Ancient Sparta had its own way of speaking Greek.
They needed it for all their gruff one-liners.
But history pushed them aside as a common dialect spearheaded by Athens swept
the Greek world.
Yet I'm told there are small pockets in the south of Greece where people still cling to
the old words, the last remnant of the Spartan tongue.
A schoolmaster leads his young students up the hillsides around Leonidio.
Cassette recorders in hand, they're on a self-appointed mission to capture the words of their elders,
who speak a Greek very different from the rest of Greece.
These aging villagers are among the few left who know it.
For him, it used to be a quirky way of speaking at home around the table, but now he sees
in it a lone descendant of Doric crumbling into yet another Greek artifact.
"Doric"?
Yes, the dialect of ancient Sparta.
While Athens forged trade routes, generated culture and spoke Attic, Sparta
was busy speaking Doric.
And grabbing all the barracks upgrades.
They said things like "ha mater", "ha hamera" and of course "Sparta".
But in Athens those ā's changed to ē: "he meter", "he hemera" or, get this, "Sparte".
Sparta's long alphas and military might couldn't stop Attic from growing into THE Greek to
replace all Greeks.
With one compromise.
It wasn't fair to ask everyone to give up all of their own words.
Why not mix the dialects a bit?
So the koinè diálektos "common dialect" was born, the Hellenic world expanded and
Koine could be heard from Turkey to Egypt to Italy and Syria.
If you head down to Sparta today, the Greek there is the same stuff you hear up in "Athina".
Hah, Spartans even ended up with the Athenian pronunciation for their own city!
Nowadays it's, heh, well, it's "Spárti"!
Sparti...
So where did that Doric ā go?
An 80 kilometer drive down a thin, parched road morphs into a twisty mountain passageway
that finally leads you to the schoolmaster's quaint town of Leonidio.
You'll know you've arrived when you spot these blue bilingual signs proudly touting the local
villager Greek on the top and a translation in, ahem, real Greek.
One sign clearly spells out the language's name: "a groussa namou inyi ta tsakonika".
Hah, short and easy, like any good Greek name.
Did you catch it?
Tsa-kó-ni-ka.
Blubluh, if that left you speaking in tongues, call it "Tsakonian".
This might come from the word "Laconic".
Not as in wit but as in Laconia, the region around Sparta!
Coincidence?
Or is there a real ancient connection here?
Well, we already have one way to test their Spartanness: do they preserve that Doric alpha
where Athenians say ēta?
Listening intently to the children's cassettes, one by one the answers turn up.
They say mati.
They say amera.
But it gets better: "the mother" is "a mati", and "the day" is "a amera".
These are a's exactly where Athens gives us "i".
That's enough to raise eyebrows, but there's another rarity.
Ancient Greek "hrynkhos" and "syka" once had an "u" that got fronted to /y/.
Then iotakismós "sounds turning into i" left Greece with rinhos and sika.
But Tsakonian still keeps an old "u": "shukho" for nose, "suka" for figs.
But other words are unexpected if we're hunting for a perfectly-preserved dialect.
Elegant declensions and conjugations that stood the test of time in Modern Greek get
tossed out when we listen to Tsakonian.
The fancy forms of a verb like "grapho" (grapheis, graphei, graphoume, graphete, graphoun) are
reduced to the paltry participle "graphou".
Not very archaic.
Neither is the way they sometimes say their k's.
Fig and figs are "souko" and "souka", but now insert ke "and": fig and figs,
"souko TSAI souka".
This sound change isn't even unique.
Indeed, Hellenic linguists have a term for the extreme form of it: tsitakismos, pronouncing
"ke" and "ki" as "tse" and "tsi".
But then you hear them utter a little v when they say o vanne "the sheep"
and a vannatzia "the ewe".
In Greece, those words are supposed to start with a vowel.
Everyone does it!
Even before the Parthenon was built, they were doing it.
To scholars, the reason for this aberrant v is as clear as it is tantalizing.
Archaic Greek once had a sound "w" written with a digamma, but lost it.
The root wamn- long ago evolved into amn-.
Not here though.
Here, these sheeps and ewes still start with a very archaic consonant now pronounced /v/.
The pieces, the artifacts, the innovations, fit.
This is a descendant of Doric.
But it's not frozen in time.
It's living.
It's productive.
And it's so distinct that linguists classify it as a separate language.
What would it be like if the dialect of the Spartans survived and evolved on its own
until today?
Like "Tsakonika".
In a country where Koine's legacy, standard Greek, reaches even the most nestled towns,
Tsakonian struggles to keep its footing.
I guess, tape recorders and uphill field trips can only do so much.
So while you once thought of Spartans as ancient warriors whose faces and voices lie buried
in the ruins of this town, perhaps, with the help of Hellenic linguistics, you can find
them in the faces and voices of another town, the last remnant of the Spartan tongue.
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