Greek (ελληνικά, IPA: [eliniˈka] or ελληνική γλώσσα, IPA: [eliniˈci ˈɣlosa]), an independent branch of the Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Southern Asia, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age, in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean family of languages, is the language of the Greeks The Greeks , also known as Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighbouring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world. Native to the southern Balkans The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains, which run through the centre of Bulgaria into eastern Serbia. The region has a combined area of 550,000 km2 (212,000 sq mi) and a population of 55 million people.[citation needed], it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records.^[9] In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature This period of Greek literature stretches from Homer until the 4th century BC and the rise of Alexander the Great. Alfred North Whitehead once claimed that all of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. To suggest that all of Western literature is no more than a footnote to the writings of ancient Greece is an exaggeration, but it is nevertheless and the New Testament The New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christian Bible, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament. Unlike the Old Testament, the contents of the New Testament deal explicitly with Christianity, although both the Old and New Testament are regarded, together, as Sacred Scripture. The New Testament of the Christian Bible. It has been spoken as the major language of the Ancient Classical World, and it then became the official language of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire as it existed during the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople, and ruled by the Byzantine emperors, direct successors to the ancient Roman emperors. It was called the Roman Empire and also Romania (Greek: Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía) by its inhabitants and neighbours. As the distinction. In its modern form, it is the official language of Greece Greece (English: /ˈɡriːs/ ; Greek: Ελλάδα, Elláda, IPA: [eˈlaða] ( listen); Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, Hellás, IPA: [helːás]), also known as Hellas and officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía, IPA: [eliniˈci ðimokraˈtia]), is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on and Cyprus Cyprus (pronounced /ˈsaɪprəs/ ; Greek: Κύπρος, Kýpros, IPA: [ˈcipros]; Turkish: Kıbrıs), officially the Republic of Cyprus (Greek: Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία, Kypriakī́ Dīmokratía, IPA: [cipriaˈci ðimokraˈtia]; Turkish: Kıbrıs Cumhuriyeti) is an Eurasian island country in the Eastern Mediterranean, south of Turkey and one of the 23 official languages of the European Union The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 member states which are located primarily in Europe. Committed to regional integration, the EU was established by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993 upon the foundations of the European Communities. With over 500 million citizens, the EU combined generated an estimated 28% share (US$ 16.5. Spoken by approximately 13 million people inside Greece,^[1] including minority and emigrant communities The Greek diaspora is a term used to refer to the communities of Greek people living outside the traditional Greek homelands, but more commonly in southeast Europe and Asia Minor. Members of the diaspora can be identified as those who themselves, or whose ancestors, migrated from the Greek homelands worldwide in numerous parts of the world, its written form uses the Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent. Many modern languages, such as the English language, have adopted words from Greek. The English language has over 50,000 words in its lexicon which are derived from the Greek language, especially in the arts of the Sciences, Medicine, and other fields of studies and literature.

History

Greek has been spoken in the Balkan Peninsula The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains, which run through the centre of Bulgaria into eastern Serbia. The region has a combined area of 550,000 km2 (212,000 sq mi) and a population of 55 million people.[citation needed] since around the late 3rd millennium BC It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The civilization of Ancient Egypt rises to a peak with the Old Kingdom. World population is estimated to have. The earliest written evidence is found in the Linear B Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Most of the tablets inscribed in Linear B were found in Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae. The succeeding period, known as clay tablets From the 4th millennium BCE in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite civilizations of the Mesopotamia region, cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed. Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water in the "Room of the Chariot Tablets", an LMIII A Sir Arthur Evans developed a relative dating scheme of Minoan chronology based on the excavations initiated and managed by him at the site of the ancient city of Knossos. He called the civilization that he discovered there Minoan. The same scheme was later applied to the Greek mainland and the Cyclades Islands to form a general plan for dating-context (c. 1400 BC) region of Knossos Knossos , also known as Labyrinth, or Knossos Palace, is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and probably the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and culture. The palace appears as a maze of workrooms, living spaces, and store rooms close to a central square. Detailed images of Cretan life in the late Bronze, in Crete Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea at 8,336 km2 (3,219 sq mi). Crete is one of the 13 peripheries of Greece and covers the same area as the Greek region of Crete from before the 1987 administrative reform. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage, making Greek one of the world's oldest recorded This is a list of languages by first written accounts which consists of the approximate dates for the first written accounts that are known for various languages living languages A modern language is any human language that is currently in use. The term is used in a language education context to distinguish between languages which are used for day-to-day communication (such as French and German), and classical languages (also called "dead languages") such as Latin, Attic Greek, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese,. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.

The later Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent (unrelated to Linear B) is derived from the Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It has been classified as an abjad because it records only (abjad An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T. Daniels to replace the common terms consonantary or consonantal alphabet or syllabary to refer to the family of scripts called West Semitic. In popular usage, abjads); with minor modifications, it is still used today. The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods:

• Proto-Greek The Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects , and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek. Most scholars would include the fragmentary ancient Macedonian language, either as descended from an earlier "Proto-Hellenic" language, or by: the assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek which is not recorded. Proto-Greek speakers possibly entered the Greek peninsula Greece (English: /ˈɡriːs/ ; Greek: Ελλάδα, Elláda, IPA: [eˈlaða] ( listen); Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, Hellás, IPA: [helːás]), also known as Hellas and officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Ellīnikī́ Dīmokratía, IPA: [eliniˈci ðimokraˈtia]), is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on in the early 2nd millennium BC Its first half is dominated by the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Babylonia. The alphabet develops. Indo-Iranian migration onto the Iranian plateau and onto the Indian subcontinent propagates the use of the chariot. Chariot warfare and population movements lead to violent changes at the center of the millennium, and a new order emerges with Greek. Since then, Greek has been spoken uninterruptedly in Greece.
• Mycenaean Greek Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 12th centuries BC, before the hypothesised Dorian invasion which was often cited as the terminus post quem for the coming of the Greek language to Greece. The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first: the language of the Mycenaean civilization Mycenaean Greece is a cultural period of Ancient Greece taking its name from the archaeological site of Mycenae in northeastern Argolis, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites. The last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, it is the historical setting of much ancient Greek. It is recorded in the Linear B Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Most of the tablets inscribed in Linear B were found in Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae. The succeeding period, known as script on tablets dating from the 15th Categories: 2nd millennium BC | 15th century BC | Centuries or 14th century BC Categories: 2nd millennium BC | 14th century BC | Centuries onwards.
• Ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (&: in its various dialects Ancient Greek, in classical antiquity before the development of the Koiné as the lingua franca of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Likewise, Modern Greek is divided into several dialects, most of them deriving from the Koiné was the language of the Archaic The archaic period in Greece is a period of Ancient Greek history. The term originated in the 18th century and has been standard since. This term arose from the study of Greek art, where it refers to styles mainly of surface decoration and sculpture, falling in time between Geometric Art and the art of Classical Greece. In the sense that it and Classical Classical Greece was a culture that was highly advanced and which heavily influenced the cultures of Ancient Rome and still has an enduring effect on European civilization. Much of modern politics, artistic thought, scientific thought, literature, and philosophy derives from this ancient society. In the context of the art, architecture, and periods of the ancient Greek civilization Ancient Greece is the civilization belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. At the center of this time period is Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC, at first under Athenian. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire The Roman Empire was the post-Republican phase of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean. The term is used to describe the Roman state during and after the time of the first emperor, Augustus. Ancient Greek fell into disuse in western Europe in the Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" (medium aevum) was coined in, but remained officially in use in the Byzantine The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire as it existed during the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople, and ruled by the Byzantine emperors, direct successors to the ancient Roman emperors. It was called the Roman Empire and also Romania (Greek: Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía) by its inhabitants and neighbours. As the distinction world, and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople The Fall of Constantinople was the capture of the capital of the Byzantine Empire which occurred after a siege laid by the Ottoman Empire, under the command of Sultan Mehmed II. The siege lasted from Thursday, 5 April 1453 until Tuesday, 29 May 1453 , when the city was conquered by the Ottomans. Constantinople was defended by the army of Emperor and Greek The Greeks , also known as Hellenes, are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighbouring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world migration to the areas of Italy Italy (pronounced /ˈɪtəli/ ; Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a country located partly on the European Continent and partly on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine.
• Koine Greek Koine Greek is the popular form of Greek which emerged in post-Classical antiquity (c.300 BC – AD 300). Other names are Alexandrian, Hellenistic, Patristic, Common, Biblical or New Testament Greek. Original names were koine, Hellenic, Alexandrian and Macedonian (Macedonic); all on the contrast to Attic dialect. Koine was the first common supra-: The fusion of various ancient Greek dialects with Attic Attic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek". It is sometimes included in Ionic, the dialect of Athens The city of Athens during the classical period of Ancient Greece was a notable polis (city-state) of Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Athenian democracy was established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Hippias. This system remained remarkably stable,, resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which became a lingua franca A lingua franca is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons' mother tongues across Eastern Mediterranean The Eastern Mediterranean is a term that denotes the lands or states geographically in the eastern, to the east of, or around the east of the Mediterranean Sea, or with cultural affinities to this region. The Eastern Mediterranean includes Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. This region is also known as the Levant or Fertile and Near East The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for archeologists and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other. The term originally applied to the Balkan states in Eastern Europe, but now generally describes the countries of Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea. 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, as it was the original language the New Testament was written in.
• Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek: the continuation of Koine Greek during Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Medieval Greek is a cover term for a whole continuum of different speech and writing styles, ranging from vernacular continuations of spoken Koine that were already approaching Modern Greek in many respects, to highly learned forms imitating classical Attic. Much of the written Greek that was used as the official language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine.
• Modern Greek: Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period, as early as 11th century. It is the language used by modern Greeks and apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it.

The tradition of diglossia, the simultaneous existence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of Greek, was renewed in the modern era in the form of a polarization between two competing varieties: Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa, meaning 'purified', an imitation of classical Greek, which was developed in the early 19th century and used for literary, juridic, administrative and scientific purposes in the newly formed modern Greek state. The diglossia problem was brought to an end in 1976 (Law 306/1976), when Dimotikí was declared the official language of Greece and it is still in use for all official purposes and in education, having incorporated features of Katharevousa and giving birth to Standard Greek.

Historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, there has been no time in its history since classical antiquity where its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition was interrupted to such an extent that one can easily speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language.^[10] It is also often estimated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, "Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than twelfth-century Middle English is to modern spoken English."^[11] Ancient Greek texts, especially from Biblical Koine onwards, are thus relatively easy to understand for educated modern speakers. The perception of historical unity is also strengthened by the fact that Greek has not split up into a group of separate national daughter languages, as happened with Latin.

Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English: mathematics, astronomy, democracy, philosophy, thespian, athletics, theater, rhetoric etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as a basis for coinages: anthropology, photography, isomer, biomechanics, cinema, physics etc. and form, with Latin words, the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary, e.g. all words ending with "-logy" ("discourse"). An estimated 12% of the English vocabulary has Greek origin, while numerous Greek words have English derivatives.^[12]

Geographic distribution

Greek is spoken by about 13.1 million people,^[1] mainly in Greece and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. There are traditional Greek-speaking settlements in the neighbouring countries of Albania, the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as in several countries in the Black Sea area such as Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and around the Mediterranean Sea, Southern Italy, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon and ancient coastal towns along the Levant. The language is also spoken by Greek emigrant communities in many countries in Western Europe, especially the United Kingdom and Germany, in Canada and the United States, Australia, as well as in Argentina, Brazil and others.^{[citation needed]}

Official status

Greek is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population.^[13] It is also, nominally alongside Turkish, the official language of Cyprus, though Turkish has seen limited official use by the Republic of Cyprus since the Turkish invasion of 1974.^[4] Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 23 official languages.^[5] Furthermore, Greek is officially recognized as a minority language in parts of Italy and Albania,^[6] as well as in Armenia and Ukraine.^[7]

Characteristics of the language across its history

The phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodisations, relatively arbitrary, especially since at all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.

Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets, but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels, and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details), and included:

• replacement of the pitch accent with a stress accent
• simplification of the system of vowels and diphthongs: loss of vowel length distinction, monophthongization of most diphthongs, and several steps in a chain shift of vowels towards /i/ (iotacism)
• development of the voiceless aspirated stop consonants /pʰ/ and /tʰ/ to the voiceless fricatives /f/ and /θ/, respectively; the similar development of /kʰ/ to /x/ may have taken place later (these phonological changes are not reflected in the orthography: both the earlier and later phonemes are written with φ, θ, and χ)
• possibly development of the voiced stop consonants /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ to their voiced fricative counterparts /β/ (later /v/), /ð/, /ɣ/

In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes, a limited but productive system of compounding^[14], as well a rich inflectional system. While its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in the nominal and verbal systems. The major change in nominal morphology was the loss of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive); in the verb, the major change was the loss of the infinitive, with a concomitant rise in new periphrastic forms.

Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual, and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language).^[15] Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all these distinctions but person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun.

The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history, though with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for:

• mood — Ancient Greek: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative; Modern Greek: indicative, subjunctive^[16], and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
• number — singular, plural (archaic Greek also had a dual number, although it was of rare use)
• 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, second person formal form
• aspect — Ancient Greek: imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist), perfect (sometimes also called perfective, see note about terminology); Modern Greek: perfective and imperfective

Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow the noun they modify, relative pronouns are clause-initial. But the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language. Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, while the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (instead having a raft of new periphrastic constructions) and uses participles more restrictedly. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, while neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO.

Greek is a language distinguished by an extensive vocabulary. The majority of the vocabulary of ancient Greek was inherited, but it does include a number of borrowings from the languages 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, Venetian and 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.

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 some linguistic scholars suggest is a dialect of Greek itself) and Phrygian, are not well enough documented to permit detailed comparison. Among living languages Greek seems to be most closely related to Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).

Writing system

Linear B was the first script used to write Mycenaean Greek. Attested as early as the late 15th century BC, it is the earliest known form of Greek (its precursor, Linear A, has not been deciphered to this day). It is basically a syllabary, that was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s. Another similar system used to write the Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet.

Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the phonemic Phoenician alphabet, albeit with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit a faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC.

The modern Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with a capital (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position:

In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs: three different accent marks (acute, grave and circumflex), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks (rough and smooth breathing), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis, used to mark full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting had seen a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it had only been retained in typography.

In the writing reform of 1982, the use of most of them was abolished from official use in Greece^{[citation needed]}. Since then, Modern Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system), is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek.

Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin alphabet in the past, especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics (and called Fragolevantinika or Fragochiotika)^{[citation needed]}, and more recently is often written in the Latin alphabet in online communications (called Greeklish).^[17]

See also

• Varieties of Modern Greek

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} "Greek language". SIL International. 2009. http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=ell.
2. ^ "Languages by number of speakers". SIL International. 2009. http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size.
3. ^ ""Enthologue report for language code: ell". http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ell.
4. ^ ^{a b} "The Constitution of Cyprus, App. D., Part 1, Art. 3". http://www.cyprus.gov.cy/portal/portal.nsf/0/302578ad62e1ea3ac2256fd5003b61d4?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=3&Click=. states that The official languages of the Republic are Greek and Turkish. However, the official status of Turkish is only nominal in the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus; in practice, outside Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus, Turkish is little used; see A. Arvaniti (2006): Erasure as a a means of maintaining diglossia in Cyprus, San Diego Linguistics Papers 2: 25-38. Page 27.
5. ^ ^{a b} "EEC Council: Regulation No 1 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community". Council of Europe. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31958R0001:EN:NOT.
6. ^ ^{a b c} "Greek". Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/grk.htm. Retrieved 2008-12-08.
7. ^ ^{a b c d} "List of declarations made with respect to treaty No. 148". Council of Europe. http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ListeDeclarations.asp?NT=148&CM=8&DF=23/01/05&CL=ENG&VL=1. Retrieved 2008-12-08.
8. ^ "An interview with Aziz Tamoyan, National Union of Yezidi". groong.usc.edu. http://groong.usc.edu/orig/ok-20040916.html. Retrieved 2008-12-08.
9. ^ "Greek language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/244595/Greek-language. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
10. ^ Browning, Robert. Medieval and Modern Greek. Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0521299780
11. ^ Margaret Alexiou (1982): Diglossia in Greece. In: William Haas (1982): Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Manchester University Press ND. ISBN 0389202916, 9780389202912
12. ^ "Greek language". Columbia Encyclopedia. Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/65/gr/Greeklan.html. Retrieved 2008-12-08.
13. ^ "Greece". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gr.html. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
14. ^ Angeliki Ralli, Μορφολογία [Morphology], Ekdoseis Pataki: Athens, 2001, pp. 164-203
15. ^ The four cases that are found in all stages of Greek are the nominative, genitive, accusative, and vocative. The dative/locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic period, and the instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period.
16. ^ There is no particular morphological form that can be identified as 'subjunctive' in the modern language, but this term is sometimes encountered in descriptions, though the most complete modern grammar (Holton et al. 1997) does not use it, calling certain traditionally 'subjunctive' forms 'dependent', and for this reason most Greek linguists advocate abandoning the traditional terminology (Anna Roussou and Tasos Tsangalidis 2009, in Meletes gia tin Elliniki Glossa, Thessaloniki, Anastasia Giannakidou 2009 "Temporal semantics and polarity: The dependency of the subjunctive revisited", Lingua); see Modern Greek grammar for explication.
17. ^ Jannis Androutsopoulos, "'Greeklish': Transliteration practice and discourse in a setting of computer-mediated digraphia" in Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present online preprint

Sources

• W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca - a guide to the pronunciation of classical Greek. Cambridge University Press, 1968-74. ISBN 0-521-20626-X
• Robert Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition 1983, ISBN 0-521-29978-0. An excellent and concise historical account of the development of modern Greek from the ancient language.
• Crosby and Schaeffer, An Introduction to Greek, Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 1928. A school grammar of ancient Greek
• Dionysius of Thrace, "Art of Grammar", "Τέχνη γραμματική", c.100 BC
• David Holton, Peter Mackridge, and Irene Philippaki-Warburton, Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-415-10002-X. A reference grammar of modern Greek.
• Geoffrey Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (Longman Linguistics Library). Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1997. ISBN 0-582-30709-0. From Mycenean to modern.
• Brian Newton, The Generative Interpretation of Dialect: A Study of Modern Greek Phonology, Cambridge University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-521-08497-0.
• Andrew Sihler, "A New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin", Oxford University Press, 1996. An historical grammar of ancient Greek from its Indo-European origins. Some eccentricities and no bibliography but a useful handbook to the earliest stages of Greek's development.
• Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, Harvard University Press, 1956 (revised edition), ISBN 0-674-36250-0. The standard grammar of classical Greek. Focuses primarily on the Attic dialect, with comparatively weak treatment of the other dialects and the Homeric Kunstsprache.

External links

General background

• Greek Language, Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.
• The Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway, useful information on the history of the Greek language, application of modern Linguistics to the study of Greek, and tools for learning Greek.
• The Greek Language Portal, a portal for Greek language and linguistic education.
• The Perseus Project has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including dictionaries.
• Ancient Greek Tutorials, Berkeley Language Center of the University of California, Berkeley

Language learning

• Hellenistic Greek Lessons Greek-Language.com provides a free online grammar of Hellenistic Greek.
• Greek dictionary, tutorial and hangman program with texteditor, this shareware program is aimed at learning New Testament Greek.
• Greek spell checker
• (Greek) komvos.edu.gr, a website for the support of people who are being taught the Greek language.
• New Testament Greek Three graduated courses designed to help students learn to read the Greek New Testament
• a keyboard for typing greek characters for firefox
• Books on Greek language that are taught at schools in Greece (page in Greek)

Dictionaries

• Greek-English/English-Greek dictionary, (Greek)
• Translatum - The Greek translation Vortal (Dictionaries and terminology forum)
• Greek Lexical Aids, descriptions of both online lexicons (with appropriate links) and Greek Lexicons in Print.
• Online Greek-English and English-Greek dictionary (Modern Greek)
• Online Greek <-> English Dictionary with gender and type of words
• The Greek Language Portal, dictionaries of all forms of Greek (Ancient, Hellenistic, Medieval, Modern).
• Woodhouse English-Greek dictionary, scanned images from S.C. Woodhouse's 1910 dictionary.
• English to Greek Dictionary, English to Greek Dictionary.

Literature

• Books in Greek, an extended list of searchable bibliographic information.
• (Greek) Center for Neo-Hellenic Studies, a non-profit organization set in order to promote Modern Greek Literature and Culture.
• Research lab of modern Greek philosophy, a large e-library of modern Greek texts/books.
• The Treasure of the Greek Language, a large collection of e-books from all stages of Greek language.

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