Vocabulary of Civilization in Greece: Rule and State

In the early period of the national awakening the development of a strong "linguistic consciousness" in a wide circle of scholars as well as among the general reading public plays an important role in the development of the social and political program and in the creation of national identity. In this project we concentrate on the next step, the creation of the state apparatus in the national state. The goal of this project is first of all to register with the aid of the vocabulary of the press of the period 1843-1864 new terms that were introduced in the systems of thought and language (1843-44 and 1864 new constitutions were adopted). Of most interest for the project are the terms reflecting the restructuring of the society through the state. Most of the Greek dictionaries of the time have a strong normative character and therefore do not register any subtle changes of language usage. For this reason the analysis of daily and weekly newspapers is the best way of collecting a sound basis of material in order to examine the connections between the formation of terms and the extension of vocabulary as well as between linguistic, political and ideological tendencies and their effect upon the political discourse of the time. The final goal of the project is therefore to compile a systematic typology of terms of the Greek language related to the semantic fields of "rule" and "state", and to analyse the semantic fields of "rule" and "state" using linguistic methods. Such a typology should be a fundamental contribution not only to the history of development of the vocabulary of civilization in Greece in the critical period 1843-1864, but also to the comparative cultural history of South-Eastern Europe seen as a history of different conceptions of the same events.