Greek language

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Greek
Ελληνικά
Elliniká
Pronunciation[eliniˈka]
Native to
EthnicityGreeks
Native speakers
13.5 million (2012)[1]
Indo-European
  • Proto-Greek
Dialects
Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
Yevanic
Glottologgree1276
Linguasphere
  • 56-AAA-a
  • 56-AAA-aa to -am (varieties)
Areas where Modern Greek is spoken (in dark blue those areas where it is the official language)[note 1]
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Greek (

Coptic, Gothic
, and many other writing systems.

The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of

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.

Idealised portrayal of the author Homer

History

Greek has been spoken in the

oldest recorded living language.[21] Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages
.

Periods

Proto-Greek-speaking area according to linguist Vladimir I. Georgiev

The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods:

Distribution of varieties of Greek in Anatolia, 1910. Demotic in yellow. Pontic in orange. Cappadocian Greek in green, with green dots indicating individual Cappadocian Greek villages.[24]
  • Medieval Greek (also known as Byzantine Greek): the continuation of Koine Greek up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Medieval Greek is a cover phrase 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 (also known as Neo-Hellenic):[25] Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period, as early as the 11th century. It is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it.

Diglossia

In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of

Standard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and in education.[26]

Historical unity

The distribution of major modern Greek dialect areas

The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can 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.[27] It is also often[citation needed] stated 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 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English".[28]

Geographic distribution

Geographic distribution of Greek language in the Russian Empire (1897 census)

Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable

Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and throughout the European Union, especially in Germany
.

Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the

Monoikos, and Mainake. It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms, for most of their history.[29]

Official status

Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population.[30] It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish).[31] Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages.[32] Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë.[33] It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine.[34] It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.[4][5][6][7]

Characteristics

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 periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.

Phonology

Spoken Modern Greek

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):

Morphology

In all its stages, the

periphrastic (analytical
) forms.

Nouns and adjectives

Pronouns show distinctions in

predicative adjectives agree
with the noun.

Verbs

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

Ancient Greek Modern Greek
Person first, second and third also second person formal
Number singular, dual and plural singular and plural
tense present, past and future past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
aspect imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist) and perfect (sometimes also called perfective; see note about terminology) imperfective and perfective/aorist (perfect is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
mood indicative, subjunctive, imperative and optative indicative, subjunctive,[note 4] and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
Voice active, medio-passive, and passive active and medio-passive

Syntax

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 and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, 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, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. 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, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO.

Vocabulary

Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of

toponyms. The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian, and Turkish. During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian, South Slavic (Macedonian/Bulgarian) and Eastern Romance languages (Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian
).

Greek loanwords in other languages

Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics,

Latin words, they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary; for example, all words ending in –logy ("discourse"). There are many English words of Greek origin.[37][38]

Classification

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]

Writing system

Linear B

Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek.[52]

Cypriot syllabary

Greek inscription in Cypriot syllabic script

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.[53]

Greek alphabet

Ancient epichoric variants of the Greek alphabet from Euboea, Ionia, Athens, and Corinth comparing to modern Greek

Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. 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 Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (

minuscule) form. The letter sigma
has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word:

upper case
Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ
Ψ
Ω
lower case
α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ
ς
τ υ φ χ ψ ω

Diacritics

In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of

diaeresis, used to mark the 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 saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography
.

After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, 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.

Punctuation

In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, 'whatever') from ότι (óti, 'that').[54]

Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries.[55] Boustrophedon, or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.

Latin alphabet

Greek has occasionally been written in the

Frankish Empire). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios. Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications.[56]

The Latin script is nowadays used by the

.

Hebrew alphabet

The

Arabic alphabet

Some

Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet.[58]

Example text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek:

Όλοι οι άνθρωποι γεννιούνται ελεύθεροι και ίσοι στην αξιοπρέπεια και τα δικαιώματα. Είναι προικισμένοι με λογική και συνείδηση, και οφείλουν να συμπεριφέρονται μεταξύ τους με πνεύμα αδελφοσύνης.[59]

Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet:

Óloi oi ánthropoi gennioúntai eléftheroi kai ísoi stin axioprépeia kai ta dikaiómata. Eínai proikisménoi me logikí kai syneídisi, kai ofeíloun na symperiférontai metaxý tous me pnévma adelfosýnis.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."[60]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.
  2. ^ A comprehensive overview in J.T. Hooker's Mycenaean Greece;[22] for a different hypothesis excluding massive migrations and favoring an autochthonous scenario, see Colin Renfrew's "Problems in the General Correlation of Archaeological and Linguistic Strata in Prehistoric Greece: The Model of Autochthonous Origin"[23] in Bronze Age Migrations by R.A. Crossland and A. Birchall, eds. (1973).
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ There is no particular morphological form that can be identified as 'subjunctive' in the modern language, but the term is sometimes encountered in descriptions even if the most complete modern grammar (Holton et al. 1997) does not use it and calls certain traditionally-'subjunctive' forms 'dependent'. 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 explanation.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Ancient Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Cappadocian Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Mycenaean Greek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Pontic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Tsakonian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    (Additional references under 'Language codes' in the information box)
  2. ^ 2006 Census Table: Language Spoken at Home by Sex – Time Series Statistics (1996, 2001, 2006 Census Years)
  3. ^ Αυστραλία: Τηλεδιάσκεψη «Μιλάμε Ελληνικά τον Μάρτιο»
  4. ^ a b Tsitselikis 2013, pp. 287–288.
  5. ^
    ISSN 0012-8449
    . p. 514: This implies that Turkey grants educational right in minority languages only to the recognized minorities covered by the Lausanne who are the Armenians, Greeks and the Jews.
  6. ^ from the original on 14 October 2023. Oran farther points out that the rights set out for the four categories are stated to be the 'fundamental law' of the land, so that no legislation or official action shall conflict or interfere with these stipulations or prevail over them (article 37). [...] According to the Turkish state, only Greek, Armenian and Jewish non-Muslims were granted minority protection by the Lausanne Treaty. [...] Except for non-Muslim populations – that is, Greeks, Jews and Armenians – none of the other minority groups' language rights have been de jure protected by the legal system in Turkey.
  7. ^ a b Questions and Answers: Freedom of Expression and Language Rights in Turkey. New York: Human Rights Watch. 19 April 2002. Archived from the original on 20 October 2023. The Turkish government accepts the language rights of the Jewish, Greek and Armenian minorities as being guaranteed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
  8. United States Census
    . Retrieved 17 October 2015.
  9. ^ "gree1276". Council of Europe. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
  10. ^ a b "Greek language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
  11. . Most of the alphabets used today descended from the Phoenician one. The Greeks adopted it about 2,800 years ago, modifying the characters to suit sounds in their own language.
  12. . ... the Greek alphabet has served the Greek language well for some 2,800 years since its introduction into Greece in the tenth or ninth century BC.
  13. .
  14. ^ Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland The text of the New Testament: an introduction to the critical 1995 p. 52.
  15. ^ Archibald Macbride Hunter Introducing the New Testament 1972 p. 9.
  16. .
  17. ^ Manuel, Germaine Catherine (1989). A study of the preservation of the classical tradition in the education, language, and literature of the Byzantine Empire. HVD ALEPH.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  18. ^ Renfrew 2003, p. 35; Georgiev 1981, p. 192.
  19. ^ Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 437–438; Atkinson & Gray 2006, p. 102.
  20. ^ "Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe". Culture. 1 April 2011. Archived from the original on 25 July 2021. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
  21. . Retrieved 30 November 2023. Greek is the world's oldest recorded living language.
  22. ^ Hooker 1976, Chapter 2: "Before the Mycenaean Age", pp. 11–33 and passim
  23. ^ Renfrew 1973, pp. 263–276, especially p. 267
  24. ^ Dawkins & Halliday 1916.
  25. ^ a b "Greek". Ethnologue. Retrieved 12 April 2020.
  26. OCLC 11134463
    .
  27. ^ Browning 1983, pp. vii–viii.
  28. ^ Alexiou 1982, p. 161.
  29. ^ Burstein, Stanley (2 November 2020). "When Greek was an African Language". Center for Hellenic Studies. The revelation of the place of Greek cultural elements in the lives of these kingdoms has been gradual and is still ongoing, but already it is clear that Greek was the official language of government and religion for most of their history. ... Greek remained the official language of Nubian Christianity right to the end of its long and remarkable history. ... But these three factors do suggest how Greek and Christianity could have become so intimately intertwined and so entrenched in Nubian life and culture by the seventh century AD that Greek could resist both Coptic and Arabic and survive for almost another millennium before both disappeared with the conversion of Nubia to Islam in the sixteenth century AD.
  30. ^ "Greece". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
  31. ^ "The Constitution of Cyprus, App. D., Part 1, Art. 3". Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. 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 Means of Maintaining Diglossia in Cyprus, San Diego Linguistics Papers 2: pp. 25–38 [27].
  32. ^ "The EU at a Glance – Languages in the EU". Europa. European Union. Archived from the original on 21 June 2013. Retrieved 30 July 2010.
  33. . Albania's official language is Albanian, but in municipalities where minorities reside, the languages of these minorities are also used, including Greek in several municipalities in Gjirokastra and Saranda, and Macedonian in a municipality in the East of the country.
  34. ^ "List of Declarations Made with Respect to Treaty No. 148". Council of Europe. Archived from the original on 10 April 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2008.
  35. ^ Ralli 2001, pp. 164–203.
  36. ^ Beekes 2009.
  37. ^ Scheler 1977.
  38. ^ "Πόσο "ελληνικές" είναι οι ξένες γλώσσες". NewsIt. 18 November 2019.
  39. ^ a b c Olander 2022, pp. 12, 14; van Beek 2022, pp. 190–191, 193
  40. .
  41. .
  42. ^ Babiniotis 1992, pp. 29–40; Dosuna 2012, pp. 65–78
  43. ^ Woodhouse 2009, p. 171: "This question is of course only just separable from the question of which languages within Indo-European are most closely related to Phrygian, which has also been hotly debated. A turning point in this debate was Kortlandt's (1988) demonstration on the basis of shared sound changes that Thraco-Armenian had separated from Phrygian and other originally Balkan languages at an early stage. The consensus has now returned to regarding Greek as the closest relative."
  44. ^ Obrador-Cursach 2020, pp. 238–239: "To the best of our current knowledge, Phrygian was closely related to Greek. This affirmation is consistent with the vision offered by Neumann (1988: 23), Brixhe (2006) and Ligorio and Lubotsky (2018: 1816) and with many observations given by ancient authors. Both languages share 34 of the 36 features considered in this paper, some of them of great significance: ... The available data suggest that Phrygian and Greek coexisted broadly from pre-historic to historic times, and both belong to a common linguistic area (Brixhe 2006: 39–44)."
  45. ^ Obrador-Cursach 2020, p. 243: "With the current state of our knowledge, we can affirm that Phrygian is closely related to Greek. This is not a surprising conclusion: ancient sources and modern scholars agree that Phrygians did not live far from Greece in pre-historic times. Moreover, the last half century of scientific study of Phrygian has approached both languages and developed the hypothesis of a Proto-Greco-Phrygian language, to the detriment to other theories like Phrygio-Armenian or Thraco-Phrygian."
  46. ^ Ligorio & Lubotsky 2018, pp. 1816–1817: "Phrygian is most closely related to Greek. The two languages share a few unique innovations, ... It is therefore very likely that both languages emerged from a single language, which was spoken in the Balkans at the end of the third millennium BCE."
  47. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Graeco-Phrygian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  48. ^ van Beek 2022, pp. 193–197
  49. ^ Renfrew 1990; Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1990, pp. 110–116; Renfrew 2003, pp. 17–48; Gray & Atkinson 2003, pp. 435–439
  50. ^ Olsen & Thorsø 2022, pp. 209–217; Hyllested & Joseph 2022, pp. 225–226, 228–229, 231–241
  51. ^ Holm 2008, pp. 634–635
  52. ^
    OCLC 7326206
    .
  53. ^ "Cypriot syllabary". Britannica Academic. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  54. ^ Nicolas, Nick (2005). "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  55. OCLC 881847972
    .
  56. ^ Androutsopoulos 2009, pp. 221–249.
  57. ^ "Yevanic alphabet, pronunciation and language". www.omniglot.com. Retrieved 18 April 2020.
  58. karamanlidika); and the Grecophone Muslims of the Greek peninsula wrote in Greek language using the Arabic alphabet (tourkogianniotika, tourkokretika). Our case is much stranger, since it is a quite early example for that kind of literature and because it is largely concerned with religious themes."; p. 306. The audience for the Greek Mi'rājnāma was most certainly Greek-speaking Muslims, in particular the so-called Tourkogianniotes (literally, the Turks of Jannina). Although few examples have been discovered as yet, it seems that these people developed a religious literature mainly composed in verse form. This literary form constituted the mainstream of Greek Aljamiado literature from the middle of the seventeenth century until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey
    in 1923. Tourkogianniotes were probably of Christian origin and were Islamized sometime during the seventeenth century. They did not speak any language other than Greek. Thus, even their frequency in attending mosque services did not provide them with the necessary knowledge about their faith. Given their low level of literacy, one important way that they could learn about their faith was to listen to religiously edifying texts such as the Greek Mi'rājnāma.
  59. ^ "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". ohchr.org.
  60. ^ "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". United Nations.

References

Further reading

External links

General background
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Dictionaries
Literature