266 GREEK LANGUAGE IN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD
had made him a barbarian: faftappdpwtuu, wovios &v &> *A
The Turkish conquest could not put an end to these
tendencies in the language. The popular style, which had
already appeared in writers of the period of the Comneni,
came more and more to the fore, and Greek began to be
written in a form closely resembling the common speech
of everyday life. Good examples of this style are the books
of the eighteenth-century geographer Meletius and the
Chronicle of Dorotheus of Monemvasia. By its side the old
classical style, increasingly filled, however, with Turkish
words, continued its course, and after 1821 unfortunately
eclipsed its rival, and the modern purifying language, the
KoBapojaucra, took shape and became the language of the
nation. Its excesses produced the anti-classical movement of
Psychari and Pallis, which has certainly had the result of
moderating the classical excesses of the purists. It would
seem now that Greece has entered upon a fresh period of
'diglossy', by some writers regretted, by others regarded as
the only means by which a writer can have at his command
the whole resources of the language.
The relations of the Byzantine Greeks with neighbouring
peoples naturally made their mark to some extent in the
language. But these contacts were never so intimate as to
have any influence on the morphology and syntax; the
frequent gallicisms in modern phraseology and the quasi-
Turkish syntax of the Asia Minor dialects belong entirely to
the world of post-Byzantine Greek,2 and we are left here with
nothing to discuss but the loanwords.3 Space compels us to
leave aside the few stray words, many for merchandise, from
the Arabian East, and also the mainly rustic words brought in
by Slavs and Roumanians and later by Albanian immigrants.
Nor can we do more than mention the Prankish words
introduced by the Crusaders, notably in Cyprus and the
Peloponnese, where Ramon Muntaner, the Catalan writer,
was able to say that as good French was spoken as in Paris.4
1 Gregorovius, Gesckichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, Bk. I, ch. vii.
2 For mutual influence of Balkan languages see Kr. Sandfeld, Linguistique bal-
kanique (Paris, 1930).
3 Collected in the not very critical book of M. A. Triandaphyllidis, Die Lehn-
worter der mittelgriechischen Vulgarliteratur (Strassburg, 1909).
4 Ch. cclxi: e parlauen axi bell Frances com dins el Paris*