My mother, determined and idealistic creature that she was, struggled to bring me up a lady. 'Never make a scene, dear,' was an article of faith. But, she added, there is such a thing as righteous indignation. I like to think I was righteously indignant last week, but hopping mad was probably a more accurate description.
The reason for this was the latest arrogant and lunatic notion of the Troika. Not content with rolling back the concept of the welfare state in several countries, the European Commission (EC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) considered, according to an online article, that it would make good economic sense if the Greek alphabet were scrapped in favour of the Latin one.
Was everything to be connected with the economy? At this thought I foamed at the mouth for days on end.
The article cited Troika mandarins as labelling Modern Greek a 'crazy script' that hampered tourism and trade. These same mandarins somehow estimated that the cost to Greece and Cyprus of maintaining their alphabet was 800 million euros per annum.
Well, the Troika is good at manipulating figures and even producing them out of thin air. But still, so what if the Greek alphabet was a lousy business model?
It was the label of 'crazy script', however, that really infuriated me. More like libel, really, I thought, as a red mist of rage descended. The article stated that the Irish had been persuaded to part with their Gaelic script, presumably another crazy typeface, in the mid 20th century, and had been, the implication was, all the better for it. So a timetable was mooted for the big Greek typescript changeover.
An attack on a culture's language is an efficacious way of destroying the culture itself, and scrapping an alphabet seemed to me to be the thin edge of the wedge. How dare they condemn an alphabet that had been adapted from Phoenician script as early as the eighth century BCE, while English and German writing lagged far behind?
I fretted and fumed some more, recalling Harold Pinter's brief, compelling play Mountain Language, in which a minority language is eradicated. And apparently the reality is that a language dies somewhere every day.
Through the murky mists of time I also remembered Daudet's story 'La Derniere Classe', in which the schoolmaster, after France's defeat by Prussia in 1871, teaches his last lesson in French: the next day the children