Greeklish

The portmanteau word Greeklish (also Greek Γκρίκλις Griklis from English Greek, Greek ' and English, English '), the Latin written transcription or transliteration of Greek in the Internet and mobile phone communication is called. The term also includes the associated network jargon, so the linguistic peculiarities of this form of communication. Other names for the Greeklish are engl. Grenglish and ASCII Greek and Greek Latinoellinika ( Λατινοελληνικά, Latino Greek ') and Frangolevandinika ( Φραγκολεβαντίνικα, actually, Frankolevantinisch ', in the sense of, west east ').

Greeklish is commonly used on the Internet in the Greek-speaking communication via email, chat and instant messaging as well as for the SMS traffic with mobile phones.

History

The term Frangolevandinika designated actually the use of the Latin alphabet from the early modern period for the Greek in the Venetian, catholic rule over some parts of Greece. The word frangos ( φράγκος, Frankish ') in Greek is a synonym for, western european ' and in the narrower sense of, Roman Catholic ', as Levante called the Republic of Venice, their possessions in the eastern Mediterranean. This followed a general tendency to use fonts after religious denomination, the Greek and Arabic for the Albanian Orthodox or Islamic faith, depending on the Greek or the Turkish of Karamanlı. Some Greek literature of the early modern period is in Latin manuscripts written before ( as the comedy Fortounatos of Markos Antonios Foskolos, 1655). The Greek written in Latin in the 19th century was referred to as frangochiotika ( φραγκοχιώτικα, frankochiotisch ', after the outgoing of Chios Catholic mission in the Aegean ) or as frangovlachika ( φραγκοβλάχικα, frankowalachisch ', according to the Romance-speaking Vlachs ).

As part of the discussion on a ( never was ) Greek orthography reform by phonetic principles to combat the " scourge of illiteracy " was proposed by the Latin alphabet in 1930 by some authors for the Greek, to avoid confusion with the previously valid ancient Greek orthography, costs in should reduce the literary production and not least manifest symbolic alignment with the Western civilization. It was counter-arguments, which feared a loss of cultural identity of Greek, met with a reference to the successfully completed migration of the Turkish on the Latin alphabet. After the Second World War latinisiertes Greek was sparse, in international telegrams and in banking, allegedly also in the Greek National Weather Service ( Ethniki Meteorologiki Ypiresia, ΕΜΥ ) needed.

With the advent of computers in the private sector in the 1960s, which had only the English 7- bit ASCII font to represent the English, which Greeklish was invented practically new. In the early 1980s, the Internet became more widespread Greeklish to represent the Greek and in the 1990s quickly become very popular. After the end of the century most of the applications supported by the Greek font in the computer area using Unicode, it stopped, however, due to the quick and easy applicability and here largely negligible orthography and developed into a kind of Greek network jargon.

Since the further spread of the Internet Greeklish it was the subject of public debate in Greece. 1996 headlined the typography magazine acro: " Etsi tha grafetai i glossa mas apo ke do bros? " ( " If you write from now on our language so "). In January 2001, the Academy of Athens published an open letter in which the Greek was warned by the Latin alphabet in front of a substitute:

This letter sparked a lively debate in the Greek newspaper landscape from that. Between almost phobic positions against a Latinization of the Greek and opinions that with a positive attitude illuminated the Greeklish to technological progress and sometimes even konstatierten a new language variety of Modern Greek Some combined these greeklish - friendly trend with a general globalization criticism. Some researchers saw in this debate, a throwback to the disputes about the Greek language question, since the arguments against the Greeklish to the katharevousa advocates that it recalled the arguments Dimotiki trailer.

Transcription schemes

For the font used there are no fixed or uniform rules. For the word διεύθυνση ( diefthynsi, address' ) could be detected 23 different transcription forms. The Greek theta ( θ ), the sound [ θ ], which corresponds to the English voiceless th, represents the, were found in a study in 62.9 % of cases by th, in 22.9% by the number 8, in 5, 7% by the zero ( 0), and in 2.9 % Q or q rendered in 5.6 % of cases, other characters were chosen. The Greek Accented characters are not normally transmitted. Through the regular use of certain characters is downright Greeklish styles can develop that for which they used groups act even identity.

Essentially three principles or their combination to play the Greek with Latin characters are used:

• Phonetic transcription: Regardless of the Greek orthography Greek is transcribed by the sounds. These correspond to the vowels a, e, i, o, and u more or less the vowels, as they are denominated in German or in Romance languages ​​, the consonants rather their articulation in English. The mixed transcription by partially phonetic principles is the most commonly used.
• Visual transliteration: Each Greek letter corresponds to a character on the Latin keyboard. The Latin letters (or numerals ) are due to their graphic similarity used with the corresponding Greek letters. Here, a clear retransfer in the Greek writing is possible. Also, for capital letters, there are visual correspondences, such as for the large Pi ( Π ) is a large double T ( TT ) or the numeral 5
• Use of the letters according to the Greek keyboard layout: Here, the letters are entered as you type in Greek on the computer. It is ( in real english keyboard layout ) often acute ( represented by ;). This variant occurs relatively rarely.

For visual transliteration extreme examples are occupied, who want to approach the typeface its Greek appearance as much as possible. So a user used a Transliterationsschema that he ( " the most cautious and best visual standard that I 've ever seen " ), referred to as "to pio prosegmevo kai pou exw dei Omorfo optiko ". It uses the c a character that resembles the variant of the sigma ς in Greek uncials:

Text example

Use

In the 1990s, many private homepages in Greeklish were designed - most HTML editors supported any Greek character set. You are the exception today. Some ISP's in the Greek -speaking world offer templates for e -mail traffic in Greek and Greeklish that they use in addition to English for their own e- mail messages to customers. In the Greek-speaking area of ​​the IRC and instant messaging almost exclusively Greeklish is used today. For longer or more formal texts, it is largely out of use. In the field of business communications, the use of Greeklish is considered inappropriate.

Began around 2004 in the Greek Internet forums, for example, in Translatum and AWNM, a discussion against the use of Greeklish and for the establishment of the Greek as compulsory, administrators threatened occasional users who used Greeklish, with blocking. Main argument against the Greeklish here was the empfunde as ugly typeface, and more difficult to read compared to Greek script. As a counter- argument was that just users must use computers in the Greek diaspora, particularly at universities or Internet cafés that do not support the Greek alphabet. The technical capabilities have improved in recent years, but in the meantime, Greeklish has been established in some circles as " chic ", inter alia because it is faster and enter the Greek orthography can be neglected.

Widely used, such as on a mailing list of www.greece.org, is also the ironic use of English sentences that are only reverse transcribed into Greek and then Greeklish. Example: "this is hard to read" is δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ to Greeklish "dis iz xarnt tou rint " ( "this is hard to read ").

Through the Greek translation of the novel Exegesis by Astro Teller, consisting solely of e- mail messages and was reproduced in the Greek translation in Greeklish, the writing was literary.

Network jargon

Another trend in Greeklish is the emergence of a kind of Greek network jargons with the typical abbreviations and jocular " misspellings " or " false " forms. Examples:

Cypriot variant

In the area of ​​Cypriot Greek, which is not a literary language, there are variants of the Greeklish that reflect the volume status of this Greek dialect. Thus, the Greek sound [ k ʲ ] denominated in Cyprus [ dʒ ], phonetically rendered as j, in transliteration as tzi ( from gr τζι ). Following this, the abbreviation j here for the Greek word for ' and ' ( και in Cypriot pronunciation [ dʒɛ ] ). n is the standard Greek the ( δεν [ ðɛn ], not '), which reads in Cyprus en εν.

Comparable language and forms of writing

Other languages ​​that are written with non- Latin scripts, have developed Internet versions with the letters the Latin alphabet, examples are the "ASCII - ized Arabic ", and various applications in the Internet of Pinyin for Chinese.