CRETAN GLOSSARY - MARINOU I. IDOMENEOS

Cretan Glossary 11,300 ENTRANCES 12,000 MANTINADES 120 PROVERBS (VOLUME 3 NEW SUPPLEMENTARY)

The Cretan dialect is one of the most important modern Greek dialects. It has a rich vocabulary, expressive completeness and a long literary tradition. When Crete was in the hands of the Venetians, its dialect was reduced to a written form of modern Greek. At that time, mainly from the 16th century until 1669, the year of the occupation of Crete by the Turks, texts of pan-Hellenic radiation were written in the Cretan dialect, which offered much to the enrichment of modern Greek. Nikolaos Kontosopoulos, former director of the "Editing Center of the Historical Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language of the Academy of Athens", writes: Turks in 1669, there would be no problem of modern Greek bilingualism (purgatory-vernacular), because the spoken language would have prevailed in our written expression based on the Cretan dialect, ie with Cretan nuance in morphology and vocabulary, if not in pension. An opinion rather exaggerated, but which in its depth reveals the great importance of the Cretan dialect ".