Grekelin
| Grekelin | |
|---|---|
| Γρεκελένικην, Γνύjα Γρεκελένικην | |
| Pronunciation | ['ɣnʊd͡zə ɣr̥ɛkɛ'lɛnikin] |
| Created by | Aggelos Tselios |
| Date | 2023 |
| Native to | Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine |
Early form | |
Standard form | Urlogreckae ('Υρλόγρέκέλινιν')
|
Dialect |
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| Official status | |
Official language in | Csongrád-Csanád |
| Regulated by | Grekelin Language Administration |
Grekelin (autoglossonym: Γνύjα Γρεκελένικην, pronounced: /'ɣnʊd͡zə ɣr̥ɛkɛ'lɛnikin/, 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 28 letters, six 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/) | Ηη (/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.
In addition, the following digraphs are used within the language:
| Digraphs in Grekelin orthography | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ει (When behind a consonant or ο, it makes the /ji/ sound) | Κχ (Makes the /ɟkʰ/ sound) | Γγ (Makes the /ɡ/ sound) | αυ (Makes the /ɔ/ sound) | ζζ (Makes the /ʐ/ sound) | |
Vowels are split into long and short vowels. Longer vowels are always stressed (If they appear twice or more in a word, the first one will be stressed), whereas short vowels may or may not be stressed. One exception is (ι) which can never be stressed. The short vowels are (α, ε, ι, υ and the long vowels are ω and η).
The Grekelin orthography was reformed recently, as part of a larger reform within the conlang. As a result, some texts that preexisted on the internet may not comply with the modern form of the language.
Geographic Distribution and Demographics
Grekelin today has about 16 thousand speakers, spread out all across Central Europe. Out of them, 8.000 lived in Hungary, where a region uses it as an official language, another 2.500 live in Serbia or Greece, and 5.500 live in Slovakia or Ukraine (Carpathia). It forms the majority language in villages of North Banat and some spread out parts of Slovakia and Ukraine. It forms a significant language in Hungary and is also spoken in Greece, primarily from learners. 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 ('), except for longer vowels which have to use a circumflex.
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.
Dialects
Grekelin has two dialects, depending on where each is spoken. These are the Slavic and Urlogrockae dialects.
Slavic
The Slavic ("Διαλέκτα Σλαβήν", "/ðʝa'lɛkti sla'vin/" or "/ðʝa'lekti 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 έςτα' εγύ βλεμινή -> Τάν' έγυ βλεμινή), if the subject can be assumed.
- 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 (Ά κάρκα -> Ά στύλα).
- Preserving the dative case (Είς ά μήρα -> Μηραηδύ) (NOTE: The dative case fixes the stress on the last syllable, which must be an ύ).
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 (Jέρνα).
Urlogrockae
The Urlogrockae ("Υρλoγρέκελην", /urle'ɣrɛkelin/ 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 and mainly to other languages like Hungarian and Greek are:
- Skipping the final vowel in pronounciation, if it's a short one (υ or ι).
- "E" does not use the Proto-Grekelin "/ɛ/" sound but the Urlogrok "/e/".
Example texts
Basic sentence
English
I would like a coffee and biscuits, thank you.
Grekelin
(Γρώ) θήλκο εγύ καφέ κιά κέбισκότη, jόμο.
Lord's prayer
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