Polytonic and monotonic: why the accents changed in 1982

The vocabulary is older than the signs. In the Cratylus (399b) Plato can already say that a middle syllable was pronounced with a βαρεῖα instead of an ὀξεῖα, but he is speaking of the voice: pitch, not a mark on the page. The written signs are attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian at Alexandria about 200 BC. That attribution needs care. Probert and Roussou (Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2019) point out that it rests on one short text in two 16th-century Paris manuscripts, whose history is uncertain. Smyth’s grammar (§161) adds that the signs were not regularly used in manuscripts until after AD 600.

The names describe sounds. The ὀξεῖα, “sharp”, marked a raised tone, the βαρεῖα, “heavy”, a low one, and the περισπωμένη combined the two. Liddell–Scott–Jones (LSJ) cites all three as grammatical terms in Dionysius Thrax. The two breathings, δασεῖα and ψιλή, told the reader whether a word began with [h] or without it. Triantafyllidis’ dictionary explains that this [h] had once been written with the letter Η, as in ΗΕΛΙΟΣ, and had stopped being pronounced.

According to Nikos Pantelidis, in the history of Greek on the Greek Language Portal, the musical accent lasted into the first centuries AD and then gave way to the stress accent still used today. With [h] also gone, the system described sounds that no longer existed. Acute and circumflex now marked the same thing, a stressed syllable, and a breathing marked nothing at all. Pupils still had to learn the rules. In the 1982 debate the majority’s rapporteur, Stefanos Tzoumakas, counted five general rules, seven for pronouns and nouns and five for verbs, plus exceptions, and said that statistics put the teaching at about 6,000 hours or more. That is his figure, and we could not trace the statistics behind it.

Not every old-looking term is ancient, either. Triantafyllidis’ dictionary calls the modern word υπογεγραμμένη, the iota subscript, a calque of the Neo-Latin iota subscriptum. The ancient ὑπογεγραμμένη it mentions meant something quite different: paint under the eyes.

The idea was not new in 1982. In 1931 a committee of the Academy of Athens proposed replacing the three accents with one dot and dropping the smooth breathing. In 1939 the grammar committee that included Manolis Triantafyllidis proposed one accent mark and no breathings. Under the Occupation Ioannis Kakridis, a professor at the University of Athens, was punished for his spelling: Greek press accounts report a two-month suspension in 1942, while Nick Nicholas, in an online history of the monotonic, dates his dismissal to 1941. Nicholas also reports that by the 1960s the grave and the breathing on rho had been abandoned, and that in the 1970s much of the press and of book publishing was monotonic in practice. Between 1976 and 1979 three bills for the monotonic were voted down.

On 11 January 1982 the education minister, Lefteris Verivakis, added the monotonic as an amendment to a bill on school entrance exams. New Democracy objected to the surprise and the late hour, though not to the idea in principle, and walked out. The bill passed at 1.20 a.m. on 12 January. It became Law 1228/1982, article 2, and the rules followed in Presidential Decree 297/1982 (Government Gazette A 52, 29 April 1982). The official report also promised savings: type cases with 60 positions instead of over 180, and 40% lower typing and printing costs.

Article 1 of the decree speaks of written Modern Greek (ο γραπτός νεοελληνικός λόγος). Its main rules are short:

• Breathings are not written.
• The accent mark is the ὀξεία.
• Every word of two or more syllables takes it.
• Words of one syllable do not, with exceptions such as ή “or” and the question words πού and πώς.

It applied in education from publication, in new school textbooks from 1982–83 and across the public sector from 1 September 1982. The apostrophe and the diaeresis (διαλυτικά) still exist, because they are not accents.

For a student the conversion is easy in one direction: ἥλιος becomes ήλιος, τῶν becomes των, ὁ ἄνθρωπος becomes ο άνθρωπος. It cannot be reversed without knowing the old rules, because ήλιος no longer tells you about the [h] that gives English helio-. The reform also still has critics. The linguist Evangelos Petrounias attacked its rules as mechanical and called the result “monotonic-atonic”, while insisting that the polytonic had been worse.