Greek language

Greek, or ελληνικά in Modern Greek, is an ancient and important language that belongs to the Indo-European language family. It has the longest history of any language in this family, with written records dating back more than 3,400 years. The Greeks have lived in many places for thousands of years, including Greece, Cyprus, and parts of Italy, Albania, and Turkey.

The Greek language has greatly shaped the Western world. Many important works of literature, science, and philosophy were first written in ancient Greek. For example, the famous epic poems of Homer and the New Testament of the Christian Bible were originally in Greek. During ancient times, Greek was the most common language spoken across the Mediterranean world.

Today, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and it is one of the official languages of the European Union. Over 13 million people speak Greek as their first language. Many English words come from Greek roots, and Greek continues to help create new scientific words around the world.

History

Main article: History of Greek

Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, maybe even earlier. The oldest writing we have is a Linear B clay tablet from Messenia, dating between 1450 and 1350 BC. This makes Greek the world's oldest recorded living language.

The Greek language is divided into different time periods. First was Proto-Greek, the early form before it split into many types. Then came Mycenaean Greek, used by the Mycenaean civilisation and written in the Linear B script. After that was Ancient Greek, spoken during the Archaic and Classical times and known across the Roman Empire. Later, Koine Greek developed, mixing different styles and becoming a common language across many lands, from Egypt to far-off places. This was the language used when Christianity began, as the Apostles shared their message.

The language kept changing over time into what we call Medieval Greek and finally into the Modern Greek spoken today. Even with these changes, Greek has kept strong ties to its ancient roots, and people today still feel connected to the writings from long ago.

Geographic distribution

Further information: Greeks and Greek diaspora

Greek is spoken by at least 13 million people today. Most live in Greece and Cyprus, but there are also Greek speakers in Albania near the border with Greece. Many people in Albania know Greek because of historical connections and movement between the countries.

In the past, Greek was spoken in many more places, including areas that are now Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, and around the Black Sea. Today, Greek communities can be found all over the world, especially in the United States, Australia, Canada, and many parts of Europe.

Official status

Today, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus. Because Greece and Cyprus are part of the European Union, Greek is one of the official languages used by the organization. It is also recognized as a minority language in Albania, Italy, and several other countries.

Characteristics

See also: Ancient Greek grammar, Koine Greek grammar, and Modern Greek grammar

The Greek language has kept many of its old sounds, shapes, and word uses while also changing in some ways over time. People often split Greek into different time periods, but these splits are not exact because Greek has always been valued, and learned people often used older forms.

Phonology

Main articles: Ancient Greek phonology, Koine Greek phonology, and Modern Greek phonology

Greek words have had a steady shape over many years. They allow complex beginnings to words but only simple endings. Greek uses only mouth sounds and a stable group of consonant sounds. Big changes in sounds happened during the time of the Hellenistic and Roman periods (see Koine Greek phonology for details):

• change from a pitch accent to a stress accent.
• simplifying vowels and two-sound vowel groups: losing the difference in vowel length, turning most two-sound vowel groups into single sounds, and shifting several vowels toward the sound /i/ (iotacism).
• turning the sounds /pʰ/ and /tʰ/ into /f/ and /θ/, respectively; the similar change of /kʰ/ to /x/ may have happened later (these sound changes are not shown in writing, and both older and newer sounds are written with φ, θ, and χ).
• turning the voiced sounds /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ into their softer counterparts /β/ (later /v/), /ð/, and /ɣ/.

Morphology

In all its stages, Greek shows many ways to change words to show meaning, a limited but useful way to combine words, and a rich system for changing words to show their role. While its word shapes have stayed mostly the same, there have been changes, especially in how nouns and verbs work. The big change in noun shapes since the classical time was stopping the use of the dative case (its jobs were mostly taken over by the genitive case). The verb system lost the infinitive, the made-up future, perfect tenses, and the optative mood. Many of these were replaced by new, built-up forms.

Nouns and adjectives

Pronouns show differences in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual, and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and change for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the differences except for a person. Both describing and matching adjectives match the noun.

Verbs

The ways verbs change have mostly stayed the same over the history of the language but with big changes in the number of differences inside each way and how they are shown. Greek verbs have built-up ways to change for:

Syntax

Many parts of how Greek sentences are put together have stayed the same: verbs only match with their subject, the use of the remaining cases is mostly the same (nominative for subjects and describing words, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for owners), articles come before nouns, word connectors are mostly adding words before, describing clauses come after the noun they describe and describing words start the clause. But, the changes in word shapes also show up in how sentences are built, and there are big differences between the way sentences were built in ancient times and in the modern form of the language. Ancient Greek used lots of parts that act like verbs and ways to build sentences without using a verb ending, and the modern form does not use these at all (using a lot of new built-up ways to build sentences instead) and uses parts that act like verbs more carefully. Losing the dative led to using word connectors to show indirect objects (and using the genitive to mark these directly as well). Ancient Greek usually put the verb last, but the normal order in the modern language is verb–subject–object or subject–verb–object.

Vocabulary

Modern Greek gets most of its words from Ancient Greek, which is an Indo-European language, but also includes some words from the people who lived in Greece before the Proto-Greeks arrived, some shown in Mycenaean texts; these include a large number of Greek place names. The shape and meaning of many words have changed. Words from other languages (called loanwords) have come into Greek, mostly from Latin, Venetian, Ottoman Turkish and Semitic languages. In the older times of Greek, words from other languages took on Greek ways to change, leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, usually do not change their shape; other modern borrowings come from Slavic languages, Albanian and Eastern Romance languages (Romanian and Aromanian).

Loanwords in other languages

Further information: English words of Greek origin and List of Greek and Latin roots in English

Many words from the Greek language are used in other languages, such as English. Some common examples are mathematics, physics, astronomy, democracy, philosophy, athletics, theatre, rhetoric, baptism, evangelist, and more. Greek words and word elements are still used to create new terms today, like anthropology, photography, telephony, isomer, biomechanics, and cinematography. Together with Latin words, they help form the basis of many scientific and technical words around the world, especially those ending in ‑logy (meaning 'study of'). There are many English words of Greek origin.

Classification

Greek is its own special branch of the big family of Indo-European languages. Most people think Greek stands alone in this group, but some believe there are other similar languages close to it.

Some think Ancient Macedonian might have been a close cousin to Greek, while others say it was just a different form of Greek. There’s also a language called Phrygian that seems to share some special traits with Greek.

Scholars wonder if Greek might be closely related to languages like Armenian or Indo-Iranian languages, but they haven’t found strong proof yet. Some also think Albanian might be linked to Greek in an even bigger group of old Balkan languages.

Writing system

See also: Greek Braille

Linear B

Main article: Linear B

Linear B was the first way to write Greek, used as early as the late 15th century BC. It is a type of writing where each symbol stands for a syllable. Experts figured out what it meant in the 1950s. The words written in Linear B are the oldest form of the Greek language that we know about.

Cypriot syllabary

Main article: Cypriot syllabary

Another way to write Greek was the Cypriot syllabary. It is similar to Linear B but uses different signs to show sounds. People in Cyprus used it from the 11th century BC until they started using the normal Greek letters.

Greek alphabet

Main articles: Greek alphabet and Greek orthography

Greek has been written with its own special letters since around the 9th century BC. Someone changed the letters used by the Phoenicians to make them work for Greek, adding letters for sounds that the Phoenicians did not use. Today we use a version of these letters that came from a place called Ionic, starting in 403 BC. At first, only big letters were used. Later, small letters were added to make writing faster.

The Greek alphabet has 24 letters, each with a big and a small shape. The letter sigma has a special small shape used at the end of words.

Diacritics

Main article: Greek diacritics

Besides the letters, Greek also uses special marks above or beside the letters. These marks used to show how the words were said and other details. Today, most of these marks are not used. Now we mainly use one mark to show how a word is said and another to show when a vowel is said alone.

Punctuation

In Greek, the question mark looks like the English semicolon. There is a special mark called ano teleia (άνω τελεία) that does the work of the colon and semicolon. The comma can also act like a quiet sound in some words.

Old Greek writing sometimes had no spaces between words. And sometimes writing went back and forth across the page.

Latin alphabet

Greek has sometimes been written with the letters we use in English, especially in places ruled by Venice or by people who followed the Catholic religion. This is called Frankolevantinika when it is used by Greek Catholics. Frankochiotika is the name for this kind of writing used on the island of Chios. Today, some Greek-speaking people in Southern Italy still use the Latin letters to write Greek.

Hebrew alphabet

The Yevanic dialect was written by some Jewish groups using the Hebrew Alphabet.

Arabic alphabet

Some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their language using the Arabic alphabet. This also happened in places like Ioannina, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Jordan.

Example text

Here is 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.

You can see the Transcription of this text using the 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.

In English, this means:

"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."