President Clinton mind-melding with Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis after the decision

Athens (UVP): In response to charges that their language has become obsolete, and faced with the pressures of an incomprehensible populace, the Greek Parliament voted yesterday to abandon the use of their three thousand year-old tongue.

"Its greek to me," Prime Minister Costas Simitis said of his former language. "I'll be glad to see it go."

The decision to drop Greek as the national language has been years in the making. Communication within the country had become increasingly difficult over the last few decades, as Greek citizens grew weary of the difficult, unfamiliar pronunciations, and an archaic alphabet that one man called "just plain silly." Over the last few years, millions of Greek citizens, fed up with their difficult tongue, had resorted to communicating through hand and facial gestures. Experts referred to the situation as "a modern day Babel."

After a brief flirtation with Esperanto in the mid 1970's, Greeks finally realized that their language was too old-fashioned, and had to be updated. "We couldn't compete with these hot new languages like Basque and Serbo-Croatian" said Greek Nobel Laureate Sonny Nictakus. "Towards the end, we couldn't remember what half our words meant any more."

When asked what language Greeks would choose to fill the void, Mr. Simitis, temporarily communicating through Dutch Sign Language, said only "we'd like to keep our options open." Language minister Georgios Popadopolos elaborated: "We've had offers from some of the heavy hitters: French, Russian, and English. But there have also been some interesting proposals from smaller tongues, like Inuit, Lappish, and Tagalog." He added: "We want to make sure everyone gets heard."

European insiders have suggested that the Greeks' language difficulties have been responsible for their embarrassing delay in joining the EU. "We've been trying to translate the EU legal documents into Greek for years," said one ambassador who wished to remain anonymous, "but its like trying to do differential equations on an abacus."

University of Athens professor Fassilis Penetratis tried to put a more positive spin on the big change, pointing to the increased academic interest in dead languages. "There's a certain nobility in retired languages," he said at his villa on the island of Crete. "Look at Latin, and Sanskrit. We just didn't feel like we could reach that level of respect for our language until we finally let the thing go." He added: "anyway, nobody's been able to understand each other for seven or eight years now. Something had to be done."

Duke Greek, Greece's ambassador to Ultraville and otherwise known as the "Greek Duke," repeated the sentiment that this decision is long overdue. "So many of our letters had been stolen anyway, like Pi, all those fraternity and sorority ones, and that Prince guy's new name too. We couldn't keep track anymore, so we just gave up." Obviously saddened from the discussion, the Duke paused, and then added: "You know what it was like trying to find a computer keyboard with all those fuckingletters on it?"

With such a unique opportunity to bring themselves up to speed with the rest of the world, Greeks are having a hard time deciding which linguistic route to take. Some of the more radical proposals circulating the country call for Greeks to adopt a computer language, like HTML, or C++ as their native tongue. But one naysayer summed up the potential problems: "Sure, we'd be able to execute major applications off the top of our heads, but how do you say 'I have to take a dump' in JavaScript?" Indeed, the situation Greeks find themselves in has its potential pitfalls.

The mighty Zeus expresses his feelings on the Greek language.

Greece enjoyed a brief period of prosperity in the first half of the first millennium BC, but soon sunk into a several-thousand-year slump. Aside from the occasional pita pocket and gyro, the world hasn't heard much from the Greeks lately. In order to "get things going," the Greek people briefly considered abandoning their country in the early part of this century, before ultimately deciding against it. Officials hit on the language issue as the heart of their problem when they observed happy foreign tourists chatting away in their native tongues. "They seemed so confident, articulate, and self assured" explained Popadopolos. "And here we were walking around speaking Greek to each other. It was embarrassing." He paused for a moment, wiped a tear from his bronzed cheek, and added "Hellas, its time we let it go."