Greek language

Greek(Modern Greek:Ελληνικά,romanized:Elliniká,[eliniˈka];Ancient Greek:Ἑλληνική,romanized:Hellēnikḗ) is anIndo-Europeanlanguage, constituting an independentHellenic branchwithin the Indo-European language family. It is native toGreece,Cyprus,Italy(inCalabriaandSalento), southernAlbania, and other regions of theBalkans,Caucasus, theBlack Seacoast,Asia Minor, and theEastern Mediterranean. It has thelongest documented historyof any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.Its writing system is theGreek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years;previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such asLinear Band theCypriot syllabary.The alphabet arose from thePhoenician scriptand was in turn the basis of theLatin,Cyrillic,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 ofHomer,ancient Greek literatureincludes many works of lasting importance in theEuropean canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. TheNew Testamentof theChristian Biblewas also originally written in Greek.Together with theLatintexts and traditions of theRoman world, the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline ofClassics.
Duringantiquity, Greek was by far the most widely spokenlingua francain theMediterranean world.It eventually became the official language of theByzantine Empireand developed intoMedieval Greek.In itsmodern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24official 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 theGreek diaspora.
Greekrootshave been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages;Greek and Latinare the predominant sources ofinternational scientific vocabulary.
Greek has been spoken in theBalkan peninsulasince around the 3rd millennium BC,or possibly earlier.The earliest written evidence is aLinear Bclay tabletfound inMesseniathat dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC,making Greek the world'soldest recordedliving language.Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinctAnatolian languages.
The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods:
In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state ofdiglossia: the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as theGreek language questionwas a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek:Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, andKatharevousa, meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki andAncient Greekdeveloped in the early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth toStandard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and ineducation.
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.It is also oftenstated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, "Homeric Greekis probably closer toDemoticthan 12-centuryMiddle Englishis tomodern spoken English".
Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizableGreek-speaking minority in Albanianear the Greek-Albanian border.A significant percentage of Albania's population has  knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to theGreco-Turkish Warand the resultingpopulation exchange in 1923a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed inTurkey, though very few remain today.A small Greek-speaking community is also found inBulgarianear the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizableGreek diasporawhich has notable communities in theUnited States,Australia,Canada,South Africa,Chile,Brazil,Argentina,Russia,Ukraine, theUnited Kingdom, and throughout theEuropean Union, especially inGermany.
Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout theEastern Mediterranean, in what are todaySouthern Italy,Turkey,Cyprus,Syria,Lebanon,Israel,Palestine,Egypt, andLibya; in the area of theBlack Sea, in what are today Turkey,Bulgaria,Romania,Ukraine,Russia,Georgia,Armenia, andAzerbaijan; and, to a lesser extent, in the WesternMediterraneanin and aroundcoloniessuch asMassalia,Monoikos, andMainake. It was also used as the official language of government and religion in theChristian Nubian kingdoms, for most of their history.
Greek, in its modern form, is theofficial languageof Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population.It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongsideTurkish) and theBritish Overseas TerritoryofAkrotiri and Dhekelia(alongsideEnglish).Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's24 official languages.Greek is recognized as aminority languagein Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts ofGjirokastërandSarandë.It is also an official minority language in the regions ofApuliaandCalabriain Italy. In the framework of theEuropean Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia,Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine.It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923Treaty of Lausanne.
Thephonology,morphology,syntax, andvocabularyof 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.
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 onlyoral vowelsand a fairly stable set of consonantalcontrasts. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (seeKoine Greek phonologyfor details):
In all its stages, themorphologyof Greek shows an extensive set ofproductivederivational affixes, a limited but productive system ofcompoundingand a richinflectionalsystem. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in thenominaland verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of thedative case(its functions being largely taken over by thegenitive). The verbal system has lost theinfinitive, thesynthetically-formed future, andperfect tensesand theoptative mood. Many have been replaced byperiphrastic(analytical) forms.
Pronouns show distinctions inperson(1st, 2nd, and 3rd),number(singular,dual, and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), andgender(masculine, feminine, and neuter), anddeclineforcase(from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language).Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Bothattributiveandpredicativeadjectivesagreewith the noun.
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 havesyntheticinflectional forms for:
Many aspects of thesyntaxof 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 themodern 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.
Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number ofborrowingsfrom the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks,some documented inMycenaean texts; they include a large number of Greektoponyms. The form and meaning of many words have changed.Loanwords(words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin,Venetian, andTurkish. 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 fromAlbanian,South Slavic(Macedonian/Bulgarian) andEastern Romance languages(AromanianandMegleno-Romanian).
Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include:mathematics,physics,astronomy,democracy,philosophy,athletics, theatre,rhetoric,baptism,evangelist, etc. Moreover, Greek words andword elementscontinue to be productive as a basis for coinages:anthropology,photography,telephony,isomer,biomechanics,cinematography, etc. Together withLatin words, they form thefoundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary; for example, all words ending in-logy('discourse'). There are manyEnglish words of Greek origin.
Greek is an independent branch of theIndo-Europeanlanguage family. The ancient language most closely related to it may beancient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinctdialect of Greekitself.Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regardsPhrygianas the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexicalisoglosses, with some being exclusive between them.Scholars have proposed aGraeco-Phrygiansubgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated.
Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related toArmenian(seeGraeco-Armenian) or theIndo-Iranian languages(seeGraeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found.In addition,Albanianhas also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with otherextinct languagesof the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termedPalaeo-Balkan, and Greek has a central position in it.
Linear B, attested as early as the late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek.It is basically asyllabary, which was finally deciphered byMichael VentrisandJohn Chadwickin the 1950s (its precursor,Linear A, has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language).The language of the Linear B texts,Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek.
Another similar system used to write the Greek language was theCypriot syllabary(also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediateCypro-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 thePhoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the lateIonicvariant, introduced for writing classicalAtticin 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 ofinkandquill.
The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase (majuscule) and lowercase (minuscule) form. The lettersigmahas an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word:
In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number ofdiacritical signs: three different accent marks (acute,grave, andcircumflex), originally denoting different shapes ofpitch accenton the stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks (roughandsmooth breathing), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and thediaeresis, 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 inhandwritingsaw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of the acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained intypography.
After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplifiedmonotonic 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 ofAncient Greek.
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 theano teleia(άνω τελεία). In Greek thecommaalso functions as asilent letterin a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishingό,τι(ó,ti, 'whatever') fromότι(óti, 'that').
Ancient Greek texts often usedscriptio 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.Boustrophedon, or bi-directional text, was also used in Ancient Greek.
Greek has occasionally been written in theLatin script, especially in areas underVenetian ruleor byGreek Catholics. The termFrankolevantinika/Φραγκολεβαντίνικαapplies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (becauseFrankos/Φράγκοςis an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe was under the control of theFrankish Empire).Frankochiotika/Φραγκοχιώτικα(meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island ofChios. Additionally, the termGreeklishis often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications.
The Latin script is nowadays used by theGreek-speakingcommunities ofSouthern Italy.
TheYevanicdialect was written byRomanioteand Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using theHebrew Alphabet.
In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known asGreek Aljamiado, someGreek Muslimsfrom Cretewrote theirCretan Greekin theArabic alphabet. The same happened among Epirote Muslims inIoannina. This also happened among Arabic-speakingByzantine riteChristians in theLevant(Lebanon, Palestine, andSyria).This usage is sometimes calledaljamiado, as whenRomance languagesare written in the Arabic alphabet.
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rightsin Greek:
Transcriptionof the example text intoLatin alphabet:
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rightsin English: