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Greek language

Greek (Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká, pronounced [eliniˈka]; Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.[10] Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years;[11][12] previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.[13] The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

For the Greek language used during particular eras, see Proto-Greek language, Mycenaean Greek, Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, and Modern Greek.

Greek

[eliniˈka]

Greeks

13.5 million (2012)[1]

Greek alphabet

el

gre (B)
ell (T)

Variously:
ell – Modern Greek
grc – Ancient Greek
cpg – Cappadocian Greek
gmy – Mycenaean Greek
pnt – Pontic
tsd – Tsakonian
yej – Yevanic

gree1276

  • 56-AAA-a
  • 56-AAA-aa to -am (varieties)

The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek.[14][15] Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics.


During antiquity, Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world.[16] It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek.[17] In its modern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora.


Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary.

: the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age.[note 2]

Proto-Greek

: the language of the Mycenaean civilization. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards.

Mycenaean Greek

: in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilization. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire. Ancient Greek fell into disuse in Western Europe in the Middle Ages but remained officially in use in the Byzantine world and was reintroduced to the rest of Europe with the Fall of Constantinople and Greek migration to western Europe.

Ancient Greek

(also known as Hellenistic Greek): The fusion of Ionian with Attic, the dialect of Athens, began the process that resulted in the creation of the first common Greek dialect, which became a lingua franca across the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Koine Greek can be initially traced within the armies and conquered territories of Alexander the Great; 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 bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became the first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek because the Apostles used this form of the language to spread Christianity. Because it was the original language of the New Testament, and the Old Testament was translated into it as the Septuagint, that variety of Koine Greek may be referred to as New Testament Greek or sometimes Biblical Greek.

Koine Greek

replacement of the with a stress accent.

pitch accent

simplification of the system of and diphthongs: loss of vowel length distinction, monophthongisation of most diphthongs and several steps in a chain shift of vowels towards /i/ (iotacism).

vowels

development of the aspirated plosives /pʰ/ and /tʰ/ to the voiceless fricatives /f/ and /θ/, respectively; the similar development of /kʰ/ to /x/ may have taken place later (the phonological changes are not reflected in the orthography, and both earlier and later phonemes are written with φ, θ, and χ).

voiceless

development of the plosives /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ to their voiced fricative counterparts /β/ (later /v/), /ð/, and /ɣ/.

voiced

Classification[edit]

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinct dialect of Greek itself.[39][40][41][42] Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses, with some being exclusive between them.[39][43][44] Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated.[39][45][46][47]


Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found.[48][49] In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan, and Greek has a central position in it.[50][51]

List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes

Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.

Greek Language

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 and Linguistics Gateway

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, , a portal for Greek language and linguistic education.

The Greek Language Portal

has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including dictionaries.

The Perseus Project

Berkeley Language Center of the University of California, Berkeley

Ancient Greek Tutorials