About this post: This post refers to when I was affiliated with the University of Graz (2015-2018). At the time, I had a confusing email address with what seemed to be a typo. I wrote this post because it was easier to direct people to it, rather than have to explain the situation over and over. That job, and that email, are now in the past, but I have decided to keep this post visible, since it has some interesting information about Greek diglossia.
If you are reading this post, it is probably because you have noticed that my university email account contains a typo – sort of. It is achillefs.kostoulas@uni-graz.at, which is odd, since my name is Achilleas – sort of. Here’s what happened.
For much of the 1900s, Greece was a diglossic linguistic community. This means that we had two varieties of the language used in parallel, one “high” and one “low”. The high variety, called katharevusa, was reserved exclusively in formal contexts, and it is still used, to some extent, by the Church, the Army, and other conservative enclaves. The low variety (demotic) was generally used in informal situations, and it would not normally appear in written form. One of the most visible differences between the two varieties was the morphological system (i.e., the endings of nouns and verbs), where the katharevusa resembled Ancient Greek forms.
The diglossic situation was formally abolished in the 1980s, when the low variety was given official status, and the government implemented a series of policies aimed at imposing a simpler standard. However, when I was born, the katharevusa variety was still the only acceptable form in the civil service. As a result, my parents registered me as Ἀχιλλεύς, a formal version of the name, which is transliterated as “Achilleus”, and pronounced in Modern Greek as /axilefs/. Family and friends, of course, called me Αχιλλέας, or Achilleas.
This mismatch was never a problem in Greece, where the two variants of the name are generally understood to be interchangeable. It was not a problem when I was in the UK, either, as the prevailing policy is to use the name by which one is commonly known. On the other hand, the powers-that-be in Austria seem to think, not entirely unreasonably, that if I were to go about with two different names, this would create unnecessary confusion. They therefore only accept the name that appears on my passport.
To cut a long story short, the University of Graz would only issue me an email account based on my formal name, in all its archaic glory. So, if you want to send me an email please make sure there is an -f- in achillefs.kostoulas@uni-graz.at. Otherwise, your message will likely disappear in the university servers, and I don’t even think you’ll get a “recipient does not exist” message).
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