Greek language

The Greek language has an important role in the development of the Western world, including the early dissemination of New Testament teachings by the apostles in Christianity. The canon of ancient Greek literature consists of very important works, including the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the Platonic dialogues and writings of Aristotle.

The Greek language is considered the oldest recorded living language, dating back to 3000 BCE. It is divided into four periods: Proto-Greek, Mycenaean Greek, Ancient Greek, and Koine. Though the Greek language has undergone many changes that resulted from interacting with other cultures, a great deal of effort has been made to restore and preserve the purity of the language from ancient times. As a result, the language spoken in Greece in modern times is very similar to that of Ancient Greek and Koine Greek, with only a few vernacular (popular language) exceptions.

Brief History

The earliest Greek, or Proto-Greek, is unrecorded but deduced to be the earliest ancestor of all Greek derivatives. Mycenaean Greek was the language of the Mycenaeans and was recorded on Linear B tablets from 1450 to 1350 BCE. There are several dialects of Ancient Greek, ranging from the archaic and classical periods of the ancient Greek civilization. The main dialects were Doric (northern Greece), Aeolic (Aeolis, Thessaly, and Boeotia), and Ionic (islands of Aegean and Asia Minor). Ancient Greek was used in the Roman Empire and gradually disappeared by the Middle Ages, only kept in use by Byzantine cultures (Medieval Greek). It was reintroduced throughout Europe after the fall of Constantinople. Koine Greek (Hellenistic Greek) was the dialect of Athens and is the parent of the first common Greek dialect. The use of the Athenian dialect diffused over the eastern Mediterranean and was used by the armies of Alexander the Great. After Alexander the Great conquered Rome, citizens became bilingual in Greek and Latin.

Christianity was first spread through Koine Greek, as the apostles used this dialect to preach to the Greek-speaking countries. The first translation of the Bible was through this form of Greek, from the Septuagint. Many of the literary works of the fifth century BCE were written in Ionic dialect, including the writings of physician Hippocrates and Herodotus, the historian. The Homeric poems were also written primarily in Ionic Greek. The Attic dialect was derived from the Ionic dialect and eventually superseded all other dialects to become the official language.

In the early nineteenth century, the Greek language bisected into two types: Dimotiki (vernacular form) and Katharevousa (purified), which is a fused version of Dimotiki and ancient Greek. In 1976, Dmiotiki became the official language of Greece, preceding the Standard Modern Greek, which is officially used in education and communication.

Overview

The Greek language is a member of the Indo-European family of languages (Germanic, Italic, Baltic, Lithuanian, and Slavic), which are used in Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, southern Balkans, southern Italy, Albania, and Cyprus. It is considered the oldest documented language currently known. The Greek alphabet, which arose from the Phoenician script, has been used for most of its history. In 1952, during an excavation in Crete and on the Grecian mainland, tablets with Linear B script were discovered. Linear B script is a syllabic script that was used by the Mycenaean civilization to write in the earliest form of Greek, or Proto-Greek. It is believed to predate the Greek alphabet by several centuries.

Once Alexander the Great conquered Rome and Macedonian rule expanded in the fourth century BCE, Greek settlements began to appear in the Middle East. Greek-speaking (Attic dialect) settlers helped to spread the language throughout the region, and it became a minor language. As the Greeks interacted with other cultures, many linguistic changes occurred. This marked the period of change from Attic to Koine Greek. Koine Greek was the official language of the court and literature and eventually split into the literary Koine form and the vernacular form. The literary form was utilized by the upper classes, especially for expressing abstract thought in philosophical, social, and physical sciences. The vernacular form was less influenced by Hellenistic thought; it changed to absorb the vocabulary of Middle Eastern languages. However, a great deal of effort was made to bring the vernacular back to a pure form that resembled the Ancient Greek.

In the twenty-first century, Modern Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of twenty-four official languages in the European Union. It is spoken by approximately thirteen million people in Greece, Albania, and Cyprus. It is also a minority language in southern Italy, Albania, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary. Greek and Latin together compose the international scientific vocabulary, and many new words are formed from Greek roots.

Grammatically, there are few differences between Modern and Ancient Greek. The two main differences are declension and verbal conjugation. With regard to declension, Modern Greek, both purist and vernacular, has discontinued the dual form of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, as well as the dative case (only used in idiomatic expressions). Specific verb forms that once denoted the varied tenses of Ancient Greek have been replaced with auxiliary verbs. Imperative forms of verbs used by Ancient Greek have been replaced the subjunctive form of the verb.

Modern Greek vernacular has absorbed many words from Turkish, Italian, and French languages. Purists in the Greek culture refuse to use these foreign words and instead champion the formation of new words that are analogous to Ancient Greek expressions. Hence, in addition to being one of the world's oldest documented languages, Greek will succeed in maintaining the richest part of its culture for many years to come.

Bibliography

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Hadas, Moses. A History of Greek Literature. Columbia University Press, 2013.

“History of the Greek Language.” Greek Language and Linguistics, www.greek-language.com/History.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

Holton, David, et al. Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2012.

Horrocks, Geoffrey. Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers. 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2014.

Janse, Mark. "Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language." Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word, edited by J. N. Adams et al., Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 332-390.

Porter, Stanley E., and D. A. Carson, editors. Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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Robins, Robert Henry. A Short History of Linguistics. Routledge, 2013.