Ancient Sparta had its own way of speaking
Greek.
They needed it for all their gruff one-liners.
But history pushed them aside as a common
dialect spearheaded by Athens swept
the Greek world.
Yet I'm told there are small pockets in the
south of Greece where people still cling to
the old words, the last remnant of the Spartan
tongue.
A schoolmaster leads his young students up
the hillsides around Leonidio.
Cassette recorders in hand, they're on a self-appointed
mission to capture the words of their elders,
who speak a Greek very different from the
rest of Greece.
These aging villagers are among the few left
who know it.
For him, it used to be a quirky way of speaking
at home around the table, but now he sees
in it a lone descendant of Doric crumbling
into yet another Greek artifact.
"Doric"?
Yes, the dialect of ancient Sparta.
While Athens forged trade routes, generated
culture and spoke Attic, Sparta
was busy speaking Doric.
And grabbing all the barracks upgrades.
They said things like "ha mater", "ha hamera"
and of course "Sparta".
But in Athens those ā's changed to ē: "he
meter", "he hemera" or, get this, "Sparte".
Sparta's long alphas and military might couldn't
stop Attic from growing into THE Greek to
replace all Greeks.
With one compromise.
It wasn't fair to ask everyone to give up
all of their own words.
Why not mix the dialects a bit?
So the koinè diálektos "common dialect"
was born, the Hellenic world expanded and
Koine could be heard from Turkey to Egypt
to Italy and Syria.
If you head down to Sparta today, the Greek
there is the same stuff you hear up in "Athina".
Hah, Spartans even ended up with the Athenian
pronunciation for their own city!
Nowadays it's, heh, well, it's "Spárti"!
Sparti...
So where did that Doric ā go?
An 80 kilometer drive down a thin, parched
road morphs into a twisty mountain passageway
that finally leads you to the schoolmaster's
quaint town of Leonidio.
You'll know you've arrived when you spot these
blue bilingual signs proudly touting the local
villager Greek on the top and a translation
in, ahem, real Greek.
One sign clearly spells out the language's
name: "a groussa namou inyi ta tsakonika".
Hah, short and easy, like any good Greek name.
Did you catch it?
Tsa-kó-ni-ka.
Blubluh, if that left you speaking in tongues,
call it "Tsakonian".
This might come from the word "Laconic".
Not as in wit but as in Laconia, the region
around Sparta!
Coincidence?
Or is there a real ancient connection here?
Well, we already have one way to test their
Spartanness: do they preserve that Doric alpha
where Athenians say ēta?
Listening intently to the children's cassettes,
one by one the answers turn up.
They say mati.
They say amera.
But it gets better: "the mother" is "a mati",
and "the day" is "a amera".
These are a's exactly where Athens gives us
"i".
That's enough to raise eyebrows, but there's
another rarity.
Ancient Greek "hrynkhos" and "syka" once had
an "u" that got fronted to /y/.
Then iotakismós "sounds turning into i" left
Greece with rinhos and sika.
But Tsakonian still keeps an old "u": "shukho"
for nose, "suka" for figs.
But other words are unexpected if we're hunting
for a perfectly-preserved dialect.
Elegant declensions and conjugations that
stood the test of time in Modern Greek get
tossed out when we listen to Tsakonian.
The fancy forms of a verb like "grapho" (grapheis,
graphei, graphoume, graphete, graphoun) are
reduced to the paltry participle "graphou".
Not very archaic.
Neither is the way they sometimes say their
k's.
Fig and figs are "souko" and "souka", but
now insert ke "and": fig and figs,
"souko TSAI souka".
This sound change isn't even unique.
Indeed, Hellenic linguists have a term for
the extreme form of it: tsitakismos, pronouncing
"ke" and "ki" as "tse" and "tsi".
But then you hear them utter a little v when
they say o vanne "the sheep"
and a vannatzia "the ewe".
In Greece, those words are supposed to start
with a vowel.
Everyone does it!
Even before the Parthenon was built, they
were doing it.
To scholars, the reason for this aberrant
v is as clear as it is tantalizing.
Archaic Greek once had a sound "w" written
with a digamma, but lost it.
The root wamn- long ago evolved into amn-.
Not here though.
Here, these sheeps and ewes still start with
a very archaic consonant now pronounced /v/.
The pieces, the artifacts, the innovations,
fit.
This is a descendant of Doric.
But it's not frozen in time.
It's living.
It's productive.
And it's so distinct that linguists classify
it as a separate language.
What would it be like if the dialect of the
Spartans survived and evolved on its own
until today?
Like "Tsakonika".
In a country where Koine's legacy, standard
Greek, reaches even the most nestled towns,
Tsakonian struggles to keep its footing.
I guess, tape recorders and uphill field trips
can only do so much.
So while you once thought of Spartans as ancient
warriors whose faces and voices lie buried
in the ruins of this town, perhaps, with the
help of Hellenic linguistics, you can find
them in the faces and voices of another town,
the last remnant of the Spartan tongue.
Stick around and subscribe for language.
