GREEK LANGUAGE

Indo-European language spoken primarily in Greece. It has a long and well-documented history-the longest of any Indo-European language-spanning 34 centuries from the 14th century BC to the present. The form of Greek that is written and spoken today evolved in four phases: Ancient Greek, Koine, Byzantine Greek, and Modern Greek. The first phase, Ancient Greek, is subdivided into Mycenaean Greek (14th-13th century BC), which is characterized by the use of a syllabic script called Linear B, and Archaic and Classical Greek (8th-4th century BC), which date from the adoption of the alphabet. The revolutionary development of five letters to signify vowel sounds was the principal innovation of the Greek alphabet. The Roman alphabet (used for English) and the Cyrillic alphabet are among the writing systems based on the Greek model. In contrast to the rather uniform Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods consisted of a number of dialects as a result of the Dorian invasions of Greece and later of overseas Greek colonizations. These dialects comprised a West group (including Doric), an Aeolic group, an Ionic-Attic group, and an Arcado-Cypriot group. Much great literature also developed on a dialect basis. For example, the Homeric epics are Asiatic Ionic interspersed with older Aeolic and even Mycenaean elements; the choral lyrics in Greek tragedies are based on Doric, interspersed with elements from Ionic epic and Lesbian poetry; Herodotus and Hippocrates wrote their famous prose in Ionic; and Thucydides and Plato wrote in the Attic (i.e., Athenian) dialect, which was also the language of dialogue in comedy and, interspersed with Doric choral elements, in tragedy. Koine (the common language), also called Hellenistic Greek, was spoken from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD. A fairly uniform variety of spoken Greek, it arose from the establishment of Alexander the Great's empire in the 4th century BC. Its main basis was the Attic dialect, with the incorporation of some Ionic features. Koine unified the formerly fragmented local dialects and simplifed Greek grammar in the course of its expansion throughout the non-Greek-speaking areas of the Hellenized world. But it also had a drawback in the minds of an influential school known as the Atticists: differing as it did from the language of Plato and Demosthenes, Koine was dismissed as "impure" by the Atticists, who urged that the Classical language be used for all writing. Their suggestion was adopted, and thus the written form, known as Byzantine Greek (5th-15th century AD), stayed rooted in the Attic tradition while the spoken language continued to develop. A chasm between the written and spoken languages opened and gradually widened as Koine further evolved. In the Koine and Byzantine phases, copies of the great works of Classical literature managed to survive, recorded not altogether accurately in papyri and in Byzantine manuscripts. Modern Greek dates from the 15th century and is of two kinds. The first includes all the local dialects, which can differ significantly from one another, though not to the point of mutual unintelligibility. The second type is Standard Modern Greek (Greek: Koini Neoelliniki, "Common Modern Greek"), which is the official written and spoken language of Greece. Standard Modern Greek emerged from the convergence of two historical varieties of modern Greek-Demotic, which was spoken in all urban centres and was understood by almost everyone; and Katharevusa, the "pure," archaizing written language used in administration and other areas of public life. In 1976 Demotic was declared the official language of the state, replacing Katharevusa in government documents, newspapers, education, and many works of literature. By this time the two varieties had naturally converged anyway, and Standard Modern Greek can best be characterized as Demotic with Katharevusa features. Greek grammar has come down through the ages fairly intact, though with some simplifications. Ancient Greek, for example, featured three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. Of these, only the singular and plural remain distinct. Apart from the vocative case (the case of address), five cases-nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative, and instrumental- were present in the Mycenaean period. Of these the instrumental disappeared in the Archaic period, its functions being adopted by the dative-locative, and the dative-locative case was lost during Byzantine Greek. The remaining cases-nominative, accusative, and genitive-remain intact, although especially in dialects the genitive tends to give way to the accusative. The three ancient gender categories for nouns-masculine, feminine, and neuter-are still in use; and adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their nouns. As in the older periods, Modern Greek verbs are inflected for mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative-the ancient optative was lost), aspect (perfective, imperfective), voice (active, passive), tense (present, past), and person (first, second, and third, singular and plural). Above all, Greek is a language distinguished by an extraordinarily rich vocabulary and supple syntax. It is still spoken today on the Greek peninsula and the islands of the Aegean, that is, in areas where groups of Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans first established themselves about 1000 BC. Indo-European language spoken primarily in Greece. It has a long and well-documented history-the longest of any Indo-European language-spanning 34 centuries. There is an Ancient phase, subdivided into a Mycenaean period (texts in syllabic script attested from the 14th to the 13th century BC) and Archaic and Classical periods (beginning with the adoption of the alphabet, from the 8th to the 4th century BC); a Hellenistic and Roman phase (4th century BC to 4th century AD); a Byzantine phase (5th to 15th century AD); and a Modern phase. Separate transliteration tables for Classical and Modern Greek accompany this article. Some differences in transliteration result from changes in pronunciation of the Greek language; others reflect convention, as for example the c (chi or khi), which was transliterated by the Romans as ch (because they lacked the letter k in their usual alphabet). In Modern Greek, however, the standard transliteration for c is kh. Another difference is the representation of b (beta or vta); in Classical Greek it is transliterated as b in every instance, and in Modern Greek as v. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek vowels is indicated by the transliteration used by the Romans. U (upsilon) was written as y by the Romans, indicating that the sound was not identical to the sound of their letter i. Modern Greek u (psilon) is transliterated as i, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient u. (See the tableClassical Greek Alphabet and Numeralsand the tableModern Greek Alphabet.) Additional reading General: Leonard R. Palmer, The Greek Language (1980, reissued 1996), provides a historical overview. Ancient Greek Studies of Ancient Greek include Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. by John Chadwick (1973), covering both the writing system and the content of tablets from Knossos, Pylos, and Mycenae, by the authors of the decipherment; L.H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, rev. ed. by A.W. Johnston (1990), a description of all the local varieties of the Greek alphabet, 8th-5th century BC; Carl Darling Buck, The Greek Dialects (1955, reprinted 1973), a summary of the dialectal features of Ancient Greek within the scope of a traditional descriptive grammar; A. Meillet, Aperu d'une histoire de la langue grecque, 8th ed. updated by Olivier Masson (1975), the first and still fundamental endeavour to define the characteristics of Greek in a diachronic perspective; Eduard Schwyzer et al., Griechische Grammatik, 4 vol. in 5 (1934-71), and several later editions of various volumes, a complete description with exhaustive bibliography; Pierre Chantraine, La Formation des noms en grec ancien (1933, reissued 1979), dealing with the history of noun suffixes throughout the history of Greek, and Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, 4 vol. in 5 (1968-80, reissued 4 vol. in 2, 1983-84), an excellent work including Mycenaean data; Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1973-79), and a 3rd ed. (1991- ), wisely selective (but often underrating Mycenaean data); and Michel Lejeune, Phontique historique du mycnien et du grec ancien (1972), a thorough description of sound changes in Mycenaean and in the later Greek dialects. Michel Lejeune Cornelis Jord Ruijgh Koine and Byzantine Greek A scholarly study of Koine Greek may be found in F. Blass and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. and ed. by Robert W. Funk (1961; originally published in German, 9th-10th ed., 1954-59), a classic work. Francis Thomas Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, vol. 1, Phonology (1976), and vol. 2, Morphology (1981), provides a grammatical analysis of the documentary papyri and ostraca from Egypt (30 BC-AD 735) and offers comparison with other periods. Robert Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, 2nd ed. (1983), covers the historical development of later periods, including a convenient summary of the development of Demotic. Modern Greek S.A. Sofroniou, Teach Yourself Modern Greek (1962, reissued as Modern Greek, 1993); and J.T. Pring, A Grammar of Modern Greek on a Phonetic Basis (1950, reissued 1975), are good elementary introductions. D.N. Stavropoulos, Oxford Greek-English Learners Dictionary, ed. by G.N. Stavropoulos (1988, reissued 1992), a dictionary of the spoken language, is accompanied by grammar tables. The structure and use of standard modern Greek are described in Peter Mackridge, The Modern Greek Language (1985), which includes references to earlier works; and Brian D. Joseph and Irene Philippaki-Warburton, Modern Greek (1987), which includes a discussion of certain theoretical issues. Brian Newton, The Generative Interpretation of Dialect: A Study of Modern Greek Phonology (1972), thoroughly describes modern Greek dialects in the framework of generative grammar. Brian E. Newton Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman Modern Greek History and development Modern Greek derives from the Koine via the local varieties that presumably arose during the Byzantine period and is the mother tongue of the inhabitants of Greece and of the Greek population of the island of Cyprus. Before the population exchange in 1923, there were Greek-speaking communities in Turkey (Pontus and Cappadocia). Greek is also the language of the Greek communities outside Greece, as in the United States, Canada, and Australia. There are Greek-speaking enclaves in Calabria (southern Italy) and in Ukraine. Two main varieties of the language may be distinguished: the local dialects, which may differ from one another considerably, and the Standard Modern Greek (Greek: Koini Neoelliniki, "Common Modern Greek"). Local dialects Of the local dialects, Tsakonian, spoken in certain mountain villages in eastern Peloponnese, is quite aberrant and shows evidence of descent from the ancient Doric dialect (e.g., it often has an /a/ sound for the early Greek /a/ that went to /e/ in Attic, later to /i/). The Asia Minor dialects also display archaic features (e.g., Pontic /e/ for ancient /e/ in certain words). It is not certain whether southern Italian Greek represents a survival from ancient times or was reimported there during the Byzantine period. Apart from these peripheral varieties, the modern dialects may be grouped for practical purposes as follows: 1. Peloponnesian, differing but slightly from the dialects of the Ionian isles, forms the basis of standard Demotic. It shows very few specifically local innovations in its phonology, although its verb morphology is less conservative than that of the island dialects. 2. Northern dialects, spoken on the mainland north of Attica, in northern Euboea, and on the islands of the northern Aegean, are characterized by their loss of unstressed /i/ and /u/ and the raising of unstressed /e/ and /o/ sounds to /i/ and /u/. Thus, standard kotpulo 'chicken' becomes kutplu, mine 'he stayed' becomes mni. They also mark certain first and second person plural past tense verb forms with -an (mastan 'we were,' Athenian maste) and use the accusative for indirect object pronouns where the southern dialects have the genitive (na se p 'let me tell you,' standard na su p). 3. Old Athenian was spoken in Athens itself until 1833, when Athens became the capital of the modern state, and on Aegina until early in the 20th century; a few elderly speakers still remain in Megara and in the Kmi district of central Euboea. Its salient feature is the replacement of the Byzantine // sound (from ancient //, /oi/) by /u/ rather than normal /i/; it changes the /k/ sound before the vowels /e/ and /i/ to /ts/ and fails to contract the vowels /i/ and /e/ to a /y/ sound before vowels (ancient syka becomes sutsa 'fig tree,' standard siky). 4. Cretan softens /k/ to a /c/ sound (as in church), /kh/ to // (as in she) before /i/ and /e/, and /y/ to /z/ (as the s in pleasure)-e.g., ce 'and,' ri 'hand,' zros 'old man,' standard ke, khri, yros. 5. The southeastern dialects of Cyprus, Rhodes, Chios, and other islands in the area also soften /k/ to /c/, drop voiced fricative consonants between vowels, and retain the ancient final -n (lin 'oil,' standard ldhi). They also retain the contrast between long and short consonants (fla 'kiss [imperative]' but flla 'leaves'). As is done in Cretan and Old Athenian, they add gh to the suffix -ev- that occurs at the end of many verb stems (dhulvgho 'I work,' standard dhulvo).