Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek
Ἑλληνική
Hellēnikḗ
Spoken in
Language extinction developed into Koiné Greek by the 4th century BC
Language family Indo-European
  • Hellenic
    • Ancient Greek
Writing system Greek alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 grc
ISO 639-3 grc
Linguasphere
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Beginning of Homer's Odyssey

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic (c. 9th–6th centuries BC), Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine ("common") or Biblical Greek, and its late period mutates imperceptibly into Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form it closely resembles Classical Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects.

The Ancient Greek language is one of the most prominent in human cultural history, as it was the language of the works of Homer and of the historians, playwrights and philosophers during the Athenian Golden Age. It has made a large contribution to the vocabulary of English and was a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. The New Latin used in the scientific binomial classification system continues today to draw vigorously from Ancient Greek vocabulary.

This article treats primarily the Archaic and Classical phases of the language – see also the articles on Mycenaean Greek and on Koine Greek.

Contents

Dialects of Ancient Greek

The origins, early forms, and early development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood, owing to the lack of contemporaneous evidence. There are several theories about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Indo-European language (not later than 2000 BC), and about 1200 BC. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period[1] is Mycenaean, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form.

History of the
Greek language
(see also: Greek alphabet)
Proto-Greek
Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)
Ancient Greek (c. 800–330 BC)
Dialects:
Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic,
Doric, Locrian, Pamphylian;
Homeric Greek.
Possibly Macedonian.
Koine Greek (c. 330 BC–330)*
Medieval Greek (330–1453)
Modern Greek (from 1453)
Dialects:
Cappadocian, Cheimarriotika, Cretan,
Cypriot, Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa,
Pontic, Tsakonian, Sarakatsanian, Maniot, Yevanic

*Dates (beginning with Ancient Greek) from Wallace, D. B. (1996). Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. p. 12. ISBN 0310218950. 

The major dialect groups of the Ancient Greek period can be assumed to have developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasion(s), and their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians; moreover, the invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians.

The ancient Greeks themselves considered there to be three major divisions of all the other Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cyprian, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation.

One standard formulation for the dialects is:[2]

Distribution of Greek dialects in the classical period.[3]
Western group:      Doric proper      Northwest Doric Greek Central group:      Aeolic      Arcado-Cypriot Eastern group:      Attic      Ionic
     Achaean Doric Greek
  • West Group
  • Aeolic Group
    • Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic
    • Thessalian
    • Boeotian
  • Ionic-Attic Group
    • Attica
    • Euboea and colonies in Italy
    • Cyclades
    • Asiatic Ionia
  • Arcadocypriot Greek
    • Arcadian
    • Cypriot

West vs. non-west Greek is the strongest marked and earliest division, with non-west in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcado-Cyprian, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cyprian vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-west is called East Greek.

The Arcado-Cyprian group apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.

Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree.

Pamphylian, spoken in a small area on the south-western coast of Asia Minor and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence.

Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: possibly a dialect of Greek; a sibling language to Greek; or a close cousin to Greek, and perhaps related to some extent, to Thracian and Phrygian languages. The Pella curse tablet is one of the many clear finds which support the idea that the Ancient Macedonian language is closely related to the Doric Greek dialect.

Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian, the dialect of Sparta), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian).

The Lesbian dialect was a member of the Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic sub-group.

All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects.

The dialects outside the Ionic group are known mainly from inscriptions, notable exceptions being fragments of the works of the poetess Sappho from the island of Lesbos and the poems of the Boeotian poet, Pindar.

After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 300's BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived to the present in the form of the Tsakonian dialect of Modern Greek, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 500's AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek.

Sound changes

Greek alphabet alpha-omega.svg
Greek alphabet
Αα Alpha Νν Nu
Ββ Beta Ξξ Xi
Γγ Gamma Οο Omicron
Δδ Delta Ππ Pi
Εε Epsilon Ρρ Rho
Ζζ Zeta Σσς Sigma
Ηη Eta Ττ Tau
Θθ Theta Υυ Upsilon
Ιι Iota Φφ Phi
Κκ Kappa Χχ Chi
Λλ Lambda Ψψ Psi
Μμ Mu Ωω Omega
Other characters
Digamma uc lc.svg Digamma Greek Stigma.svg Stigma
Greek Heta.svg Heta Greek San.svg San
Qoppa Q-and-Z-shaped.svg Qoppa Greek Sampi 2 shapes.svg Sampi
Greek diacritics

These sound changes since Proto-Greek affect most or all Ancient Greek dialects:

Note that /w/ and /j/, when following a vowel and not preceding a vowel, combined early on with the vowel to form a diphthong and were thus not lost.

The loss of /h/ and /w/ after a consonant were often accompanied by compensatory lengthening of a preceding vowel. The loss of /j/ after a consonant was accompanied by a large number of complex changes, including diphthongization of a preceding vowel or palatalization or other change to a directly preceding consonant. Some examples:

The results of vowel contraction were complex from dialect to dialect. Such contractions occur in the inflection of a number of different noun and verb classes and are among the most difficult aspects of Ancient Greek grammar. They were particularly important in the large class of contracted verbs, denominative verbs formed from nouns and adjectives ending in a vowel. (In fact, the reflex of contracted verbs in Modern Greek—i.e., the set of verbs derived from Ancient Greek contracted verbs—represents one of the two main classes of verbs in that language.)

Phonology

The pronunciation of Post-Classic Greek changed considerably from Ancient Greek, although the orthography still reflects features of the older language (see W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca – a guide to the pronunciation of Classical Greek). For a detailed description on the phonology changes from Ancient to Hellenistic periods of the Greek language, see the article on Koine Greek.

The examples below are intended to represent Attic Greek in the 5th century BC. Although ancient pronunciation can never be reconstructed with certainty, Greek in particular is very well documented from this period, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represented.

Vowels

Short vowels

  Front Back
  unrounded rounded unrounded rounded
Close /i/ /y/    
Mid /e/     /o/
Open /a/

Long vowels

  Front Back
  unrounded rounded unrounded rounded
Close /iː/ /yː/    
Close-mid /eː/     /oː/
Open-mid /ɛː/     /ɔː/
Open /aː/

/oː/ probably raised to [uː] by the fourth century BC.

Compensatory lengthening

There are different schemes for compensatory lengthening, depending on where it happens. The differences are in whether /a/ becomes [aː] or [ɛː], and whether /e/ and /o/ become the closed values [eː] and [oː] or the open ones [ɛː] and [ɔː].

Consonants

Front Back
Bilabial Dental Velar Glottal
Plosive /p/ /b/ /t̪/ /d̪/ /k/ /ɡ/  
Aspirated Plosive /pʰ/    /t̪ʰ/    /kʰ/     
Nasal /m/ /n/ ~ [ŋ]  
Trill   /r/ ~ [r̥]    
Fricative   /s/ ~ [z]   /h/
Lateral approximant   /l/    

[z] was an allophone of /s/, used before voiced consonants; [ŋ] occurred as an allophone of /n/ used before velars and as an allophone of /ɡ/ before nasals, while [r̥], written (ῥ), was probably a voiceless allophone of /r/ used word initially.

Consonant classes

There are three main classes of consonants:

Assimilation

In verb conjugation, one consonant often comes up against the other. Various sandhi rules apply.

Rules:

Morphology

Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In Ancient Greek nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven tenses: the present, future and imperfect tenses are imperfective in aspect; the aorist tense (perfective aspect); a present-perfect, pluperfect and future perfect (all with perfect aspect). Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. There are infinitives and participles corresponding to the finite combinations of tense, aspect and voice.

Augment

The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least) a prefix /e-/. This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist).

There are two kinds of augment in Greek, syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r, however, add er). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel:

Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei. The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels. In verbs with a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the prefix and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσεβάλoν in the aorist.

Following Homer's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry, especially epic poetry.

The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below.

Reduplication

Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (Note that a few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) There are three types of reduplication:

Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab) has the perfect stem eilēpha (not *lelēpha) because it was originally slambanō, with perfect seslēpha, becoming eilēpha through (semi-)regular change.

Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i. A nasal consonant appears after the reduplication in some verbs.[4]

Writing system

Ancient Greek was written in the Greek alphabet, with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of Ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks, interword spacing, modern punctuation, and sometimes mixed case, but these were all introduced later.

Example text

The following polytonic Greek text is from the Apology by Plato:

Ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Άθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων, οὐκ οἶδα: ἐγὼ δ' οὖν καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπ' αὐτῶν ὀλίγου ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπελαθόμην, οὕτω πιθανῶς ἔλεγον. Καίτοι ἀληθές γε ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οὐδὲν εἰρήκασιν.

Transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme:

Hóti mèn humeîs, ô ándres Athēnaîoi, pepónthate hupò tôn emôn katēgórōn, ouk oîda: egṑ d' oûn kaì autòs hup' autōn olígou emautoû epelathómēn, hoútō pithanôs élegon. Kaítoi alēthés ge hōs épos eipeîn oudèn eirḗkasin.

Translated into English:

What you, men of Athens, have learned from my accusers, I do not know: but I, for my part, nearly forgot who I was thanks to them since they spoke so persuasively. And yet, of the truth, they have spoken, one might say, nothing at all.

Another example, from the Iliad of Homer:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή·
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Modern use of Ancient Greek

The study of Ancient Greek in European countries in addition to Latin occupied an important place in the syllabus until the beginning of the 20th century. Ancient Greek is still taught as a compulsory or optional subject especially at traditional or élite schools throughout Europe, such as Public schools and Grammar schools in the United Kingdom, it's compulsory in the Liceo classico in Italy and optional in the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Germany (usually as a 3rd language after Latin and English, from age 14 till 18). In 2006/07, 15,000 pupils studied Ancient Greek in Germany according to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, and also 280,000 pupils in Italy. Ancient Greek is also taught at most major universities worldwide, often combined with Latin as part of Classics and will also be taught in state primary schools in the UK, to boost children’s language skills.[5][6][7]

Ancient Greek is often used in the coinage of modern technical terms in the European languages: see English words of Greek origin.

Modern authors rarely write in Ancient Greek, though Jan Křesadlo wrote some poetry and prose in Ancient Greek, some volumes of Asterix have been written in Attic Greek [1] and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been translated into Ancient Greek.[8]

Ancient Greek is also used by, mainly Greek, organizations and individuals who wish to denote their respect, admiration or preference to the use of this language. This use is sometimes considered graphical, nationalistic or funny. In any case, the fact that modern Greeks can still wholly or partly understand texts written in non-archaic forms of ancient Greek shows the affinity of modern Greek language to its ancestral predecessor.[9]

The 2010 science fiction television series Caprica, set on twelve distant worlds culturally related to Earth, uses Ancient Greek as a basis for the Tauron language.

See also

External links

Grammar learning

Ancient literature text

References

  1. ↑ Imprecisely attested and somewhat reconstructive due to its being written in an ill-fitting syllabary (Linear B).
  2. ↑ This one is to be found in recent versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which also lists the major works defining the subject.
  3. ↑ Roger D. Woodard (2008), "Greek dialects", in: The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. R. D. Woodard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.
  4. ↑ Palmer, Leonard (1996). The Greek Language. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 262. ISBN 0806128445. 
  5. ↑ Ancient Greek 'to be taught in state schools'
  6. ↑ Primaries go Greek to help teach English
  7. ↑ Now look, Latin's fine, but Greek might be even Beta
  8. ↑ Areios Potēr kai ē tu philosophu lithos, Bloomsbury 2004, ISBN 158234826X
  9. ↑ Akropolis World News, and Tech news in Ancient Greek
Ages of Greek
c. 2000 BC c. 1600–1100 BC c. 800–300 BC c. 300 BC – AD 330 c. 330–1453 since 1453

Proto-Greek

Ancient Greek

Medieval Greek