Grekelin
| Grekelin | |
|---|---|
| Γρεκελένικιν, Γνύjα Γρεκελένικιν | |
| Pronunciation | ['ɣnʊd͡zə ɣr̥ɛkɛ'lɛniki] |
| Created by | Aggelos Tselios |
| Date | 2023 |
| Native to | Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine |
Early form | |
Standard form | Urlogreckae ('Υρλόγρέκέλινιν')
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Dialect |
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| Official status | |
Official language in | Csongrád-Csanád |
| Regulated by | Grekelin Language Administration |
Grekelin (autoglossonym: Γνύjα Γρεκελένικιν, pronounced: /'ɣnʊd͡zə ɣr̥ɛkɛ'lɛniki/, lit. "The Grekelin language") is a Hellenic language with strong Hungarian influence. It was initially coined as a result of contact between the Greek refugees in Hungary in the 12th-13th century, although the language referring to that era is referred to as Proto-Grekelin and Grekelin itself has diverged too much from it. Today, Grekelin is spoken in a few Hungarian and Serbian villages, with respectively higher influence from Hungarian and Slavic. Grekelin holds some mutual intelligibility with Modern Greek, if the sentence is too simple and intentionally designed to be similar to Greek.
Grekelin is written using the Greek alphabet, although some letters have changed sounds and others have been added or removed.
Etymology
Grekelin comes from the Urlogrok word Groko, which means Greek. The suffix -lin comes from Proto-Grekelin "Ελλήν" which is the ethnonym for the Greeks. Eventually, Groko reverted to the Latin-related "Greko" and, as the tradition has it, the two worlds met to form Grekelin.
Another legend says that Grekelin was a very old Slavic word to describe the Greeks of the Black Sea, during the Kievan Rus times. It appears that the surname Grekelin exists in Ukrainian and Belarusian (Грекелін), while Russian has a more distinct version Грекелов.
From the Grekelin perspective, Γρέκέλίν is split into "Γρέκέλ-" and "-ίν", the latter being used to show that "it derives" from the former. Hence, Grekelin derives from some unknown "Grekel" word. Some studies appear to talk about the Grekely people (perhaps referring to the first Greeks in Hungary?). It also looks like an extremely corrupted form of Szekely, a Hungarian subgroup living in Romania, perhaps during the first split of Grekelin from Greek.
Alphabet and Orthography
The Grekelin alphabet consists of 27 letters, five of which are vowels and 22 are consonants.
| Letters of the Grekelin alphabet | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Αα (/ə/) | Ββ (/v/) | Бб (/b/) | Γγ (/ɣ/) | Δδ (/ð) | Дд (/d/) | Εε (/ɛ/) | Ζζ (/zʲ) | Θθ (/tʰ/) | Ιι (/i/) | Κκ (/k/) | Λλ (/l/) | Μμ (/m/) | Νν (/n/) | Ξξ (/ks/) | Οο (/ɵ/) | Ππ (/p/) | Ρρ (/r̥/) | Σς (/s/) | Ss (/ʂ/) | Jj (/d͡z/) | Ττ (/t/) | Υυ (/ʊ/) | Φφ (/pʰ/) | Χχ (/kʰ/) | Ψψ (/ps/) | Ωω (/ɔː/) |
The letters correspond always to their pronunciation, unless there's a borrow used (eg. είς). The Grekelin orthography is considered a phonetic, as opposed to deep orthographies like French's.
Geographic Distribution and Demographics
Grekelin today has about 1.3 million speakers, spread out all across Central Europe. Out of them, 300.000 lived in Hungary, where a region uses it as an official language, another 400.000 live in Serbia or Greece, and 600.000 are speaking it as a native language across the world. It forms the majority language in North Banat and some spread out parts of Slovakia and Ukraine. It forms a significant language in Hungary and is also spoken in Greece. Generally, its speakers are considered of Greek descent or natives of the land they live in, adopting Grekelin as their language. The populations of Serbia and Slovakia speak the Slavic dialect whereas the Hungarian and Greek populations speak the Standard dialect.
Stress
Grekelin does not have any rules on the stress placement. The stress may go on any position unless the final vowel is doubled, where the stress is automatically passed there. The stress may be indicated with an accute accent ('), unless "ε" has to be stressed, where two accute accents have to be placed.
When a word is an agglutinative one and is too long for a stress to be placed somewhere comfortably, the word may accept up to three stresses. Two syllables may not have more than 1 stress consecutively.
Grammar
Grekelin's grammar is very straightforward and simple, although it will seem strange to new learners of the language:
- Articles can be skipped although some cases may be confusing without it. The only article in the language is "τάν", since Grekelin does not have genders.
- The plural is formed by adding the plural syllable κέ- in the beginning of the word. Eg. μύσι -> κέμύσι
- Grekelin does not make conjugation necessary, if a pronoun precedes the verb. Eg. θίλε -> σίχ θίλο.
- The English article "a" (eg. A block) is used in Grekelin as "έγυ" (Lit. "one").
- Personal pronouns are "Ίχ, σίχ, τίχ | Μύχ, νύχ, βάρ", respectively "I, you, he/she/it | We, you (plural), they"
Dialects
Grekelin has two dialects, depending on where each is spoken. These are the Slavic and Urlogrockae dialects.
Slavic
The Slavic ("Διαλέκτι Σλάβιν", "/ðʝa'lɛkti slavin/" or "/ðʝa'leːkti slaviŋ/") dialect can be distinguished by some certain features that aren't present in Standard Grekelin:
- Feature of Palatalization (phonetics), primarily borrowed from Russian and other Eastern Slavic languages.
- Skipping of the verb "to be" (έςτ') in the present tense (Τάν έςτέ' έγύ βλέμίνι -> Τάν´ έγυ βλέμίνι), if the subject can be assumed.
- Preserving the Greek letter ή which is lost in Standard Grekelin (Ίχ θίλο έγύ καφέ -> Ίχ θήλο έγυ καφέ) especially in the genitive case (Πέγνιί -> Πέγνηή).
- In some more isolated places (South-East Slovakia for example), the Cyrillic alphabet is used altogether.
- The letter "υ" represents the "ɨ" sound instead of the "u" one, when stressed.
- Borrow of Slavic words instead of using Grekelin ones (Τάν κάρκα -> Τάν στύλα).
- Preserving the dative case (Είς τάν μίρα -> Μηραηδύ) (NOTE: The dative case fixes the stress on the last vowel, which must be an ύ).
- Not using multiple stresses for extremely long words.
The Slavic dialect is spoken fluently in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, where it is flourishing as a local language. It is also spoken by a tiny community living in Čierna (Jέ´ρνα).
Urlogrockae
The Urlogrockae ("Υρλεγρέκελιν", /ʉrleː'ɣrɛkeːliŋ/ dialect is the one used as the standard language. It's closer to Hungarian when it comes to phonetics but closer to Greek when it comes to orthography. Key features of this dialect, compared to the Slavic one are:
- Skipping the final vowel in pronounciation, if it's a medium one (υ or ι).
- "Έ" does not use the Proto-Grekelin "/ɛ/" sound but the Urlogrok "/eː/".
- Preserving the contiguous tense (Δίζζόμι κρόνι), which Slavic Grekelin no longer uses. The contiguous tense is formed with the doublement of the first syllable (ρέπλαςίςμι), eg "Κόπιο -> Κόπιπιο" (I did -> I was doing).
- Standardization of the Latin alphabet for use within Hungary. It is mainly used in street labels and not in actual writing.
- Larger effect of agglutination within the language.
Intelligibility with Greek
Grekelin is derived from Medieval Greek, so it retains multiple Greek words, leading to Grekelin and Greek sounding similar. For example, consider the following two sentences, in respectively Medieval Greek and Grekelin:
- Ὁ κύων μου ἐπορεύθη καὶ ἔπιεν ὕδωρ ἐκ τῆς λίμνης τῶν γατῶν.
- Κίνι μοί κορέπατίςω ανά κοίςγω βίζα έξ λίκνιι γατίι.
However, more formal sentences completely lose their intelligibility:
- Ὁι ὑπολογισταὶ σήμερον ἔνδοξον τεμένιον ὄντος εἰς τὸ βίον ἡμῶν παρείσανται.
- Κέκομπιύτερ ίςδιλα έςτε έγυ δίθράστο κομμάτι ζζιβίι μοί.
In this sentence, there are only two words of Greek origin, and only one can be easily distinguished.
Example texts
Basic sentence
English
I would like a coffee and biscuits, thank you.
Grekelin
(Ίχ) θίλο έγυ καφέ ανά κέбισκότι, jόμο.
Greek
(Έγω) Θέλω έναν καφέ καί μπισκότα, ευχαριστώ.
Lord's prayer
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