the dialectal diversity of Modern Greek does not owe anything to the dialectal diversity of Ancient Greek.
That means that the null hypothesis is that there was no survival of Ancient Greek dialect; and methodologically, if you can prove a feature of Modern Greek dialect through modern mechanisms, that should be preferred over accounts using ancient dialect. To do so satisfies Occam’s Razor.
Let me take the silliest example I can think of of a proposed Ancient dialectal survival.
… Why yes. Coincidence.
This means that not as much Ancient dialect survives Occam’s Razor as enthusiasts might like.
Tsakonian, by any sensible metric, is indeed a separate language. It also has clear survivals of Doric. But it doesn’t have clear survivals because amateurs like Michael Deffner said so. It has clear survivals because the magisterial neogrammarian Hubert Pernot ended up conceding it has Doric survivals, after three decades of scepticism. And in the process, he dispensed with a lot of faulty claims of dialect.
The only other widely known claims of ancient dialectal survival (as opposed to the odd word here and there—on which see Nikolaos Andriotis. Lexikon der Archaismen in neugriecheschen Dialekten) are:
Since 1453? Hm.
It’s hard to pin this down, because Greek at the time was a whole bunch of dialects, whose pronunciation we don’t have a good handle on historically—but which was likely stable. (There aren’t any surprises in the Renaissance Latin alphabet transcriptions of Cretan for example.) For that matter, Standard Modern Greek did not coalesce until the Modern Greek state was established.
The one area where there has been recent pronunciation change in Standard Modern Greek is in the extent of prenasalisation in the compounds <μπ, ντ, γκ>. There is an isogloss separating dialects which pronounce them as [mb, nd, ŋɡ] (e.g. Cyprus) from those pronouncing them as [b, d, ɡ] (e.g. Crete). Within Standard Greek, the shift has been from the former to the latter, and the shift happens with people who are now in their 50s.
The question adds whether Turkish has had much of an impact on pronunciation. As far as I know, noone’s claimed it or expects it: Turkish settlement in the Balkans does not seem to have been substantial enough to have had much impact. The Greek spoken in Cappadocia would presumably have had substantial phonetic impact from Turkish; but Cappadocian was under immense linguistic pressure from Turkish.
Turkish has somewhat complicated the phonology of Cypriot Greek, but not its phonetics. Cypriot Greek already had geminated stops realised as aspirates: potʰe ‘never’, tʰofis ‘Chris’, and it already realised palatalised /s, x/ as [ʃ]: xiros > ʃiros ‘pig’, skillos > ʃtʃilːos > ʃilːos ‘dog’. Turkish stops and <ş> took on the same pronunciations, they just turned up in places where they would be rare to non-existent in Greek: at the start of words (for stops), and at the end of words (for ʃ): kʰele < Turkish kele ‘head’, paʃ < Turkish baş ‘chief’. The kʰ and ʃ were already in the dialect, just not in those positions before Turkish contact.
(Hence me staring at εξίκκον σου on Facebook, trying to work out what Ancient Greek phrase lurked behind ‘exikkon to thee’ = “it’s not worth the bother”. In fact, this is just /eksikkossu/ (with folk etymology reinterpreting –ossu as the more hellenic –on sou), and [eksikʰosːu] is merely the Turkish eksik olsun “may it be missing”.)
But other than that, no instances of [ɯ] or [ø] (outside of Cappadocia), and no particularly telltale Turkish intonation (outside of Cappadocia). Greek mangles Turkish loanwords to fit its phonetics, and much of the time its morphology; so cacık [dʒadʒɯk] > tzatziki, Karagöz [karagøz] > Karagiozis /karaɡjozis/.
See also Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer, which this is complementary to.
First names in Greece are either (mostly revived) Ancient names, Judaeo-Christian names, or Saints’ names (which end up being either of the first two). There are a few later names (though they are less in vogue now), and some of them can be long, like Triantafyllos ‘Rose’; but as Dimitra says, the names that seem long and complicated are the surnames.
The reason why surnames seem longer is that:
So Papahatzidimitrakopoulos is a comical exaggeration for surname length, but not by much: both Papadimitrakopoulos and Hatzidimitrakopoulos are real surnames.
Clyde Thogmartin is right in his answer that traditionally Judeo-Spanish is written in Hebrew (with the quite icky trigraph <ניי> for [ɲ]). But more to the point, even when it is written in Latin script, people writing it usually make a point of not using Spanish orthography: they are putting distance between their language and Christian Spanish. Thus, per Judaeo-Spanish, writers in Turkey usually spell it like Turkish, while the Israeli Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino spells it phonetically, using <ny> instead of <ñ>. (I would assume Turkish spelling would end up doing the same.)
Something similar occurred with 20th Latin transliteration of Yiddish: it has made a point of not resembling German orthography. (19th century Yiddish text even in Hebrew script, OTOH, was daytshmerish “Germanising”, particularly in retaining double consonants, and bits of that remain in use to this day.)
Exceptionally, Judeo-Spanish texts published in Spain do use Spanish orthography, but that is because they are primarily intended for modern Spanish speakers. There has been a proposal to use 1492 spelling of Spanish for Judeo-Spanish, which would retain <ñ>; but that appears to be marginal.
EDIT: SEE ALSO: Erik Painter’s answer to Why doesn’t Judeo-Spanish use the letter Ñ?
Contra Konstantinos Konstantinides, I’m assuming the expression intended is Ακόμα δεν τον είδαμε, Γιάννη τονε βγάλαμε “We have not seen him yet, (but) we have named him John.” It refers to jumping to conclusions, making premature moves—just as it would be premature to name a baby before it is actually born (in traditional society, with high mortality at childbirth).
Nikolaos Politis’ monumental catalogue of Greek proverbs remains unpublished past epsilon, but this proverb has made it: https://books.google.com.au/book…. Politis gives this interpretation and associates it with a just-so story. My translation:
Of those who anticipate things and foretell future plans, founded on uncertain and indefinite expectations. A fairy tale (related by Mr K.D. Papaioannidou of Sozopol) underlies this saying, belonging to the class of tales told among both our nation and others of foolish women lamenting future disasters for an as yet unborn child. The story is as follows:
There was once a man with two marriageable girls; and one day a matchmaker came and brought a groom for the eldest daughter. The matchmaker sent her to fetch him wine from the barrel. When she put her jug under the barrel, she pondered her wedding, and thought: I will get married, and I will have a child, and call him John. But then it occurred to her that she might die, and she started lamenting; and the wine kept running. After a long time had passed, the youngest daughter came to see what was going on. When she heard what her sister said, she too started lamenting her dear nephew; and the wine kept running. Then the father went down; and when he learned why they were delayed, he shook his head and said: He haven’t seen him yet, we’ve already called him John, and the wine’s running!
The corresponding ancient proverb seems to come from a similar source: the goat has not yet given birth, and the kid is playing on the roof.
Politis then gives a long list of equivalent proverbs in other languages:
No, I hadn’t heard of that English proverb either. But here it is: Better master to Call not. W.C. Hazlitt, comp. 1907. English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases
Ancient Greek used connecting vowels between two stems when forming compounds, unless the second stem started with a vowel (e.g. nost-os ‘homecoming’ + algos ‘pain’ > nost-algia). A vowel was also unnecessary if the first part of the compound was a numeral or preposition, which instead had their own optional vowels: tetr(a)– ‘four’, di(a)– ‘through’, an(a)- ‘on’, etc. So connective vowels really only apply when the first component of a compound is a noun or verb.
(And in the case of –logia, those formants keep their vowels: tetra-logy, dia-logue, ana-logy.)
Verb-initial compounds are rare in Greek, and even rarer in borrowings into English or novel coinages; they can have any of -e-, -o-, or -i- as a connecting vowel. mis-o-gynist ‘hate-women’ has an -o-, but arch-i-tektōn ‘lead builders’ has an -i-.
Almost all Greek compounds borrowed or newly coined in English are noun-initial. The connecting vowel was not always an -o-; however, it was an -o- much more often than not. The original rules are:
So you’re already seeing that most of the time it’s –o-.
–o– got generalised even further, already in antiquity: first declension nouns could use –o– instead of –ā-, and that in fact happens with techn-o-logia < technē. I presume that in modern coinages, the –o– became universal with first declension nouns, by analogy. So the study of stones could be either petr-a-logy or petr-o-logy; the former is what you’d expect from Ancient Greek petr-ā, but the latter is more frequent in English, because we expect –ology in all such compounds. The third declensions with a bare stem do turn up: brachy-cephalic; but they are quite rare.
So most Greek and Greek-inspired compounds beginning with a noun use –o-, unless the second word starts in a vowel.
The reason why this rule of Greek has become a rule of technical English is because Greek formed compounds much more readily than Latin; so when a compound needed to be put together for a technical term, Greek was the language we reached for.
To expand on Kenneth Bakke’s answer: the Jewish Christians who were the original Christian movement appear to have survived into the 5th century. We don’t know that much about them, but we do know that they had their own Gospels (Jewish–Christian gospels). They certainly would not have had any time for the Gospel of John, as the Gospel that most overtly makes a God of Jesus, and they may have been reluctant to take on Matthew or Luke, with their Christology and anti-Jewish sentiment.
That said, of the three known Jewish Christian gospels (as tentatively reconstructed from patristic citations), the Gospel of the Ebionites was a Gospel harmony based on the Synoptic Gospels, written in Greek; and the Gospel of the Nazarenes was based on Matthew and written in Aramaic. (The Gospel of the Hebrews, which explicitly denied the divinity of Jesus and of the crucifixion, and repudiated Paul, appears to have been an original composition in Greek.) That indicates that there was some translating from Greek into Aramaic; it also indicates that many Jewish Christians could read Greek.
Hebrew was by then a liturgical language; if you wanted to reach an audience outside the synagogue, you would use Aramaic or Greek instead of Hebrew anyway.
The right answer to this is Dimitris Almyrantis’, which goes into the motivations and anxieties behind this attitude.
I had passed on answering this, but I’ve just been asked this externally, by a user who pointed out the discrepancy with Chinese and Italian. There are a few linguistic and cultural factors that have made this angry dismissal of reconstructed pronunciation possible.
Greek is in a club of (say) seven “classical” languages, languages with a very longstanding and ongoing literary tradition: Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic. (YMMV.) Of these, some modern speech communities do not assert an overt linguistic continuity the way Greek now does: Hindi is not Sanskrit, and Italian is not Latin. For that matter, Greek did not always assert its continuity as forcefully: Greeks differentiated between old Hellenic and modern Romeic up until the 19th century.
Some modern speech communities do not have classics from the earliest stages of the language that they venerate in the same ways that Greeks (and, critically, Westerners) venerate theirs, and that they claim privileged access to: the Behistun inscription is not a Thing for Persians, the way the Iliad is for Greeks. Persians have also shifted several scripts in the meantime, and Italians use an orthographic writing system that makes the phonological and morphological shifts obvious.
I think laypeople, when told that scholars think older versions of their language were pronounced differently, still react with some surprise, especially when that older version does not match the current prestige version. Biblical Hebrew was certainly closer to Sephardi than Ashkenazi Modern Hebrew; Middle Chinese is much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. And of course the reconstruction of Shakespearian English as Canadian Pirate Talk has taken some members of this site by surprise. So the reaction of Greeks is not without parallel.
What exacerbates it is the feelings of resentment that Dimitris already alluded to, and which I’ll restate aphoristically:
It’s a reaction I can see Indians and possibly Arabs also having. Others won’t have that reaction, because they don’t cling as tightly to the old patrimony; or they don’t feel as put upon from the West; or they are more familiar with internal linguistic diversity (so the notion that the texts originally sounded different won’t come as much of a surprise: I surmise the Chinese would have that reaction).
Currently deactivating because I need to focus on some things and deal with some sleep deprivation, but be active again very soon