Of course, these cases only allowed Guo Kang to judge that "the Greeks would have problems without Rome." The really serious things are actually yet to come.
As we all know, the alphabetic writing used by Europeans developed correspondingly with the language. And this also brings about a problem: as the accent changes, the words and writing methods are actually changing all the time.
According to Guo Kang's opinion, this is a very normal phenomenon. Not to mention alphabetic characters, even the most stable single seedling, Chinese characters, will continue to develop and change. Only a dead language will stop changing.
This is why, in the end, Latin became the language of scholarship—it was essentially dead, but happened to survive relatively intact. This way, terminology and proper nouns will not become ambiguous due to frequent changes in daily use.
But the Greeks at that time didn't think so.
They are also aware of the various changes taking place in the language, but find it difficult to accept them. Because according to the popular logic at the time, it was obvious that the Greek of the classical era was the authentic Greek. If you want to revive Greece, you must start from the past, abandon the ignorant "vernacular" Greek, and use classical Greek that is more in line with enlightenment and progress.
The biggest problem here is that Western Europeans can arbitrarily praise ancient Greece and Rome and advocate restoration and enlightenment because they have almost no ancient history. Therefore, as long as you make up an idealized "ancient time" at will, you can use the past to inform the present without having to face other people's doubts based on historical facts or bear other side effects.
But for the Greeks, they really had ancient times to test, and this was a big problem...
The upper-class Greek literati at that time quickly defined: Greek vernacular is not normal Greek, because Greek has been contaminated by barbarian languages in the process of development! The decline of the Greek nation is also directly related to this kind of cultural barbarism. Therefore, in order to make Greece great again, these "barbarized" parts must be eliminated and repaired using the rules of classical language.
In fact, they are not the only ones to have this theory, even Guo Kang has seen it before. The difference is that the Greeks actually believed it.
However, the Greek language in classical times and modern times has undergone tremendous changes and cannot be used directly. Therefore, the scholar Colaeus and others (the one who refused to admit that he was a Roman) created a new Greek language. They eliminated a large number of Italian and Turkish words, and where they were missing, they directly created new words using ancient roots. In this way, a new Greek language was created that was neither classical nor modern.
People call it "pure Greek". However, this purity mainly means purification, and I don’t know how to translate it well. Considering that the main purpose is to promote one's orthodox ancient attributes, maybe it can be called "Greek Orthodox"...
But the biggest problem is that this language is man-made after all. The creator was a Greek who was educated in France and lived in Paris most of his life. His works are not for the convenience of users, but to pursue a hypothesis. Even he himself believes that this language can only serve as a transition, allowing people to eventually return to the classical language. Because compared to the classical writing of "classical Chinese", this half-literary and half-white language is more embarrassing.
Many anti-Roman literati of the same period were opposed to this. They believed that this patchwork language was more "Roman" and "Oriental" and more backward than demotic vernacular Greek. As for the reason... maybe there is no need for a reason. Because Rome is gone, everyone can assume that the Roman elements are backward. No one cares about who has Roman elements and whether there is any relationship between these elements. Anyway, it can be discussed in any way.
As for further solutions, the Greeks did not come up with them until the end. This language continued to "transition" until the late twentieth century, when it finally faded out of the ranks of official languages. After more than a hundred years of struggle, everyone has returned to vernacular Greek...
In Guo Kang's view, this is a kind of Wang Mang behavior - everyone is just talking about retro, but you still take it seriously. It is a pity that the history of the Greeks is not rich enough to realize it.
Moreover, it was not long before their theory began to face serious challenges.
Also around 1830, the Austrian historian Valmeyer published a book called "History of the Morea Peninsula in the Middle Ages". Valmeier had always disliked the "pro-Greek" trend that was popular in southern Germany at that time, and believed that this was a completely wrong assumption.
So he analyzed various place names in Greece and found that many names were Slavic words. On this basis, after collecting a series of evidence, Valmeyer concluded that the current Greeks have almost no clear relationship with the Greeks of the classical era, but are the descendants of the Slavs.
According to his own words, "The Greek race has been completely extinct. There is not a drop of classical Greek blood in the veins of Greek Christians today." The spiritual legacy of ancient Greece has long been absorbed by the Romans, Goths, Slavs and Destroyed by waves of conquerors such as the Albanians.
So, a group of Slavs, don’t just sit there and act like ancient Greece. It had nothing to do with it in the first place, but it was just a matter of trying to get someone else's reputation. The revival advocated by the Greeks is completely impossible to realize - it has long been gone, so who can revive it?
This view was gradually falsified in later generations. But at the time, it still had a big impact. This kind of rhetoric did not only affect Greece. Guo Kang also often encountered this argument model in the East.
For the Greeks at that time, Valmeyer's theory was quite fatal.
According to popular sayings in Europe and Greece at the time, the end of ancient Greek history was the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. The Kingdom of Macedonia defeated the Athenian-Theban coalition in this battle and eliminated the Theban Holy Order, the most elite of the Greeks. From then until the revolution of 1821, Greece was ruled by foreigners. This is also the theoretical basis for their request to return to the classical era.
But this gap is really too big...
The Yuan Dynasty was less than a hundred years old, and Zhu Yuanzhang did not deny its legal authority in legal terms, so as to avoid various subsequent problems and theoretical contradictions. It stands to reason that this is the basic quality of a politician. However, the Greeks were eliminated for more than two thousand years in one fell swoop... It would be strange if this didn't cause problems.
Valmeyer's "Greek Pseudo-History" had an influence beyond the theoretical level - because he really made the Greek literati collectively break their defenses.
Although it is not very correct, it directly hits the most problematic part of this nation-building theory: if according to Enlightenment thinking, the classical era and subsequent periods are considered to be separated and opposed, then how can we prove that two thousand years have passed. , why did this modern Greece suddenly appear again?
Therefore, even if the Romans were considered to be foreigners, the Greeks could not ignore this part of their legal narrative.
(End of chapter)
