From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Greek
Ελληνικά
Ellìniká |
| Spoken in: |
Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Australia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Spain, Armenia, Lebanon, Georgia, Egypt, Jordan, United Kingdom, United States of America, Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, France, and the rest of the Greek diaspora. |
| Total speakers: |
15-22 Million |
| Ranking: |
52 |
| Language family: |
Indo-European
Greek |
| Writing system: |
Greek alphabet |
| Official status |
| Official language in: |
 Greece
 Cyprus
 European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
 Italy[1]
|
| Regulated by: |
no official regulation |
| Language codes |
| ISO 639-1: |
el |
| ISO 639-2: |
gre (B) |
ell (T) |
| ISO 639-3: |
either:
grc – Ancient Greek
ell – Modern Greek |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
Greek (ελληνική γλώσσα IPA: [e̞liniˈkʲi ˈɣlo̞sa] or simply ελληνικά IPA: [e̞liniˈka] — "Hellenic") is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people, mainly in Greece and Cyprus but also by minority and emigrant communities in numerous other countries.
Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that, in Linear B during the 15th-13th centuries BC), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three thousand years.
History
History of the
Greek language
(see also: Greek alphabet) |
Proto-Greek (c. 2000 BC)
|
Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)
|
Ancient Greek (c. 800–300 BC)
Dialects:
Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic,
Doric, Pamphylian; Homeric Greek.
Possibly Macedonian.
|
Koine Greek (c. 300 BC–c. 500)
|
Medieval Greek (c. 500–1453)
|
Modern Greek (from 1453)
Dialects:
Cappadocian, Cretan, Cypriot,
Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa,
Pontic, Tsakonian, Yevanic
|
-
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 written evidence is found in the Linear B tablets in the "Room of the Chariot Tablets", a LMII-context (c. 1400 BC) region of Knossos, in Crete, making Greek one of the world's oldest recorded living languages. Among its fellow Indo-European languages, Greek's date of earliest attestation is matched only by Vedic Sanskrit and the extinct Anatolian languages.
The later Greek alphabet is unrelated to Linear B, and is derived from the Phoenician alphabet (abjad); with minor modifications, it is still used today. Greek is conventionally divided into the following periods:
- Mycenaean Greek: the language of the Mycenaean civilization. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th or 14th century BC onwards.
- Classical Greek (also known as Ancient Greek): In its various dialects was the language of the Archaic and Classical
periods of Greek civilization. It was widely known throughout the Roman
empire. Classical Greek fell into disuse in western Europe in the Middle Ages, but remained officially in use in the Byzantine world, and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to Italy.
- Hellenistic Greek (also known as Koine Greek): The fusion of various ancient Greek dialects with Attic (the dialect of Athens) resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which became a lingua franca across the Mediterranean region. Koine Greek can be initially traced within the armies and conquered territories of Alexander the Great, but after the Hellenistic colonization of the known world, it was spoken from Egypt to the fringes of India. After the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial diglossy of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, as the Apostles used it to preach in Greece and the Greek-speaking world. It is also known as the Alexandrian dialect, Post-Classical Greek or even New Testament Greek (after its most famous work of literature).
- Medieval Greek: The continuation of Hellenistic Greek during medieval Greek history as the official and vernacular language of the Byzantine Empire, and continued to be used until, and after the fall of that Empire in the 15th century. Also known as Byzantine Greek.
- Modern Greek: Stemming independently from Koine Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the late Byzantine period (as early as 11th century).
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,
meaning "purified"), 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
Characteristics
Like most 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 dual number 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. Four cases, nominative, genitive, accusative and vocative, remain in Modern Greek. 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 have synthetic inflectional forms for:
- mood
— Ancient Greek: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative;
Modern Greek: indicative and imperative (other modal functions are
expressed by periphrastic constructions)
- number — singular, plural (archaic Greek also had a dual)
- voice — Ancient Greek: active, middle, and passive; Modern Greek: active and medio-passive
- tense — Ancient Greek: present, past, future; Modern Greek: past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
- person — first, second, third
- aspect — Ancient Greek: imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist), perfect (sometimes also called perfective, see note about terminology); Modern Greek: perfective and imperfective
Ancient had several infinitives; in Modern, the infinitive of verbs has been replaced by a periphrastic subjunctive.[2] Ancient had a complex participial system; Modern has a simpler one.
A great syntactical
reformation took place during Hellenistic times, with the result that
late Koine is 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 participial clauses
permits the construction of very long, complex yet clear sentences.
This technique of Attic prose (known as periodic style) is unmatched in
other European languages. Since Hellenistic times Greek has tended to
be more periphrastic, but much of the syntactical and expressive power
of the language has been 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 Proto-Greeks. Words of non-Indo-European origin can be
traced into Greek from as early as Mycenaean times; they 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 older periods of the Greek language, loan words into Greek
acquired Greek inflections, leaving thus only a foreign root word.
Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected.
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 new, yet perfectly understandable compounds that express
in one word what other languages would express in an entire clause, or
even an entire sentence. This linguistic mobility is largely absent
from Latin and its offspring languages. In the Homeric language, Thetis — the mother of Achilles, is described as "δυσαριστοτόκεια", dysaristotokeia, meaning "she, who to her own bad fortune, gave birth to the best", in pure Modern Greek — "πικρολεβεντομάνα", pikroleventomana. Some languages are able to express such a complex meaning naturally in one word, others have different mechanisms (see polysynthetic languages
for extreme examples). Compound constructional capability, as is found
in Greek, is frequently imitated by modern languages such as French and English
in order to produce monolectic compounds; this is often done by
actu
Classical
from 
