Ancient Spartan Dialect Tsakonika Still Alive Despite Ravages of Time greekreporter.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greekreporter.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ancient Spartan Dialect Tsakonika Still Alive Despite Ravages of Time
” width=”1024″>Statue of Leonidas in Greece. Tsakonika, the Spartan dialect, is still alive today. Credit: Dmpexr/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0
Greece, the home of one the oldest civilizations on the globe, is blessed with thousands of priceless monuments. But perhaps no physical structure anywhere is as important than the living monument of a spoken language which originates directly from the ancient world.
One such language still survives today, despite the ravages of time and the many reversals of fortune that Greece has known, in Leonidio–Tsakonika, the language of ancient Sparta, the warrior state which became the byword for an extraordinarily strict and regimented society.
Ancient Spartan Dialect Still Alive Despite Ravages of Time and Fortune greekreporter.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greekreporter.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Angela Dansby 16 December 2020
As you enter the mountainous village of Pera Melana in Greece’s southern Peloponnese peninsula, you’re likely to hear the roar of scooters zooming down narrow roads and the chirps of birds stealing ripe fruit from trees. But if you approach the village’s central cafe, you’ll hear a rather unusual sound. It’s the buzz of conversations among elders in a 3,000-year-old language called Tsakonika.
The speakers are the linguistic descendants of ancient Sparta, the iconic Greek city-state, and part of a rich cultural heritage and population called Tsakonian.
Thomais Kounia, known as the “empress of Tsakonika” for her mastery of the language, tells her friend about the bread she baked that morning, but my Greek translator cannot understand her. Instead, Kounia translates for him in Greek, and he then tells me, like a game of Chinese whispers. I am in awe. These ladies are some of the last fluent speakers of one of the world�