Greek language

Indo-European language spoken mostly in Greece.

Its history can be divided into four phases: Ancient Greek, Koine, Byzantine Greek, and Modern Greek. Ancient Greek is subdivided into Mycenaean Greek (14th–13th centuries BC) and Archaic and Classical Greek (8th–4th centuries BC). The language of the latter periods had numerous dialects (e.g., Ionic, Attic). The second phase, Koine (Hellenistic Greek), arose during the reign of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. A common language with simplified grammar, it spread throughout the Hellenized world. Purists who rejected Koine as a corruption of Attic Greek successfully advocated adoption of the Classical language for all writing. Thus, the written form, Byzantine Greek (5th–15th centuries AD), stayed rooted in the Attic tradition while the spoken language continued to develop. Modern Greek, dating from the 15th century, has many local dialects. Standard Modern Greek, Greece's official written and spoken language, is largely based on a form called Demotic (used in popular speech) but includes elements of Katharevusa, the written language formerly used in government and public life.

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Introduction

      Indo-European language spoken primarily in Greece. It has a long and well-documented history—the longest of any Indo-European language (Indo-European languages)—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 χ (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 χ is kh. Another difference is the representation of β (bēta or víta); 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. Υ (upsilon) was written as y by the Romans, indicating that the sound was not identical to the sound of their letter i. Modern Greek υ (ípsilon) is transliterated as i, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient υ.

General considerations

 In the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, the “Proto-Greeks” (Indo-European ancestors of the Greeks) established themselves on the Greek peninsula, where their language developed into Greek. Later, Greek-speaking people occupied most of the islands of the Aegean and, about 1000 BC, the west coast of Anatolia. With few exceptions that is still the area occupied by the Greek language today. In the second quarter of the 1st millennium BC, a vast “colonial” movement took place, resulting in establishments founded by various Greek cities all around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, especially in southern Italy 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, and Egypt by Alexander 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 at Byzantium, as the official language of the Eastern Empire.

Relationship of Greek to Indo-European

 Ancient Greek is, next to Hittite (Hittite language), the Indo-European language with documents going furthest back into the past. By the time it emerged in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, it had already acquired a completely distinct character from the parent Indo-European language. Its linguistic features place it in a central region on the dialect 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 as Phrygian (Phrygian language). 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 of a and o 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, see Indo-European languages.) Greek keeps the distinction between the original voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops of Indo-European (e.g., Indo-European *d becomes Greek d, and Indo-European *dh becomes Greek th), whereas Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic confuse them. (Some linguists, however, assume that Greek th continues Indo-European th and that Greek d goes back to an Indo-European glottalized stop.) 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 is conservative, as are, generally speaking, the western Indo-European languages (Italic and Celtic). On the other hand, it does show innovations. One of these, the devoicing of the original voiced aspirated stops, is shared with Italic, although it is realized in different ways (*dh- yields Greek th-, Latin f-, Osco-Umbrian f-); but others are foreign to Italic. The latter include, for example, the weakening of spirants and semivowels at the beginning of words before a vowel, the evolution of *s- to h- (pre-Mycenaean), and *y- to h- (contemporary with Mycenaean).

      Morphological criteria 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 last innovation, 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.

Greek syllabaries (syllabary)

      Starting from a foreign script known as Linear A (Linear A and Linear B) (used in Crete to record a native language known as Minoan), the Greeks devised, toward 1500 BC at the latest, a syllabic script to record their own language. Known as Linear B, this script was deciphered in 1952 by the British architect Michael Ventris (Ventris, Michael) 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 (1400–1350 BC—this date has been questioned), and at Thebes, Tiryns, Mycenae, Pylos, and Chania (1250–1200 BC). There are no literary texts and hardly any continuous 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 B syllabary 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 for ta, te, ti, to, tu, but there is no sign for the consonant t without a following vowel. As an initial syllable may be formed by just a vowel, there are also signs for a, e, i, o, u. The script does not distinguish r and l, unvoiced and voiced consonants (except for /d-/), nonaspirated and aspirated consonants; so the sign pa can be read in Greek as pa, ba, or pha. 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 for sperma, ta-to-mo for stathmos). Consequently, the spellings are often ambiguous, such as pa-te for pantes and patēr, pa-si for pansi and phāsi. 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 before Homer, incomplete as it may be, is of capital importance.

      Another syllabary, distantly related to Linear B, was in use in Cyprus. From the 11th to the 3rd century BC it was used to record a native language of the island (Eteocypriot) as well as Greek.

The Greek alphabet

      The Mycenaean script dropped out of use in the 12th century when the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, perhaps in connection with the Dorian invasions. For a few centuries the Greeks seem to have been illiterate.

      In the 8th century at the latest, but probably much earlier, the Greeks borrowed their alphabet from the Phoenicians in the framework of their commercial contacts. The Phoenician alphabet had separate signs for the Semitic consonants (North Semitic alphabet), but the vowels were left unexpressed. The list of Semitic consonants was adapted to the needs of Greek phonology, but the major innovation was the use of five letters with the value of vowels—α (a), ε (e), ι (i), ο (o), υ (u). The earliest datable inscriptions, both from approximately 725 BC, come from Athens (the Dipylon vase) and the colony of Ischia in the Tyrrhenian Sea (the so-called Nestor's cup).

      During the period from the 8th to the 5th century BC, there were local differences in the forms of the letters and in their values from one city to another. Moreover, the primitive Greek alphabet underwent various reforms—the creation of new letters or a new use of old letters, first ϕ (ph), χ (ch), then ξ (ks), ψ (ps), η (ē), and ω (ō). About 400 BC the alphabet became normalized throughout the Greek world as the Asiatic Ionic form was uniformly adopted.

      Greek alphabetic inscriptions are numbered in tens of thousands: dedications, epitaphs, decrees, laws, treaties, religious rules, judicial decisions, and so forth. The majority are of Hellenistic or Roman date. The less numerous Archaic inscriptions (8th–5th centuries BC) are of particular interest for their contribution to the knowledge of the dialects. It is only in Hellenistic papyri, and later in Byzantine manuscripts, that the great works of ancient literature (the originals of which have disappeared) are available in the form of copies, some of which are far removed from the originals.

      The Greek alphabet, still in use today in Greece in the form it reached during the Hellenistic period, has enjoyed an extraordinary success as a direct or indirect model for other alphabets (notably the Latin alphabet); on it are based the writing systems employed in a great part of the modern world.

Ancient Greek

History and development

 From the end of the 4th century BC onward, in the Hellenistic period, Greek gradually obtained a high degree of unity throughout the area it covered (see Koine (Greek language)). In the preceding 10 centuries there had been numerous Greek dialects (dialect), which differed in phonetic and morphological details but which were mutually intelligible. The features shared by the local speech of different regions allow the delineation of dialect groups, of which the Greeks themselves were aware. The classifications of modern scholars modify in various ways the classifications made by the ancients but still retain these as their basis. Among the dialects there are a West group, an Aeolic group, an Arcado-Cypriot group, and an Ionic-Attic group. Modern scholars have tried in various ways to combine some of these groups—for example, by considering Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot as varieties of “central” Greek or by considering Arcado-Cypriot and Ionic-Attic as varieties of “southern” Greek and West Greek and Aeolic as varieties of “northern” Greek.

      In regard to the dialects, two very different situations must be distinguished: that established for the period between the 14th and the 12th centuries BC and that for the period between the 8th and the 4th centuries BC.

      In Mycenaean (Mycenae) times the carriers of West Greek (Doric dialect) (ancestors of the Dorians and of their relatives) were still living around the Pindus Mountains. In Eastern Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus and on certain Aegean islands (notably Crete), only varieties of Greek other than West Greek were spoken. The tablets reveal a somewhat artificial chancellery language current in the palace offices and taught as a written language in scribal training. Based essentially on a dialect of the type that was eventually called Arcado-Cypriot, it shows great uniformity in time (during the two centuries or thereabouts covered by documents) and in space (from Knossos to Thebes). The language of the tablets must have been based on the language of the Achaean rulers who inhabited the Mycenaean palaces. The problem of the geographic distribution of the various other forms of spoken Greek in Mycenaean times does not yet have a final solution.

      There followed two great events that upset the dialectal distribution within the Greek world. First, about 1100 BC the Dorian invasions brought speakers of West Greek southward, then into the Peloponnese, and finally into the Aegean. Some pre- Dorian Greek populations were expelled from their homes and emigrated eastward to the west coast of Anatolia and to Cyprus. Others, who remained where they were, became more or less thoroughly Dorian in speech. It has long been thought that some of the features that West Thessalian and, even more, Boeotian (both of which are Aeolic) shared in the 1st millennium with West Greek can be attributed to “recent” influences; on the other hand, some Doric dialects of the 1st millennium (e.g., in Crete) show sporadic traces of features attributable to an Arcado-Cypriot substratum. The other subsequent event, which is of a different sort, was the great colonization (colonialism, Western) movement that began in the 8th century BC. Each group of emigrants took the speech of its mother city and planted it in the new foundation. Thus there developed side by side on the shores of southern Italy and Sicily a totally new grouping of Greek dialects—Euboean Ionic at Cumae; Laconian Doric at Tarentum and Heraclea; Achaean at Sybaris, Croton, and Metapontum; Locrian at Locri Epizephyrii; Corinthian Doric at Syracuse; and so on.

      Toward the middle of the 1st millennium BC the geographic distribution of the dialects (insofar as they are known directly through inscriptions) is, briefly, as follows:

● West Group (Doric in the widest sense)

● (1) North-West Greek: Aetolia, Locris (colony—Locri Epizephyrii), Phocis,

● (2) Saronic Doric: the territory of Corinth (colonies—Corcyra, Syracuse), the Megarid (colonies—Megara Hyblaea, Selinus, Byzantium), Eastern Argolid,

● (3) Western Argolid,

● (4) South-East Aegean Doric: Melos and Thera (colony—Cyrene), Cos, Rhodes (colonies—Gela, Acragas),

● (5) Crete,

● (6) Laconia (colonies—Tarentum, Heraclea), Messenia,

● (7) Achaea (colonies—Ithaca, Sybaris),

● (8) Elis.

● Aeolic (Aeolic dialect) Group

● (1) Boeotia,

● (2) Thessaly,

● (3) Lesbos and Asiatic Aeolis.

● Arcado-Cypriot Group

● (1) Arcadia,

● (2) Cyprus,

● (3) Pamphylia (mixed with West Greek and Aeolic).

● Ionic-Attic Group

● (1) Attica,

● (2) Euboea (colonies—Catana, Cumae),

● (3) Northern Cyclades,

● (4) Asiatic Ionia (colonies—foundations in Pontus [Black Sea]).

      This linguistic circumstance in the first half of the 1st millennium BC caused literature to develop on a dialect basis. The Homeric epic displays an artificial dialect based on Asiatic Ionic but interspersed with Aeolic and even Mycenaean elements inherited from a long oral tradition. Choral lyric also uses an artificial dialect, which is based on Doric but interspersed with many elements from Ionic epic and some from Lesbian poetry. Prose developed first in Ionic surroundings ( Herodotus, Hippocrates), then in Attica (Attic dialect) ( Thucydides, Plato). The dialect of dialogue in Attic tragedy is Attic mixed with some elements from choral lyric poetry. Attic comedy is pure Attic, whereas a Doric comedy developed in Syracuse. Personal poetry employs, depending on the author, Ionic ( Archilochus, Hippon), Lesbian ( Alcaeus, Sappho), Boeotian ( Corinna), and other dialects. It was only in the Hellenistic and Roman periods that Attic became clearly dominant, though in poetry of the later periods artificial imitations of the early genres were common.

      Within the alphabetical period of pre-Koine Ancient Greek (8th–4th centuries BC) there is no break between what is termed Archaic Greek (8th–6th centuries) and what is termed Classical Greek (5th–4th centuries).

      In the linguistic subdivision of Ancient Greek the effects of substratum languages played only a minor part. In their penetration into Greece toward the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, the Proto-Greeks found earlier populations established there, about whom Greek tradition gives only vague hints, and whose language or languages are unknown. From this “pre-Hellenic” stratum, Greek vocabulary made numerous borrowings (kyparissos ‘cypress,' asaminthos ‘bathing tub,' and so on), and it received from it a number of place names (e.g., Korinthos); but there is no reason to think that the divergent characters of the Greek dialects (in phonetics and morphology) could be connected with different substrata. The native “barbarian” languages also had little effect on colonial Greek in the 1st millennium, and these contacts show up only in a few local borrowings.

      On the other hand, there is a connection between the facts of civilization (in the political and cultural fields) and the evolution of the language. In the Mycenaean period an evident unity of civilization and the organization in the palaces of record offices and scribal training allowed the use of a stable and uniform chancellery language. In the first half of the 1st millennium, political subdivision and rivalry between cities allowed dialectal peculiarities to strike deep roots. As a result of a long oral formulaic tradition of epic poetry in dactylic hexameters, the language of the Homeric epics is an artificial mixture of dialects. This Homeric dialect became the standard for dactylic poetry all over the Greek world. It also influenced the creation of the dialect mixture of other “noble” literary genres of poetry—e.g., that of choral lyric. In the 6th century BC, Ionic became the dialect of prose as a consequence of the political and cultural prestige of Ionia. In the course of the 5th century BC, as the prestige of Athens rose, Ionic was gradually replaced by Attic. The predominance of Attic was continued under the Macedonian rulers.

Linguistic characteristics

Phonology

      The phonological systems of Ancient Greek differ noticeably from one period to another and from one dialect to another. The system that has been chosen to serve as an example here is that which may be attributed to Old Attic of about 500 BC.

      In Old Attic there are seven vowel qualities: i, open and closed e, a, open and closed o, and u, each of which has a long and a short form, except open e and open o, which have only the long form. Diphthongs originally included ei, ai, oi and eu, au, ou, but ei began to evolve toward long closed ē and ou toward long closed ō. In addition, there is a diphthong ui, and, usually at the end of words, the diphthongs -ēi, -āĭ, -ōi, with long first elements, which much later were reduced respectively to long ē, long ā, and long open ō.

      The consonantal structure is characterized by relative richness in stops (sounds produced by momentary complete closure at some point in the vocal tract): unvoiced p, t, k, aspirated ph, th, ch, voiced b, d, g; and by few spirants: only s and h (h restricted to initial position before a vowel). There are two liquid sounds, l and r and two nasals, m and n. The velar nasal (as in ink) is not distinctive but is only a variant of the n in front of a velar stop, or a variant of g in front of a nasal. Neither y nor w occurs as a distinctive sound. Most consonants can be doubled between vowels. The only consonant sounds normally allowed at the end of the word are s, n, and r.

      Apart from some unaccented monosyllabic or disyllabic terms of minor importance, each word is marked by an accent (the highest tone within the word) on one of the vowels (one of the last three vowels, if the word has more than three syllables). Short vowels, if they carry the accent, have only a rising tone (noted from the Alexandrian grammarians onward by the sign of the acute accent); long vowels or diphthongs may have either a rising tone (noted by the acute accent) or a rising tone followed by a falling tone (noted by the circumflex). When a word carrying an acute accent on the vowel of the final syllable is followed by another word within the same phrase, its accent is noted by the sign of the grave accent, in order to indicate that its tone is lower than that of the vowel of the initial syllable of the next word. Sometimes two otherwise identical words are differentiated by the nature or the position of the accent: for example, oîkoi (‘houses') is a nominative plural form and oíkoi (‘at home') an adverb of place; tómos means ‘a cut' and tomós ‘cutting.'

      The accent (which is not associated with stress) does not play any part in the rhythm of the language. The rhythm of both prose and poetry is based upon the distribution of short and long syllables. For a syllable to be short, it must end in a short vowel; syllables ending in a long vowel, or closed syllables (i.e., those ending in a consonant), are long. The rhythm of Ancient Greek is therefore said to be quantitative.

Morphology

      Every nominal (noun or adjective) or verbal form combines a stem that carries the lexical sense of the word and a certain number of grammatical markers that serve to specify the meaning of the whole word (e.g., plural, future) or to indicate its syntactic function (e.g., subject, object) in the sentence.

      The category of gender, which differentiates masculine, feminine, and neuter, concerns only the substantive (noun), adjective, and pronoun. The category of person (first, second, and third person) is restricted to the personal pronoun and the verb. There are three numbers—singular, dual, and plural—that are distinguished in both the noun and the verb. The survival of the dual is an archaism; although a living form in the Mycenaean period, it tends to be replaced by the plural in the 1st millennium. Attic is one of the dialects in which the dual number is best preserved down to the threshold of the Hellenistic period.

      Not counting the vocative case, the Greek declension in the Mycenaean period still contained five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative, and instrumental. Between the Mycenaean period and the 8th century the instrumental ceased to exist as a distinct case, its role having been taken over by the dative.

      The verb system is organized around four principal tense stems, which are built on the verb stem: “present,” aorist, “perfect,” and future. The first three are often called aspects, a term taken over from Slavic grammar. According to this terminology, the “present” stem is used for imperfective aspect (ongoing or repeated process), the “perfect” stem for stative aspect (state resulting from the completion of the process), and the aorist stem for perfective aspect (completed process). In principle, each tense stem provides five moods for the finite verb (with personal endings), a participle, and an infinitive. There are two assertive moods (nonpast and past indicative) and three nonassertive moods (subjunctive, optative, imperative). The expression of time relations is based on the combination of the values of the tenses (“aspects”) and those of the moods. For instance, the past indicative of the “present” (the so-called imperfect) is used for ongoing or repeated processes in the past, that of the aorist for completed processes in the past, and that of the “perfect” (the so-called pluperfect) for states in the past. The Greek verb has two voices, active and mediopassive (reflexive and passive), which are expressed (leaving aside the aorist passive) by the opposition of two series of personal endings, for each mood (with participle and infinitive) of each tense stem.

syntax

      Since syntactical relations are expressed by means of case endings (and so on), Greek word order is relatively free. The creation of the definite article (post-Mycenaean and post-Homeric) is an important innovation. The availability of infinitive and participle clauses, with or without the article, as alternatives for all kinds of subordinate clauses permits the construction of very long and complex sentences that are nevertheless entirely transparent as to their syntactic structure. This accomplishment of Attic prose (known as periodic style) is unmatched in other languages.

Vocabulary

      If one considers the roots of words, it seems that, although the essential basis of the vocabulary is of Indo-European origin, a fairly large number of terms are borrowings. Most of these loans were taken from the idioms of the populations living in Greece prior to the arrival of the Proto-Greeks; many words had already penetrated into Greek in the 2nd millennium, for there are forms found in Mycenaean that correspond to plant names such as elaiā ‘olive,' pyxos ‘box tree,' and selīnon ‘celery'; animal names such as leōn ‘lion' and onos ‘ass'; names for objects such as asaminthos ‘bathing tub,' depas ‘vase,' and xiphos ‘sword'; and names of materials such as elephās ‘ivory,' chrȳsos ‘gold,' and kyanos ‘dark blue enamel.'

      Whatever the origins of its verbal and nominal roots, the Greek language developed a vocabulary full of nuances and of great scope (by using preverbs and by forming compounds and derived words). At all periods the lexical creativity of Greek has been very productive, thus giving it a vocabulary of extraordinary richness.

Michel Lejeune Cornelis Jord Ruijgh

The middle phases: Koine and Byzantine Greek

Koine

      The fairly uniform spoken Greek that gradually replaced the local dialects after the breakdown of old political barriers and the establishment of Alexander's empire in the 4th century BC is known as the Koine (hē koinē dialektos ‘the common language'), or “Hellenistic Greek.” Attic (Attic dialect), by virtue of the undiminished cultural and commercial predominance of Athens, provided its basis; but, as the medium of communication throughout the new urban centres of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, it absorbed numerous non-Attic elements and underwent some degree of grammatical simplification. Numerous inscriptions enable scholars to trace its triumphant progress at the expense of the old dialects, at least as the language of business and administration, although some rural dialects are reported to have survived as late as the 2nd century AD. Other sources of information for the Koine are the translation of the Septuagint made in the 3rd century BC for the use of the Hellenized Jewish community of Alexandria, the New Testament, and the writings of a few people (e.g., the historian Polybius and the philosopher Epictetus) who preferred it to Attic. As the everyday colloquial language of urban Egypt (Egyptian language), it may be studied in papyri going back to the 4th century BC. The Koine may be dated very crudely from the period of Alexander's conquests in the 4th century BC to approximately the reign of Justinian in the 6th century AD.

      The Koine replaced the Attic tt with the ss characteristic of Ionic and other dialects (e.g., glōssa for glōtta ‘tongue') at an early date, but its main phonological characteristic is the gradual simplification of the rich vowel system of Classical Greek. Ancient closed and open long /ē/ (ει and η) and /i/ (ι) merged as /i/, and /ai/ (αι) monophthongized to /e/; /oi/ (οι) monophthongized to /ü/, thus merging with simple /ü/ (υ) (pronounced as French tu). The second element of /au/ (αυ) and /eu/ (ευ) was changed to /v/ or /f/ depending on the voicing of the following consonant (compare Ancient auge ‘light, dawn,' autos ‘he' to Modern avghí, aftós). Classical /ph th kh/ (pronounced as in English pin, tin, kin) acquired fricative articulations as in fin, thin, and the final element of Scottish loch (or German Buch); /b d g/ became the voiced fricatives /v dh/ (as in that), /gh/ (as in Spanish fuego).

      Other parts of the grammar also began to move in the direction of Modern Greek in this period. Nouns in consonant stems began to acquire the endings of the -a declension; e.g., thygatēr, ‘daughter,' accusative thygatera, was remodeled after items such as khōra, khōran ‘country.' The dual number was lost in nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as was the optative mood (expressing wish or desire) of verbs. Confusion arose between the perfect and aorist tense forms, leading to the loss of one or the other (the former in most verbs).

      In vocabulary there were numerous borrowings from non-Attic dialects, and some Attic words acquired new meanings; thus opsaria ‘fish' and brechei ‘it rains' for Classical Greek ichthyes and hyei both occur in the New Testament (compare Modern Greek psárya, vrékhi).

      This gradual divergence from the language of Plato and Demosthenes was viewed as a species of linguistic decadence by an influential school known as the Atticists, who unceasingly castigated the use of Koine forms by writers. It was thus that the rift developed between the everyday spoken language and an archaizing, specifically written language. It became fashionable to publish manuals of “good usage” in which the Attic equivalents of Koine innovations were recommended as models for the student's imitation.

Byzantine Greek (Byzantine Greek language)

      During the period of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., until the fall of Constantinople in 1453) the language of administration and of most writing was firmly rooted in the Atticist tradition; it is this archaizing style that is often referred to as “Byzantine Greek.” The spoken language continued to develop apace, however, and its course can be followed to some extent in the writings of the less-educated chroniclers (such as John Malalas, 6th century) and hagiographers. Furthermore, the increasing political and military disintegration characteristic of the last few centuries preceding the fall of Constantinople brought with it a general decline in educational level, and works appeared that reflect quite closely the colloquial language of the time, although learned and pseudo-learned elements are never absent. While the differences between the Chronicle of the Morea (13th century), for example, and present-day spoken Greek are quite minor, Byzantium failed to produce a writer of the stature of Dante, capable of establishing once and for all the living vernacular as a worthy vehicle for great literature.

      Most of the phonological and grammatical developments that separate present-day Greek from the Koine occurred during this period. Thus, in the phonology the two high front vowels /i/ and /ü/ were merged, simplifying the six-vowel system to the five-vowel system of Modern Greek. In the morphology the frequent misuse of the dative case of nouns shows that it went out of use in the spoken language, and the infinitive was replaced by various periphrastic constructions. (Periphrastic constructions involve the use of function words and auxiliaries.) In the earlier period numerous words (mostly Latin) were imported: the chronicler Malalas has (in their modern form) pórta ‘door,' kámbos ‘plain,' saíta ‘arrow,' paláti ‘palace,' spíti ‘house' (from hospitium), and hundreds of other borrowings, not all of which have survived. The later period is characterized by the richness of its compound words, usually from native roots. Some of these, such as the compounds in which a modifying noun precedes its head noun, continued ancient patterns (thalassóvrakhi ‘sea rock,' vunópulo ‘mountain lad'); coordinative compounds of the type common in Modern Greek, though rare in earlier periods, are also found (aristódhipnon ‘lunch and dinner,' compare Modern Greek andróyino ‘man and wife,' makheropíruna ‘knives and forks'). Semantic shift was another source of innovation: álogho ‘horse,' previously meant ‘irrational'; skiázome ‘I fear,' earlier meant ‘I am in shadow'; and (u)dhén ‘not,' meant, in Classical Greek, ‘nothing.'

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 (dialect)

      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 /ā/ that went to /ē/ in Attic, later to /i/). The Asia Minor dialects also display archaic features (e.g., Pontic /e/ for ancient /ē/ 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 (Demotic Greek language). 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 kotópulo ‘chicken' becomes kutóplu, émine ‘he stayed' becomes émni. They also mark certain first and second person plural past tense verb forms with -an (ímastan ‘we were,' Athenian ímaste) and use the accusative for indirect object pronouns where the southern dialects have the genitive (na se pó ‘let me tell you,' standard na su pó).

      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 Kími district of central Euboea. Its salient feature is the replacement of the Byzantine /ü/ sound (from ancient /ü/, /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 sykéa becomes sutséa ‘fig tree,' standard sikyá).

      4. Cretan softens /k/ to a /č/ sound (as in church), /kh/ to /š/ (as in she) before /i/ and /e/, and /y/ to /ž/ (as the s in pleasure)—e.g., če ‘and,' šéri ‘hand,' žéros ‘old man,' standard ke, khéri, yéros.

      5. The southeastern dialects of Cyprus, Rhodes, Chios, and other islands in the area also soften /k/ to /č/, drop voiced fricative consonants between vowels, and retain the ancient final -n (láin ‘oil,' standard ládhi). They also retain the contrast between long and short consonants (fíla ‘kiss [imperative]' but fílla ‘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 (dhulévgho ‘I work,' standard dhulévo).

Standard Modern Greek

      With the establishment of the new Greek state in 1830, the Peloponnesian dialect was adopted as the oral language, and this developed into the Demotic variety. The absence of a written form of Demotic, however, led to the creation of Katharevusa (Katharevusa Greek language), a “pure,” rather artificially archaizing form that was intended to purge the language of foreign elements and to systematize its morphology (inevitably on the Classical Greek model). This Modern Greek “diglossia” continued well into the 20th century, with specific areas of use for the two varieties; e.g., Demotic became the vehicle for poetry, whereas Katharevusa remained the language of administration.

      The diglossia problem was finally resolved in 1976, when Demotic was declared the official language of Greece. Meanwhile, the two varieties had naturally converged, and the emerging Standard Modern Greek language can be well characterized as resulting from the merger of the Demotic variety with Katharevusa features. Thus, in the phonology, some clearly Demotic changes (see below statements [3] and [5]), under Katharevusa influence, either were suppressed or developed alternations or even contrasts. Thus, for the change of i to y before another vowel, is found jimnásio ‘high school' (instead of the expected Demotic *jimnásyo), the alternants sxolyó and sxolío ‘school,' or the contrast yós ‘sun' but iós ‘virus.' The assimilation of a nasal to a fricative is confined to the morphology; e.g., the verbal form krin-thik-e (third person-passive-singular aorist ‘he was judged') is kríthike with nasal loss, while in a word such as pénthos ‘mourning' the nasal is retained. Further, the historical tendency to differentiate gender by declension class (e.g., by restricting the declension -os to masculine) was inhibited, and numerous feminine nouns in -os are reintroduced into the language (e.g., odhós ‘street,' leofóros ‘avenue'), some in parallel with Demotic alternants, as in jatrós or jatrína ‘doctor (feminine).'

      The interaction between Demotic and Katharevusa is even stronger in the vocabulary. A Katharevusa form may be used in parallel with a Demotic form in a specialized role; for example, édhra (from the Ancient Greek word for ‘chair') means ‘professorial chair,' while the Demotic karékla remains in use for the article of furniture.

      This manner of interaction causes the Greek speaker to experience these differences not as belonging to two different varieties of the language but rather as stylistic variations of one and the same system.

Linguistic characteristics

phonology

      Modern Greek has five distinct vowel sounds (/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/) and the glide /y/, most of which are indicated in Greek orthography in more than one way. The consonant sounds are:

Historically, /f th kh/ derive from ancient aspirated consonants, and the voiced fricatives /v dh gh/ from voiced stops /b d g/. Modern /b d g/ usually result from the voicing of /p t k/ after nasals; thus Ancient Greek pente ‘five' becomes pénde. They also occur at the beginning of words in place of ancient nasal + stop sequences (boró ‘I am able' from emporó). Other important consonant cluster changes linking Ancient and Modern Greek include:

      1. Ancient clusters, whether of stops or of aspirates, become fricative + stop; for example, hepta ‘seven' becomes eftá, (e)khthes ‘yesterday' becomes (e)khtés.

      2. Double consonants are simplified except in the southeast, thus thalassa ‘sea' becomes thálasa.

      3.Nasals assimilate to the following fricatives; thus nymphē ‘bride' becomes níffi and then (except in the southeast dialects) nífi.

      4. The liquid /l/ may be replaced with /r/ before consonants; for example, adelphos ‘brother' becomes adherfós.

      5. Before a vowel, /i/ and /e/ change to /y/; thus paidia ‘boys' becomes pedhyá, mēlea ‘apple tree' becomes milyá. Except for the simplification of double consonants, these historical changes do not hold for words of Katharevusa origin.

      With the changes produced in the vocalic system in Koine, the ancient pitch distinction was lost and stress became dynamic (as in English), its place being indicated orthographically by a uniform stress mark; but it remained confined to the three last syllables of a word (the trisyllabic, or window, constraint). Stress placement is largely predictable, depending for nominals on their declensional class marker (e.g., ánthropos ‘man' versus polítis ‘citizen' [-o versus -i class]), but for the verb on their tense (e.g., katháriz-a ‘I cleaned' versus katharíz-o ‘I clean' [past versus nonpast tense]).

      Further stress shift may occur owing to the trisyllabic constraint, as in máthima gives mathímata ‘lesson' (nominative singular or plural), or as a morphological relic of an earlier long ō-vowel in the genitive plural—e.g., mathímata becomes mathimáton ‘lesson' (nominative or genitive plural). The addition of clitics (words that are treated in pronunciation as forming a part of a neighbouring word and that are often unaccented or contracted) may provoke further stressing in the host + clitic unit if the trisyllabic constraint is violated, as in máthima: but máthima-mu becomes máthimá mu ‘lesson' becomes ‘my lesson.' In some dialects, especially in the north, the tendency to a rhizotonic (stable) stressing extends to the verb, leading either to violations of the trisyllabic constraint or to an additional stress (as in the case of clitics)—e.g., tarázumasti or tarázumásti ‘we are shaken' (standard tarazómaste).

morphology and syntax

      Much of the inflectional apparatus of the ancient language is retained in Modern Greek. Nouns may be singular or plural—the dual is lost—and all dialects distinguish a nominative (subject) case and accusative (object) case. A noun modifying a second noun is expressed by the genitive case except in the north, where a prepositional phrase is usually preferred. The indirect object is also expressed by the genitive case (or by the preposition se ‘to,' which governs the accusative, as do all prepositions). Thus:

      TY The ancient categorization of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter survives intact, and adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their nouns, as do the articles (o ‘the,' enas ‘a'). In general, pronouns exhibit the same categories as nouns, but the relative pronoun pu is invariant, its relation to its own clause being expressed when necessary by a personal pronoun in the appropriate case: i yinéka pu tin ídhe to korítsi ‘the woman pu her saw the girl' (i.e., ‘the woman whom the girl saw').

      The verb is inflected for mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), aspect (perfective, imperfective), voice (active, passive), tense (present, past), and person (first, second, and third, singular and plural). The future is expressed by a particle tha (from earlier thé[o] na ‘[I] want to') followed by a finite verb—e.g., tha grápho ‘I will write.' Formally, the finite forms of the verb (those with personal endings) consist of a stem + (optionally) the perfective aspect marker (-s- in active, -th- in passive) + personal ending (indicating person, tense, mood, voice). Past forms are prefixed by e- (the “augment”), usually lost in mainland dialects when unstressed. There are also two nonfinite forms, an indeclinable present active participle in -ondas (ghráfondas ‘writing'), and a past passive one in -ménos (kurazménos ‘tired').

      Aspectual differences play a crucial role. Roughly, the perfective marker indicates completed, momentary action; its absence signifies an action viewed as incomplete, continuous, or repeated. Thus the imperfective imperative ghráphe might mean ‘start writing!' or ‘write regularly!' while ghrápse means rather ‘write down! (on a particular occasion).' Compare also tha ghrápho ‘I'll be writing' but tha ghrápso ‘I'll write (once).' The difference is sometimes represented lexically in English: ákuye ‘he listened' and ákuse ‘he heard.' The passive forms are largely confined to certain verbs active in meaning like érkhome ‘I come,' fováme ‘I am afraid,' and reciprocal usages (filyóndusan ‘they were kissing').

      The most common form of derivation is by suffixation; derivation by prefixation is limited mainly to verbs. On the other hand, compound formation is rich. Three morphological types of compounds can be distinguished, as reflected also in their stressing—thus, stem + stem compounds—e.g., palyófilos ‘old friend' (o is the compound vowel) or khortofághos ‘vegetarian'; stem + word compounds—e.g., palyofílos ‘lousy friend' (compare fílos ‘friend'); and the newly borrowed formation, word + word compounds—e.g., pedhí thávma as English ‘boy wonder.' There is no infinitive; ancient constructions involving it are usually replaced by na (from ancient hína ‘so that') + subjunctive. Thus thélo na ghrápso ‘I want to write,' borí na ghrápsi ‘he can write.' Subordinate statement is introduced by óti or pos (léi óti févghi ‘he says that he is leaving'). Unlike English, Greek (because of its inflectional system) shows flexible word order even in the simplest sentences. Further, as in Italian, the subject of a sentence may be omitted.

Vocabulary

      The vast majority of Demotic words are inherited from Ancient Greek, although quite often with changed meaning—e.g., filó ‘I kiss' (originally ‘love'), trógho ‘I eat' (from ‘nibble'), kóri ‘daughter' (from ‘girl'). Many others represent unattested combinations of ancient roots and affixes; others enter Demotic via Katharevusa: musío ‘museum,' stikhío ‘element' (but inherited stikhyó ‘ghost'), ekteló ‘I execute.' In addition, there are more than 2,000 words in common use drawn from Italian and Turkish (accounting for about a third each), and from Latin, French, and, increasingly, English. The Latin, Italian, and Turkish elements (mostly nouns) acquire Greek inflections (from Italian síghuros ‘sure,' servitóros ‘servant,' from Turkish zóri ‘force,' khasápis ‘butcher'), while more recent loans from French and English remain unintegrated (spor ‘sport,' bar ‘bar,' asansér ‘elevator,' futból ‘football,' kompyúter ‘computer,' ténis ‘tennis').

Brian E. Newton Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman

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, Aperçu 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 étymologique 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 Wörterbuch, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1973–79), and a 3rd ed. (1991– ), wisely selective (but often underrating Mycenaean data); and Michel Lejeune, Phonétique historique du mycénien 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

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