Hellenophone

No need to emphasize the fact that the Hellenophone people – metallarii as well as the other inhabitants of mining territories – were both numerous and prominent.

First, the earliest Christians in Africa of whom we have evidence are Punic, and not part of the cultured elite who might have contact with Hellenophone culture.

Butterfield (2009) stresses the dialogic nature of the formation of an English vernacular, which emerged from a Francophone environment that embraced England along with France: again, there are thought-provoking parallels with the Hellenophone environment from which a vernacular Latin literature emerged.

The Orthodox, separated from Rome, are divided into two factions which differ in language and origin, and live in enmity: on one side, the Hellenophones, many of whom are natives of the Greek kingdom; on the other, the Arabophones, subject to the khedive or natives of Syria; all these have a patriarch of Greek tongue and race whose official residence is in the town, near the church of St. Sabas.

A third group of Hellenophones were those Dawkins studied in the twenty Cappadocian villages located about the regions of Nigde and Kayseri.

Thus, faulting Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon for being “interlingua,” “a centaur-idiom” that imposes the vocabulary, syntax, and phonology of ancient Greek on his own Victorian English, George Steiner (the trilingual critic who pointedly titled a 1972 volume of essays on language and literature Extraterritorial) pronounced it “a no-man’s-land in psychological and linguistic space”—hence a text treacherous for both Hellenophones and Anglophones because it occupies a space outside either language.