I am starting my presence here, wishing to discuss the linguistic situation in Greece. I hope you find this story interesting, and I would be greatly interested to know if such phenomena can be found elsewhere.Of course there is a professional, academic linguistic community in Greece, but other than that, there is also some "urban-legendary" movement of, let's say, para-linguistics.
The average Greek is educated to maintain a pride about his ancestry, the seniority of his language and its unique heritage. Well, if you believe that if language has a "value", this value can be measured by several (subjective) facts, like how ancient it is, how many words it has loaned to other languages, how much indigenous or original it is, etc.
There are some nationalists-dash-conspiracy theorists who are by no means professional linguists, but amateur authors, educators or philologists, with a great personal interest (and admiration) for ancient Greek culture and history. So, there is a big body of press (books and magazines) concerning some fringe theories about ancient Greece in general, and Greek language in particular. Now these authors also claim that mainstream historiography and linguistics are a result of antihellenic propaganda.
So if you are a nationalist, you would wish for even more for the Greek language: you want it to be more ancient, more unique, more rich, more influential with bigger heritage to the world community. For them, it's anathema to claim that Greek is descended from another, more ancient language, or to claim that the Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician alphabet. I will explain the reasons later.
Other than official books and magazines, there are also the occasional anonymous chain-mail that can be found also on blogs. These texts might refer to some discovery concerning the history of the Greek language, or an observation that proves some "unique" properties of the Greek language that showcase its value.
Of course these people are not consciously nationalists, at least politically, but I guess most are, or share similar views. However they do believe that Greece is the center of the world, and there is an anti-hellenic zionist conspiracy against them, and they try to reveal the "truth" i.e. the true value of the Greek language, as they see it.
Considering that most Greeks have studied only English, and perhaps a couple of other European languages, with their share of Greek loanwords and cognates, I can assure you that the above can sound quite convincing to an uneducated person. And I want to point out strongly, that these fringe theories and folk beliefs are shared only among conspiracy theorists and the common folk. No serious Greek academics or Greeks versed in linguistics take them seriously. I must also point out that these claims are not politically motivated; when these para-linguists claim that e.g. English language derives from Greek, they don't express any territorial claim against England, other than maintaining some high patriotic sentiment of superiority.
And it is even more interesting to say that the above don't originate only from Greeks. There have been also foreign authors who wrote fringe theories about the Greek language. A German professor (but NOT a linguistics professor) wrote a book pointing out similarities between Polynesian languages and Greek roots, and speculating the routes of ancient Greeks.
Although I find this phenomenon very interesting, it is so fringe, that it isn't taken seriously by professional academics, and therefore nobody bothered to document it. If Wikipedia can be taken as a measure, well, there is no Wikipedia article about it. However there are also some anti-hoax and anti-urban legend Greek blogs that debunk these myths.
I would be very interested to know if there are any such phenomena in other countries.
For example, if you are a Spanish and hear that French voir looks and sounds like ver, what would you think? Would you believe that ancient Spanish went to the French and taught them language?
