|
Greek (, IPA — "Hellenic") has a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest of any single language within the Indo-European family. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, with fragmentary records in Mycenaean dating back to the 15th or 14th century BC, matched only by the Anatolian languages and Vedic Sanskrit. Today, it is spoken by approximately 15 million people in Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Italy, Turkey and emigrant communities around the world. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet (the first to introduce vowels), since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that in Linear B), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly 3000 years.
History This article does not cover the reconstructed history of Greek prior to the use of writing. For more information, see main article on Proto-Greek language. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan Peninsula since the 2nd millennium BC. The earliest evidence of this is found in the Linear B tablets in the "Room of the Chariot Tablets", a LMII-context (c. 1500 BC) region of Knossos, in Crete. The later Greek alphabet is unrelated to Linear B, and is believed to be derived from the Phoenician alphabet (abjad); with minor modifications, it is still used today. Greek is conventionally divided into the following periods: Two main forms of the language have been in use since the end of the medieval Greek period: Dhimotikí (Δημοτική), the Demotic (vernacular) language, and Katharévusa (Καθαρεύουσα), an imitation of classical Greek, which was used for literary, juridic, administrative and scientific purposes during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This diglossia problem was brought to an end in 1976 (act (νόμος) 306/1976), when Dhimotikí was declared the official language of Greece. In the meantime, both forms of Greek had naturally converged and Standard Modern Greek (Κοινή Νεοελληνική — Common Modern Greek), the form of Greek used for all official purposes and in education in Greece today, emerged. It has been claimed that an "educated" speaker of the modern language can understand an ancient text, but this is surely as much a function of education as of the similarity of the languages. Still, Koinē, the version of Greek used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint, is relatively easy to understand for modern speakers. Greek words have been widely borrowed into the European languages: astronomy, democracy, philosophy, thespian, etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as a basis for coinages: anthropology, photography, isomer, biomechanics etc. and form, with Latin words, the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary. See English words of Greek origin, and List of Greek words with English derivatives. Evolution from Ancient to Modern Greek Due to the long history of the Greek language, it is hard to point out specific linguistic differences between distant periods, such as "ancient", and "modern", Greek. For example the pronunciation of Beta, Gamma and Delta is commonly regarded as an important phonetic difference between Ancient and Modern periods; however evidence suggests a fricative pronunciation of Gamma as early as the 4th century BC in Boeotian, Elean, Pamphylian, and possibly even vulgar Attic, and modern pronunciation may be derived from this (this point is debated among scholars). The only way to analyse the evolution of Greek until modern times, is to view the language as a whole. This is done by examining all its four periods, whose chronological boundaries are symbolic. The development from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek has affected phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek Phonology for details), and included: The phonological changes were often not reflected in the orthography. The morphological changes affected both nouns and verbs. Some of the changes to the verbs are parallel to those that affected the Romance languages as they developed from Vulgar Latin — for instance the loss of certain historic tense forms and their replacement by new constructions — but the changes to the nouns have been less far-reaching. Greek has never experienced the wholesale loss of word-endings and noun cases that has for instance made Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian separate languages from Latin. However, the phonological differences between Ancient and Modern Greek (vowel length, stress, pitch, pronunciation, etc.) do somewhat parallel those between Latin and the modern Romance languages. Characteristics Like all Indo-European languages, Greek is highly inflected. Greek grammar has come down through the ages fairly intact, though with some simplifications. For example Modern Greek features two numbers: singular and plural. The useless but sublime dual of Ancient times was abandoned at a very early stage. The instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period, and the dative-locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic. The remaining cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative) remain intact. The three ancient gender noun categories (masculine, feminine and neuter) never fell out of use, while adjectives agree in gender number and case with their respective nouns, as do their articles. Greek verbs are inflected for: A great syntactical reformation took place during Hellenistic times, resulting in late Koine to be already much like Modern Greek. However since Greek syntactical relations are expressed by means of case endings, Greek word order has always been relatively free. In Attic Greek the availability of the definite article and the infinitive and participle clauses permit the construction of very long, complex yet clear sentences. This technique of Attic prose (known as periodic style) is unmatched in other languages. Since Hellenistic times Greek tended to be more periphrastic, but much of the syntactical and expressive power of the language were preserved. Greek is a language distinguished by an extraordinarily rich vocabulary. In respect to the roots of words, ancient Greek vocabulary was essentially of Indo-European origin, but with a significant number of borrowings from the idioms of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of the Proto-Greeks. Words of non-Indo-European origin can be traced into Greek from as early as Mycenaean times; those include a large number of Greek toponyms. The vast majority of Modern Greek vocabulary is directly inherited from ancient Greek, although in certain cases words have changed meanings. Words of foreign origin have entered the language mainly from Latin, Italian and Ottoman Turkish. During all periods of the Greek language, loan words into Greek acquired Greek inflections, leaving thus only a foreign root word. Yet the most distinctive characteristic of the Greek language is its powerful compound-constructing ability. The speaker is able to combine basic or derived terms in order to construct compounds that express in one word what other languages would express in an entire sentence. This linguistic mobility is entirely absent from Latin and its offspring languages, and is at some less flexible degree matched only by Modern German. In the Homeric language, Thetis - the mother of Achilles, is described as "δυσαριστοτόκεια", meaning "she who to her bad fortune gave birth to the best", in pure Modern Greek - "πικρολεβεντομάνα". Very few languages would be able to express such a complex meaning with such ease in one word, an exception to this would Modern German which would produce Unglücksheldenmutter. Greek's constructing capability is being frequently borrowed by modern languages such as French and English in order to produce monolectic compounds, often by using directly Greek words (e.g. biology < biologie < bios + logos, Micromégas < mikros + megas ) or by applying imported Greek rules on foreign words (e.g. Anglo-Saxons < Angles + Saxons). For that reason Greek has always been the language of sciences, and mainly the natural sciences i.e. Physics, Chemistry, biology, geography, medicine etc. It has been romantically stated by scholars that due to this specific flexibility, Greek and German have been the languages of philosophy, and that Plato's ideas had pre-existed in Greek, in the same way that Meister Eckhart's thoughts had in German. Classification Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages which were probably most closely related to it, ancient Macedonian (which may have been a dialect of Greek) and Phrygian, are not well enough documented to permit detailed comparison. Among living languages, Armenian seems to be the most closely related language (see Graeco-Armenian). Geographic distribution Modern Greek is spoken by about 15 million people mainly in Greece and Cyprus. There are also Greek-speaking populations in Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Southern Italy. The language is spoken also in many other countries where Greeks have settled, including Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. Official status Greek is the official language of Greece where it is spoken by about 99.5% of the population. It is also, alongside Turkish, the official language of Cyprus. Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the 20 official languages of the European Union. Greek is officially recognised as a minority language in parts of Italy and Albania. See also General background General Modern Greek Ancient Greek Dictionaries Literature Typography Books Spell checkers | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| |