Greece, the home of one of the oldest civilizations on the globe, is blessed with thousands of priceless monuments, from the Parthenon, the temple at Sounion, and the site of Delphi, just to name a few. But perhaps no physical structure anywhere is as important as the living monument of a spoken language which originates directly from the ancient world, according to greekreporter.com.
One such language still survives today, despite the ravages of time and the many reversals of fortune that Greece has known, in Leonidio, a living reminder of ancient Sparta, the warrior state which became the byword for an extraordinarily strict and regimented society.
Despite being banished to the hills and mountains 55-100 km (34-62 miles) outside the city-state after it was attacked and conquered by the Visigoths almost 2,400 years ago, the people who spoke the language somehow kept it alive even after their original city lay abandoned for centuries afterward.
Two thousand people in and around Leonidio speak Tsakonika, which is recognized as the oldest living language in a country that is itself one of the oldest continuous civilizations on the face of the planet.
Tsakonika, based on the western Doric dialect of the Hellenic languages, even predates Greek by 3,100 years. Greek is from Ionic and Attic, eastern branches of the same language family.
Differing in pronunciation, and even with some different letters and phonetic symbols, Tsakonika actually resembles Ancient Greek more than the modern Greek spoken nowadays, according to philologists.
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Photo Source: panoramio.com
