I am currently reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
On the left page you see the original ancient text and on the right page you see the rendition (I don’t like the term “translation” in this case) in Modern Greek.
This is a perfect example of how dense in meaning a speech in Ancient Greek could be and how much Greek evolved into a simplified version that has to rely a lot on circumlocution in order to provide the same amount of information. This is not the case just with Greek of course. All languages have been evolving into a more simple, if not simplistic, form that requires a lot more words to successfully communicate the same message.
The interesting thing that I would invite modern Greek speakers to check for themselves is that this difference has not resulted from a critical change in the vocabulary. These here aren’t words which encompassed such a dense meaning and at some point fell out of use, making later stages of Greek having to compensate for its poorer vocabulary with an approximation achieved with long paraphrasing. As a matter of fact, if you check however much you can read from the left page in this photo, you will find that there are hardly any words that are not actively used in the modern Greek vocabulary. The two such examples I find are the words ἡδὺς (=sweet, pleasant) and δύσερις (= contentious), which are truly not used anymore in this form. Yet even when it comes to those, there are derivative words in modern Greek like ηδύποτα (sweet drinks), ηδυπάθεια (passion / desire for sweetness / pleasures). And δύσερις can be easily understood if you realise it comes from the negative δυσ- and ερις (fighting, argument), provided that the lingual education of the average Greek nowadays was not piss poor of course, which it unfortunately is.
So, this means that the reason the modern rendition has to add so many words and so much descriptive context is not a change or degradation of the vocabulary but rather the extreme oversimplification of the grammar and the syntax, which are the main reasons that you see a text full of perfectly understandable words and yet still need a full page of babytalk long explanations to help you understand what you just read.
Someone may argue that this was the natural way languages evolved towards simpler forms and we cannot change the way people communicated and keep communicating. That’s fair. However, I have spoken before about how I see modern linguists in Greece actually STRIVING to further speed up and intensify such changes of oversimplification, sometimes even enforcing them to the speakers! I am in a few greek language groups in social media and I have witnessed this time and again. Linguists and language teachers scolding someone for their text, telling them; "We don't use this type anymore, drop it. This word sounds pretentious, drop it. Stop using this case, just say it with more words. There are simpler ways to say this, what are you trying to prove?" Excuse me now, if the whole philosophy in linguistics is that linguists must only observe and document the changes occuring in the language without intervening in any way, then aren't they violating their own philosophy? It seems to me they understand it in an one-directional way; we don't intervene in the way the language keeps deteriorating becoming simpler but we're absolutely intervening if someone dares use an older, more demanding, more advanced grammatical type or a rare word that is in danger of becoming obsolete. No, let it become obsolete. I am also afraid there are certain ideological beliefs tightly associated with these tactics and they have permeated linguistics so thoroughly that linguists do not even consider questioning or re-examining their fixed stance on the matter, even if this excludes people occuring naturally in the population, who still use more archaic types, whether out of an aesthetic or cultural preference or memory or old age or some local idiomatic footing.
Furthermore, I have written about this before but I still can't help but wonder at the way "translators" (?) modernize the ancient text. Their clear philosophy is "let's try to write this text as differently from the original as possible", which is something I don't even understand when it comes to translating a different language, let alone when it's just writing in Greek but of a different chronological stage. It is not always the case but it is more often than not.
Some examples from the same page: The word ευτράπελος is changed with the word χαριτολόγος (=the pleasant speaker) in the modern rendition which is a good and necessary change because the first word has shifted from having positive to having negative connotations, as it means riduculous rather than "pleasantly funny" nowadays. That's fine.
The next example is about the word βωμολόχος which was also correctly changed in the modern version because the word has now a more narrow meaning. In ancient Greek, it meant someone acting and speaking in a vulgar, dishonourable and obscene way, however in modern it strictly means someone using a lot of foul language. Here the change is not a problem but how the change is applied is. The translator uses the word καραγκιόζης, which comes from the turkish word Karagöz (=black eyes) and is the name of the most famous shadow puppet theater character in Turkey, Greece and the rest of the Balkans, and yeah perhaps he has the type of personality Aristotle would call "βωμολόχος" a good two thousand years back. The problem is that it seems quite surreal and completely out of place to interpret Aristotle from Greek to Greek by using turkish cultural slang of all things, like, hold on a bit, mate! I mean, he could easily use Greek words like γελοίος or φαιδρός (=ludicrous) or χυδαίος (= vulgar) and many more.
Then for some reason the "translator" changes the word αγροίκος (=boorish) with the word χωριάτης, even though the word αγροίκος is also used in modern Greek in the exact same way and almost just as often and as such it is a closer translation of its own self (!) than χωριάτης (=peasant, crude) is lol But no, I really have this feeling that linguists and translators try to create gaps even when there's not any. I really don't get it. Same with the word αηδής (disgusting, very unpleasant) which could be used just like that or at least turned into αηδιαστικός in modern, however the translator went for a kind of distant synonym (αντιπαθητικός / unlikeable) just so he could change the root word. Then he obligatorily changes the word αιδώς (=shame) with the synonym ντροπή, even though αιδώς totally survives and is used in the modern speech as well. I don't understand why there is this need to cut ties even in the smallest of ways, for there definitely is such a need amongst some people, but I haven't figured out yet the ultimate root of this phenomenon.
Before finishing, I would like to acknowledge that to some degree this tendency towards a more descriptive and circumlocutory way of speaking is also cultural, aside from lingual. There is some approachability in writing more and explaining something exhaustingly to your reader. However, this is surely not just a cultural phenomenon. It absolutely is a result of lingual oversimplification that cannot help but go hand in hand with the development of a cultural need for loads of paragraphs in order to compensate for the loss of dense meaning.
