Greek language
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- What is the Greek language?
- Where is Greek primarily spoken?
- How long has the Greek language been around?
- What are some characteristics of the Greek alphabet?
- How has the Greek language influenced other languages?
- What are the main differences between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek?
- Why is the Greek language important in understanding ancient texts and culture?
- How is the Greek language taught in schools today, both in Greece and internationally?
Greek language, Indo-Europeanlanguage spoken primarily inGreece. It has a long and well-documented history—the longest of anyIndo-European language—spanning 34 centuries. There is an Ancient phase, subdivided into aMycenaean period (texts in syllabic script attested from the 14th to the 13th centurybce) andArchaic and Classical periods (beginning with the adoption of the alphabet, from the 8th to the 4th centurybce); a Hellenistic and Roman phase (4th centurybce to 4th centuryce); aByzantine phase (5th to 15th centuryce); and a Modern phase.
Separatetransliteration tables forClassical andModern Greek accompany this article. Some differences in transliteration result from changes in pronunciation of the Greek language; others reflect convention, as for example the χ (chi orkhi), which was transliterated by the Romans asch (because they lacked the letterk in their usual alphabet). In Modern Greek, however, the standard transliteration for χ iskh. Another difference is the representation of β (bēta orvíta); in Classical Greek it is transliterated asb in every instance, and in Modern Greek asv. The pronunciation of Ancient Greekvowels is indicated by the transliteration used by the Romans. Υ (upsilon) was written asy by the Romans, indicating that the sound was not identical to the sound of their letteri. Modern Greek υ (ípsilon) is transliterated asi, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient υ.
General considerations
While it is possible that speakers of Hellenic or pre-Hellenic arrived earlier, there is no linguistic evidence of Hellenic prior to the first half of the 2nd millenniumbce on what is now the Greek peninsula, where the language brought by the relevant people(s) developed into Greek. Later, Greek-speaking people occupied most of the islands of the Aegean and, about 1000bce, the west coast ofAnatolia. With few exceptions that is still the area occupied by the Greek language today. In the second quarter of the 1stmillenniumbce, a vast “colonial” movement took place, resulting in establishments founded by various Greek cities all around the Mediterranean and theBlack Sea, especially in southernItaly and Sicily. This extension of the linguistic area of Greek lasted only a few centuries; in the Roman period, Latin, more or less rapidly, took the place of Greek in most of these ancient colonies. After the conquest of Asia Minor,Syria, andEgypt byAlexander the Great, Greek was the standard language of the rulers in the new urban centres of these countries until the invasions of the Arabs and the Turks. “Colonial” Greek survived longest atByzantium, as the official language of the Eastern Empire.
Relationship of Greek to Indo-European
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Ancient Greek is, next toHittite, the Indo-European language with documents going furthest back into the past. By the time it emerged in the second half of the 2nd millenniumbce, it had alreadyacquired a completely distinct character from the parent Indo-European language. Its linguistic features place it in a central region on thedialect map that can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European; the ancient languages with which it has the most features in common are little-known ones such asPhrygian. In the study of Indo-European dialectology, phonetic data are the most readily available and provide the most information. In this respect the position of Ancient Greek is as follows. The vowels ofa ando quality, both short and long, remain distinct, whereas they are completely or partially confused in Hittite, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic. Greek is the only language that distinguishes by three different qualities (ĕ, ă, ŏ) the secondary short vowels resulting in certain positions from the three laryngeal sounds, *H1, *H2, *H3, of Indo-European. (An asterisk preceding a sound or word indicates that it is not an attested, but a reconstructed,hypothetical form. For a discussion of these laryngeal sounds,seeIndo-European languages.) Greek keeps the distinction between the original voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops of Indo-European (e.g., Indo-European *d becomes Greekd, and Indo-European *dh becomes Greekth), whereas Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic confuse them. (Some linguists, however, assume that Greekth continues Indo-Europeanth and that Greekd goes back to an Indo-European glottalizedstop.) Greek avoids the general shifts of stop consonants that are displayed, independently, by Armenian and Germanic, as well as the change of palatal stops (k, etc.) into affricates (ts, etc.) or spirants (s, etc.) in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Baltic, and Slavic. In these respects Ancient Greek isconservative, as are, generally speaking, the western Indo-European languages (Italic and Celtic). On the other hand, it does showinnovations. One of these, the devoicing of the original voiced aspirated stops, is shared with Italic, although it is realized in different ways (*dh- yields Greekth-, Latinf-, Osco-Umbrianf-), but others are foreign to Italic. The latter include, for example, the weakening of spirants and semivowels at the beginning of words before avowel, the evolution of *s- toh- (pre-Mycenaean), and *y- toh- (contemporary with Mycenaean).
Morphologicalcriteria must, of course, be taken into account in defining the position of a language. It should be noted that there are few grammatical innovations shared by Greek and Italic, apart from the extension to nouns of the pronominal ending of the genitive feminine plural *-āsōm (Greek -āōn; Latin -ārum, Umbrian -aru, Oscan-azum) and of the pronominal ending of the nominative masculine plural *-oi (Greek -oi; Latin -ī). The lastinnovation, however, is not shared with Osco-Umbrian but is found instead in Germanic (in the strong declension of adjectives) and partly in Celtic. The dialectal individuality of Greek is very clearly marked in the organization of the verb, which is without parallel except for an approximation in Indo-Iranian.
Greeksyllabaries
Starting from a foreign script known asLinear A (used in Crete to record a native language known as Minoan), the Greeks devised, toward 1500bce at the latest, a syllabic script to record their own language. Known asLinear B, this script was deciphered in 1952 by the British architectMichael Ventris and the British classicist and linguist John Chadwick. At present more than 100 very short Linear B inscriptions painted on vases have been found in Crete and in continental Greece (e.g., Thebes), where they were imported from Crete. The major source of Linear B inscriptions are some 4,500 unbaked clay tablets found at Knossos (1400–1350bce—this date has been questioned) and at Thebes, Tiryns, Mycenae, Pylos, and Chania (1250–1200bce). There are no literary texts and hardly anycontinuous texts (only a small number of complete sentences exist); the tablets contain accounts of the great Mycenaean palaces and their dependencies, written in the Greek language, in a very concise style.
The Linear Bsyllabary consists of about 90 signs. In principle, each sign represents a syllable beginning with one consonant and ending with a vowel. Thus, there are five different signs forta, te, ti, to, tu, but there is no sign for the consonantt without a following vowel. As an initial syllable may be formed by just a vowel, there are also signs fora, e, i, o, u. The script does not distinguishr andl, unvoiced and voiced consonants (except for /d-/), and nonaspirated and aspirated consonants, so the signpa can be read in Greek aspa, ba, orpha. Final consonants are omitted, and consonants followed by other consonants are either omitted or expressed by means of the sign corresponding to the next vowel (e.g.,pe-ma forsperma, ta-to-mo forstathmos). Consequently, the spellings are oftenambiguous, such aspa-te forpantes andpatēr, pa-si forpansi andphāsi. This inconvenient script and the nature of the documents make Mycenaean inscriptions harder to exploit and less rich in data than the later alphabetic inscriptions, but the information that can be gathered on the state of Greek five centuries beforeHomer, incomplete as it may be, is of capital importance.
Another syllabary, distantly related to Linear B, was in use inCyprus. From the 11th to the 3rd centurybce it was used to record a native language of the island (Eteocypriot) as well as Greek.