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129-517: Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of

258-872: A / , ⟨ ε, αι ⟩ / e / , ⟨ η, ι, υ, ει, οι, υι ⟩ / i / , ⟨ ο, ω ⟩ / o / , and ⟨ ου ⟩ / u / . The digraphs ⟨ αυ ⟩ , ⟨ ευ ⟩ and ⟨ ηυ ⟩ are pronounced /av/ , /ev/ , and /iv/ respectively before vowels and voiced consonants, and /af/ , /ef/ and /if/ respectively before voiceless consonants. The Greek letters ⟨ φ ⟩ , ⟨ β ⟩ , ⟨ θ ⟩ , and ⟨ δ ⟩ are pronounced / f / , / v / , / θ / , and / ð / respectively. The letters ⟨ γ ⟩ and ⟨ χ ⟩ are pronounced / ɣ / and / x / , respectively. All those letters represent fricatives in Modern Greek, but they were used for occlusives with

387-480: A Grammarian, Philologist, Schoolmaster, Metrician and Poet . After pointing out errors and solecisms in Soutsos's own language, Asopios went on to defend Korais's general 'simplifying' approach, but with the addition of his own selection of archaisms. The exchange sparked a small war of pamphlets from other pedants, competing to expose inconsistencies, grammatical errors, and phrases literally translated from French in

516-575: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with 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 . 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,

645-399: A certain usage, then this was sufficient justification for adopting it; the question whether the λαός could actively handle such a usage was usually ignored." (emphasis in the original) (Mackridge (2009), p. 185) In practice, even after fifty years of exposure to them and given several years of Ancient Greek grammar lessons in primary school, the 'common people' had adopted none of

774-587: A common evolutionary path from Koine and have retained a high degree of mutual intelligibility to the present. As shown in Ptochoprodromic and Acritic poems, Demotic Greek was the vernacular already before the 11th century and called the "Roman" language of the Byzantine Greeks , notably in peninsular Greece , the Greek islands , coastal Asia Minor , Constantinople , and Cyprus . Today,

903-557: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in

1032-560: 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 ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on

1161-537: A foreign language. It is also often 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 ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near

1290-411: A group of conservative and educated nobles who supported the archaic language and were the most important critics of the language of the people. This discussion later became crucial when it was to be decided which one should be the single language of the modern Greek state, which was yet to be founded. Adamantios Korais (1748–1833) influenced the further discussion considerably. While being a supporter of

1419-504: A language that the nation does not understand, [with the result that] it remains untutored, ignorant and barbarous, and consequently betrayed by them". A decade later in Athens, among the logiόtatoi , even the young Georgios Hatzidakis (newly appointed assistant professor of linguistics at Athens University, and later to become Katharevousa 's greatest defender) had come to recognize the problem. In one of his earliest published pieces (in

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1548-443: A legal standard of precision exactly what was meant by " Katharevousa glossa " (at the time, Katharevousa was still an adjective). In fact, the only mention of language in legislation appeared in the educational laws of 1834 and 1836, which established that Ancient Greek (not Katharevousa ) should continue to be the only language of the readers and textbooks used in schools. There was also no official body to make such decisions: "It

1677-400: A patriotic and spiritual dimension. "All other nations have a present. We do not. ... By despising and renouncing our language, we are despising and renouncing our present." Two years later, Konemenos published Once More on Language , in which he answered his critics and developed his ideas. To those who complained that his prose did not sound like genuine Demotic speech, he explained that he

1806-433: A prototypical velar, between a velar [ ɣ ] and an uvular [ ʁ ] (transcribed ɣ̄ ). The letter ⟨ ξ ⟩ stands for the sequence /ks/ and ⟨ ψ ⟩ for /ps/ . The digraphs ⟨ γγ ⟩ and ⟨ γκ ⟩ are generally pronounced [ ɡ ] , but are fronted to [ ɟ ] before front vowels ( / e / and / i / ) and tend to be pronounced [ɡ̄] before

1935-646: A satirical dialogue between "the Editor" (in Demotic) and "a Pedant" (in archaic Katharevousa ) which raised many of the issues central to the Language Question. The Editor defends his decision to value and preserve the songs, while the Pedant complains about their language, making himself look rather ridiculous in the process. Manousos ended his preface with a long quotation from Ioannis Vilaras in support of

2064-562: A search for internal correctness or at least consistency, and in part by a feeling that since Ancient Greek was the ideal language, any approach to it could only be regarded as progress. Not only did new writers use more archaic forms than their predecessors; individual authors also tended to use more archaisms as their careers advanced—sometimes even in successive editions of the same work. Soutsos first published his ground-breaking Katharevousa dramatic poem "The Wayfarer" ( Ὁ Ὁδοιπόρος ) in 1831, using much Demotic vocabulary and grammar. However,

2193-522: A separate language because of this. Greco-Australian is an Australian dialect of Greek that is spoken by the Greek diaspora of Australia, including Greek immigrants living in Australia and Australians of Greek descent. A series of radical sound changes starting in Koine Greek has led to a phonological system in Modern Greek that is significantly different from that of Ancient Greek. Instead of

2322-437: A standardized variety of Demotic Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus, and is referred to as "Standard Modern Greek", or less strictly simply as "Greek", "Modern Greek", or "Demotic". Demotic Greek comprises various regional varieties with minor linguistic differences, mainly in phonology and vocabulary. Due to the high degree of mutual intelligibility of these varieties, Greek linguists refer to them as "idioms" of

2451-467: A verb, such as augmentation and reduplication , and has lost some patterns of noun declension and some distinct forms in the declensions. Most of these features are shared with other languages spoken in the Balkan peninsula (see Balkan sprachbund ), although Greek does not show all typical Balkan areal features, such as the postposed article. Because of the influence of Katharevousa, however, Demotic

2580-550: A wider "Demotic dialect", known as "Koine Modern Greek" ( Koiní Neoellinikí - 'common Neo-Hellenic'). Most English-speaking linguists however refer to them as "dialects", emphasizing degrees of variation only when necessary. Demotic Greek varieties are divided into two main groups, Northern and Southern. The main distinguishing feature common to Northern variants is a set of standard phonological shifts in unaccented vowel phonemes: [o] becomes [u] , [e] becomes [i] , and [i] and [u] are dropped. The dropped vowels' existence

2709-487: Is a Greek dialect of central Turkey of the same fate as Pontic; its speakers settled in mainland Greece after the Greek genocide (1919–1921) and the later Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek dialects earlier, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Asia Minor in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so developed several radical features, such as

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2838-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout

2967-478: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek 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

3096-475: Is an almost extinct language of Romaniote Jews . The language was already in decline for centuries until most of its speakers were killed in the Holocaust . Afterward, the language was mostly kept by remaining Romaniote emigrants to Israel , where it was displaced by modern Hebrew . Tsakonian ( Τσακωνικά ) is spoken in its full form today only in a small number of villages around the town of Leonidio in

3225-537: Is being devised at present ... it is the sole remaining shoot on the venerable old tree of our nationality". When (after the unification of 1864) Valaoritis moved to Athens to take a seat in the national Greek Parliament, his high reputation went with him; and when in 1872 the university commissioned him to write a commemorative poem, it described his language as "sweetly spoken and entirely national". Although this referred only to its use in poetry, Athenian attitudes to Demotic had now begun to change, particularly in

3354-445: Is characteristic of the Greek case that, while language reforms in other new states were undertaken with the help of official and semi-official bodies, Katharevousa was developed in an empirical and unsystematic fashion, without congresses, commissions, and academies, and with little official support." (Mackridge (2009), p. 164) Korais himself (though an admirer of the legislated clarity and precision of French) explicitly rejected

3483-530: Is divided into groups that include: Demotic Greek has officially been taught in monotonic Greek script since 1982. Katharevousa ( Καθαρεύουσα ) is a sociolect promoted in the 19th century at the foundation of the modern Greek state, as a compromise between Classical Greek and modern Demotic. It was the official language of modern Greece until 1976. Katharevousa is written in polytonic Greek script. Also, while Demotic Greek contains loanwords from Turkish, Italian, Latin, and other languages, these have for

3612-428: Is extremely rare, but could be heard in literary and scholarly words or when reading ancient texts (by a few readers); normally it retains its "original" pronunciation [ŋk] only in the trigraph ⟨ γκτ ⟩ , where ⟨ τ ⟩ prevents the sonorization of ⟨ κ ⟩ by ⟨ γ ⟩ (hence [ŋkt] ). Modern Greek is largely a synthetic language . Modern Greek and Albanian are

3741-425: Is implicit, and may affect surrounding phonemes: for example, a dropped [i] palatalizes preceding consonants, just like an [i] that is pronounced. Southern variants do not exhibit these phonological shifts. Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian ( Constantinople ), Epirote , Macedonian , Thessalian , Thracian , Northern Euboean , Sporades , Samos , Smyrna , and Sarakatsanika . The Southern category

3870-503: Is largely unique, but several of the vowels can be spelt in multiple ways. Thus reading is easy but spelling is difficult. A number of diacritical signs were used until 1982, when they were officially dropped from Greek spelling as no longer corresponding to the modern pronunciation of the language. Monotonic orthography is today used in official usage, in schools and for most purposes of everyday writing in Greece. Polytonic orthography, besides being used for older varieties of Greek,

3999-415: Is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki ,

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4128-406: Is necessary, to avoid the "mob rule" of undisciplined and uncorrected Demotic, but ultimate authority still lies with the people, whose judgement over the long term decides which works and writers are "elected" as the classics to be emulated. In line with these principles, Korais took great pains not to appear to be a one-man Académie . Much of his writing on the language question was published in

4257-827: Is not commonly used in its purest form. Archaisms are still widely used, especially in writing and in more formal speech, as well as in some everyday expressions, such as the dative εντάξει ('okay', literally 'in order') or the third person imperative ζήτω ! ('long live!'). The following is a sample text in Modern Greek of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations ): Άρθρο 1: Arthro 1: Árthro 1: [ˈarθro ˈena ‖ Όλοι Oloi Óli ˈoli οι oi i i άνθρωποι anthropoi ánthropi Greek language question The Greek language question ( Greek : το γλωσσικό ζήτημα , to glossikó zítima )

4386-514: 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 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . 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

4515-763: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Modern Greek During most of

4644-569: Is still used in book printing, especially for academic and belletristic purposes, and in everyday use by some conservative writers and elderly people. The Greek Orthodox Church continues to use polytonic and the late Christodoulos of Athens and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece have requested the reintroduction of polytonic as the official script. The Greek vowel letters and digraphs with their pronunciations are: ⟨ α ⟩ /

4773-761: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient 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 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'). 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. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,

4902-469: 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

5031-518: Is written in the Greek alphabet, which has 24 letters, each with a capital and lowercase (small) form. The letter sigma additionally has a special final form. There are two diacritical symbols, the acute accent which indicates stress and the diaeresis marking a vowel letter as not being part of a digraph . Greek has a mixed historical and phonemic orthography , where historical spellings are used if their pronunciation matches modern usage. The correspondence between consonant phonemes and graphemes

5160-670: The Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from

5289-778: The Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the 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 . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek

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5418-845: The Dictionary of Our Hellenic Dialect Interpreted into Ancient Greek and French . Here, the definitions and explanations were all given in Ancient Greek and French, used as precision instruments to dissect "grocers' style" Demotic, which was treated more as an object of study than a medium of communication. Vyzantios concluded his dictionary with a list of words of foreign origin (many of them Turkish) that were to be expelled from Demotic as part of its "purification". In his preface he argued that "it would be ridiculous to express scholarly and scientific ideas in 'grocers' style'; for this reason, in order to be written down, our spoken language must be corrected according to that of our ancient forebears:

5547-617: The Dorian Greek settlers who colonised the area from Sparta and Corinth in 700 BC. It has received significant Koine Greek influence through Byzantine Greek colonisers who re-introduced Greek language to the region, starting with Justinian 's conquest of Italy in late antiquity and continuing through the Middle Ages. Griko and Demotic are mutually intelligible to some extent, but the former shares some common characteristics with Tsakonian. Yevanic ( יעואניקה , Γεβανικά )

5676-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It

5805-483: The Greek Orthodox Church who worshiped in Koine Greek and shared much Greek culture even though they spoke other languages such as Albanian or Aromanian at home. At this early stage of the Greek state, it was far from clear how large its borders would ultimately be and whether citizenship would depend on language, religion, or simple residence. It was recognized, though, that if Demotic had become

5934-512: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. 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. Linear B , attested as early as

6063-657: The Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , 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 of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of

6192-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in

6321-467: The "common people" nor the State would ever be using Ancient Greek as their everyday language. Katharevousa thus lost one of its justifications, as a necessary halfway stage in the natural restoration of the ancient language. It would now have to stand on its own merits as the practical written language of a modern state. It was also clear that something had to be done to loosen the grip of Ancient Greek on

6450-486: 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

6579-494: 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. Greek has been written in

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6708-629: 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: 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

6837-683: 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 the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community

6966-483: The Ionian Islands , Valaoritis had become famous for his passionately patriotic poems, written in vigorous Demotic with dramatic dialogue and a style recalling Greek folk-song. But (in an 1857 foreword, just after the Soutsos controversy) he had also mounted a strong defence of the general use of "the language of the people" in poetry: "Born automatically, it is not the work of art, unlike the [ Katharevousa ] that

7095-653: The Islands) became one of the first to break with this convention when he published The Question of the Language in Corfu. Writing in fluent Demotic prose, Konemenos presented what was in effect a Demoticist manifesto, arguing that the spoken language should become the basis of the national written language. "Language ... is a means, not an end", he wrote, and should be judged on its effectiveness in conveying meaning and emotion. "Vulgarity and impropriety" are properties of

7224-630: The Italian-based Mediterranean Lingua Franca of the Levantine ports. In Athens, the new capital, now that Katharevousa had been accepted for official purposes, most hopes for the future were concentrated on "ennobling" and "correcting" everyday speech; outside the Ionian Islands (which would not become part of the Greek state until 1864), very few now argued for the use of "uncorrected" Demotic as

7353-602: The Modern Greek period, the language existed in a situation of diglossia , with regional spoken dialects existing side by side with learned, more archaic written forms, as with the vernacular and learned varieties ( Dimotiki and Katharevousa ) that co-existed in Greece throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Varieties of Modern Greek include Demotic, Katharevousa, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan, Southern Italian, Yevanic, Tsakonian and Greco-Australian. Strictly speaking, Demotic or Dimotiki ( Δημοτική ), refers to all popular varieties of Modern Greek that followed

7482-655: The Ottomans in 1461. Thereafter, the Crimean Greek state continued to exist as the independent Greek Principality of Theodoro . The Greek-speaking inhabitants of Crimea were deported by Catherine the Great to resettle in the new city of Mariupol after the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) to escape the then Muslim-dominated Crimea. Mariupolitan's main features have certain similarities with both Pontic (e.g.

7611-614: The Pontic villages of Turkey.) It derives from Hellenistic and Medieval Koine and preserves characteristics of Ionic due to ancient colonizations of the region. Pontic evolved as a separate dialect from Demotic Greek as a result of the region's isolation from the Greek mainstream after the Fourth Crusade fragmented the Byzantine Empire into separate kingdoms (see Empire of Trebizond ). Cappadocian ( Καππαδοκικά )

7740-404: 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),

7869-691: The ancient grammar to the current language. Even Soutsos, however, had limits. He left out the dual number, and the logical connectives γάρ 'for' and οὖν 'therefore', as being too far from modern usage; and in yet another compromise, he admitted that the public were not yet ready for the ancient negative particle οὐ , while also recommending that the Demotic equivalent δεν should be avoided, thus leaving his followers with no easy way of writing 'not'. The proposal drew an immediate counter-attack from Soutsos's bitter academic rival Konstantinos Asopios : The Soutseia, or Mr Panagiotis Soutsos Scrutinized as

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7998-401: The ancient language alone is prescribed" for teaching in primary schools; it was the only consistent set of rules with a status that all could agree on. Meanwhile, although the details were under continual dispute, the drift towards the archaic continued; to men who visualized the language as a magnificent building in need of restoration, the structure would always seem ugly and incomplete until

8127-401: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (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. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of

8256-458: The archaic usages. They were happy to use newly coined Katharevousa terms for modern inventions, and some (though not all) alternatives for loanwords, but the trickle-down of Ancient Greek grammatical forms into the language of ordinary people that Korais and Vyzantios had hoped for simply did not happen. It seemed that the scholars had greatly overestimated the influence of the written word on everyday speech patterns. In fact, instead of closing

8385-414: The back vowels ( / o / and / u / ). When these digraphs are preceded by a vowel, they are pronounced [ŋɡ] and [ɲɟ] before front vowels ( / e / and / i / ) and [ŋ̄ɡ̄] before the back ( / o / and / u / ). The digraph ⟨ γγ ⟩ may be pronounced [ŋɣ] in some words ( [ɲʝ] before front vowels and [ŋ̄ɣ̄] before back ones). The pronunciation [ŋk] for the digraph ⟨ γκ ⟩

8514-455: The complex vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a simple system of five vowels. This came about through a series of mergers, especially towards /i/ ( iotacism ). Modern Greek consonants are plain (voiceless unaspirated) stops , voiced stops , or voiced and unvoiced fricatives . Modern Greek has not preserved length in vowels or consonants. Modern Greek

8643-419: The content, not the language itself; and since even the [lόgioi] Error: {{Lang}}: Non-latn text/Latn script subtag mismatch ( help ) –the learned–were by then accepting the use of Demotic in poetry, it had proved capable of conveying even the most sublime concepts. "I believe", he continued, "that our modern language is a perfection of the ancient." For Konemenos, as for so many others, the language question had

8772-455: The dead of our paternal language is our sweetest dream." Rangavis himself continued to write ever more archaic virtuoso works, notably Theodora (1884). But in the event, he was to be one of the last archaists in Greek literature, and Mackridge evaluated Theodora as "remarkable and futile". Almost all of these writers "subscribed to the frequently expressed argument that as long as the λαός (the common people) could passively comprehend

8901-609: The earliest attestations of the dialect. Ruméika ( Ρωμαίικα ) or Mariupolitan Greek is a dialect spoken in about 17 villages around the northern coast of the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine and Russia . Mariupolitan Greek is closely related to Pontic Greek and evolved from the dialect of Greek spoken in Crimea , which was a part of the Byzantine Empire and then the Pontic Empire of Trebizond , until that latter state fell to

9030-637: The editions of 1842 and then 1853 contained progressively more archaic language. However, the question of exactly which archaisms to re-introduce provoked much acrimonious bickering among scholars. This flared up in 1853, when Panagiotis Soutsos published New School of the Written Word, or Resurrection of the Ancient Greek Language Understood by All . Breaking with the convention of respecting Korais (while still making archaizing "corrections"), in this pamphlet he rejected

9159-399: The educational system. Accordingly, in 1881, provision was officially made for the teaching of some Katharevousa in Greek primary schools. It was the first time that anything other than Ancient Greek had been allowed in education. However, change was slow; some Ancient Greek continued to be taught in primary schools until 1917, and secondary schools were allowed nothing else until 1909. It

9288-404: The following text: The discussion began at the end of the 18th century, as Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806), Lambros Photiadis , St. Kommitas and Neophytos Doukas , who were proponents of a more archaic language, and Voulgaris's students Iosipos Moisiodax (1725–1800) and Dimitrios Katartzis (ca. 1725-1807), who proposed a simpler language, began to voice their opinions. The phanariots were

9417-474: The gap between Ancient and Modern Greek must be eliminated by writing in a more archaic language than that which is spoken, so that readers will familiarize themselves with the ancient forms." Like Korais, he was confident that "poets and other writers will control the future development of the language" and that Demotic speakers would follow their lead and start to "purify" their own speech. The majority, however, now followed Korais in recognizing with regret that

9546-470: The gap between Demotic and Ancient Greek was now too large to be bridged this way in one step. After all, Demotic speakers had been exposed to Ancient Greek in church and school for centuries without any noticeable trickle down; the languages had simply grown too far apart for any such diffusion to be possible. It was hoped now that Katharevousa would be close enough to Demotic for its "purifying" influence to work. As Korais had written in 1804: "Root out from

9675-485: The gap by gradually pulling Demotic up to its own level, Katharevousa was moving away from the spoken language, widening the gap and leaving the "common people" behind. As a result, while many Greeks could read (or at least puzzle out) the Katharevousa in official use, only a minority could now write it with any pleasure or confidence. It was far from the universal standard language of Korais's vision; writing itself

9804-491: The idea of a top-down imposition of language standards by a body modelled on the Académie française . As a secular republican in language as well as in politics, he rejected this "tyranny" and favoured an informal "parliamentary" model; the poets and prose writers are the "legislators", "elected" by the size of their readership, and they have a duty to guide the language wisely by their majority opinion and their example. Guidance

9933-439: 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

10062-456: The invitation of the state) vocabularies appropriate to their fields; the more "official" the field, the more like Ancient Greek the new vocabulary appeared. For example, the newly formed Royal Hellenic Navy introduced the use of Ancient Greek nautical terms although civilian seamen continued to use the traditional ones, many of them loanwords from Italian, owing to the centuries-old maritime influence of Venice and Genoa, and with borrowings from

10191-512: The lack of synizesis of -ía, éa ) and the northern varieties of the core dialects (e.g. the northern vocalism). Southern Italian or Italiot ( Κατωιταλιώτικα ) comprises both Calabrian and Griko varieties, spoken by around 15 villages in the regions of Calabria and Apulia . The Southern Italian dialect is the last living trace of Hellenic elements in Southern Italy that once formed Magna Graecia . Its origins can be traced to

10320-452: The language of the people, Korais sought to cleanse it from elements that he considered to be too "vulgar" and eventually invented Katharevousa . After a prolonged War of Independence , the modern Greek state was founded in 1830; the first capital was Nafplio and, from 1834 onwards, Athens . Publishing had been brought almost to a halt by the war, and with it the intellectual debate, but by 1830 an informal consensus had been reached that

10449-604: The language of the state. Quite apart from its supposed inadequacy and vulgarity, there had been another political and diplomatic reason to rule out using Demotic as the state language. In 1830 the population of the new Greek state was about 800,000; but outside the borders were at least two million more Greek-speakers (mainly in the remaining provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the British-controlled Ionian Islands), and millions more members of

10578-406: The language the weeds of vulgarity, yet not all at once by the forkful, but gradually with the hand, one after the other; sow Hellenic seeds in it, but these too by the handful and not by the sackful. You will be surprised how in a short while your words and phrases have passed from the book into the mouths of the people." Typical of the many prominent intellectuals who believed that this would work

10707-400: The last piece had been slotted back into place. By 1877, the diplomat and Katharevousa poet Kleon Rangavis  [ el ] could write: We are convinced, now that the dative has become generally accepted, that the future, which is already in use among the better writers, will follow it, and that the infinitive, on the increase in many quarters, will follow this in turn, together with

10836-464: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in 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

10965-464: The linguistic welfare of the whole population, it "represented the triumph of Enlightenment intellectuals over the Ancient Greek resurrection proposal". During the next few decades, however, the Katharevousa in general use grew more and more archaic as writers gradually introduced Ancient Greek features (like the noun dative case) that had not been present in Korais's version. In part, it was driven by

11094-563: The loss of the gender for nouns. Having been isolated from the crusader conquests ( Fourth Crusade ) and the later Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance ones in Demotic Greek. The poet Rumi , whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek, one of

11223-476: The magazine Estia , 1883) he admitted, "In our struggle to render the written language more noble, we are allowing the Greek people to become more uncouth." However, he explicitly ruled out switching to writing in Demotic, which he dismissed as "the tattered Romaic language , which is not sufficient for anything" (emphasis in original). By about 1880, it had become tacitly accepted that the fifty-year dream of Vyzantios, Soutsos and their fellows had failed: neither

11352-574: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . 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 . 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

11481-441: 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 only oral vowels and

11610-546: The most part been purged from Katharevousa. See also the Greek language question . Pontic ( Ποντιακά ) was originally spoken along the mountainous Black Sea coast of Turkey, the so-called Pontus region, until most of its speakers were killed or displaced to modern Greece during the Pontic genocide (1919–1921), followed later by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. (Small numbers of Muslim speakers of Pontic Greek escaped these events and still reside in

11739-518: The necessity of "correcting" the modern language. The rhetoric of the time is "full of adjectives such as 'correct', 'rich', 'pure', 'noble' and even 'sacred' to describe Ancient Greek and/or Katharevousa and their antonyms 'ungrammatical', 'poor', 'corrupt' or 'adulterated', 'vulgar' or 'base', and 'profane' or even 'blasphemous' to refer to Demotic." Foreign loanwords were especially reviled. As Korais had written, "To borrow from foreigners—or, to speak more clearly, to beg words and phrases, with which

11868-530: The negative particles ... This extract is from the introduction to Julian the Transgressor ( Ιουλιανός ο παραβάτης: ποίημα δραματικόν ), the "dramatic poem" in which Rangavis attempted to re-introduce the long-disused infinitive into poetry. Although this author was an extreme example, his linguistic ambition had been widely shared; Skarlatos D. Vyzantios, well known for his 1835 dictionary of Demotic, had written as late as 1862 that "resurrection from

11997-459: The new state should have a unified written language modeled on Korais's version of Katharevousa ; "... the romantic-classical ideology of the new state that emerged from [the War]; could not condone the use of 'vulgar' spoken Greek; instead it installed the linguistic compromise solution advocated by Korais as a provisional measure until such time as Ancient Greek could be fully revived. What

12126-399: 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

12255-706: 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 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 and word elements continue to be productive as

12384-497: The only two modern Indo-European languages that retain a synthetic passive (the North Germanic passive is a recent innovation based on a grammaticalized reflexive pronoun ). Modern Greek has changed from Classical Greek in morphology and syntax , losing some features and gaining others. Features lost: Features gained: Modern Greek has developed a simpler system of grammatical prefixes marking tense and aspect of

12513-537: The predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation

12642-415: The prefaces to his 16-volume Hellenic Library series of ancient Greek texts, and they were modestly titled "Impromptu thoughts on Greek culture and language". Most of his other linguistic studies were issued as five collected volumes under the even more self-effacing title Atakta , a "jumbled miscellany". It has even been suggested that "the chief reason why Korais did not publish a grammar of Modern Greek

12771-489: The region of Arcadia in the Southern Peloponnese , and partially spoken further afield in the area. Tsakonian evolved directly from Laconian (ancient Spartan) and therefore descends from Doric Greek . It has limited input from Hellenistic Koine and is significantly different from and not mutually intelligible with other Greek varieties (such as Demotic Greek and Pontic Greek ). Some linguists consider it

12900-545: The same (or with a similar) articulation point in Ancient Greek. Before mid or close front vowels ( / e / and / i / ), ⟨ γ ⟩ and ⟨ χ ⟩ are fronted, becoming [ ʝ ] and [ ç ] , respectively, which, in some dialects, notably those of Crete and Mani , are further fronted to [ ʑ ] or [ ʒ ] and [ ɕ ] or [ ʃ ] , respectively. Μoreover, before mid or close back vowels ( / o / and / u / ), ⟨ γ ⟩ tends to be pronounced further back than

13029-594: The specific development of dialects, but concentrate them on the dignified formation of the Panhellenic language". The adjudicator was Alexandros Rizos Rangavis , one of the most influential literary men of the time. Language policy at the time was very much at the service of the Megali Idea , the grand re-unification of the entire Greek nation. Some critics were less polite; an anonymous newspaper article (probably written by Soutsos) sharply told Tertsetis that it

13158-427: The spoken language could not be properly cultivated if it was so widely separated from the written variety that mutual influence between the two became impossible." Katharevousa thus formed part of a reasoned strategy for empowering ordinary people by improving the language in which they spoke and thought, admittedly not to Ancient Greek standards but as close as was currently practicable. In its practical concern for

13287-400: The state language, it might well have alienated millions of non-Greek speaking Orthodox believers within the potentially much larger future borders. Among the believers in "correction", hopes were still divided between those who pushed for the full resurrection of Ancient Greek (bringing with it "Truth and Freedom", as Soutsos put it later), and the majority who believed with Korais that this

13416-587: The storerooms of one's language are already replete—creates a reputation for complete ignorance or even idiocy as well as dishonour." In this intellectual climate, the population set to work with enthusiasm to restore the national honour by "correcting" the Greek vocabulary. Alehouses and brewers took down the signs saying μπιραρία biraria (from Italian birreria ) and put up ζυθοπωλείον 'ale-house'. Grocers took down μπακάλικο bakaliko (from Turkish bakkal ) and put up παντοπωλείον while various academics and professionals devised and issued (at

13545-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the 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

13674-447: 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

13803-528: The vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed 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 to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between

13932-459: The whole idea of a "simplified" Ancient Greek, dismissing Katharevousa as a "meagre Frankish edifice" full of imported Gallicisms, and deriding the university professors whose writing was hardly Greek at all, merely literally translated French. He declared "that the hearts and minds of the modern Greeks will be elevated by writing Ancient Greek, and that they will thereby learn Truth and Freedom". Accordingly, Soutsos proposed to restore almost all of

14061-433: The works of their rivals, and proposing their own alternative sets of rules. In this climate of academic discord, it was difficult for the educational authorities to know what grammatical rules to teach in the few years of primary education available to most Greeks. The matter was settled in 1856 when a royal decree re-affirmed the decisions of 1834 and 1836 and laid down, "As the grammar of the Greek language ... that of

14190-469: The world, is called diglossia . While Demotic was the vernacular of the Greeks, Katharevousa was an archaic and formal variant that was pronounced like Modern Greek, but it adopted both lexical and morphological features of Ancient Greek that the spoken language had lost over time. Examples: These differences meant that Katharevousa was only partly intelligible to a Greek without higher education. There

14319-481: The written use of the spoken language, and immediately put this into practice by writing his own commentaries on the songs in Demotic. Such arguments did not find a sympathetic ear in the mainland Greek state. When in 1853 the Ionian poet Georgios Tertsetis was bold enough to enter the national poetry competition with the Demotic poem "Corinna and Pindar" the adjudicator advised that "we must not dissipate our forces in

14448-439: The written use of the spoken language. In 1850 there was a new development when Antonios Manousos produced the first collection of Greek folk-songs to be published on Greek soil: National Songs . This was one of the first shoots of the folklore movement that was to blossom a generation later, though for the moment its influence was limited to the Ionian Islands. But Manousos did more than just collect. In his preface, he presented

14577-562: The years after 1870. It was no longer just the "debased grocers' slang" of a generation before. In the next year, 1873, the national poetry competition was won for the first time by a collection of poems in Demotic— The Voice of My Heart by the young Dimitrios Kampouroglou. When it came to prose, however, even Valaoritis still used Katharevousa . In 1873, Nikolaos Konemenos  [ el ] (brought up in Lefkada and Corfu in

14706-454: Was a dispute about whether the vernacular of the Greek people ( Demotic Greek ) or a cultivated literary language based on Ancient Greek ( Katharevousa ) should be the prevailing language of the people and government of Greece . It was a highly controversial topic in the 19th and 20th centuries, and was finally resolved in 1976 when Demotic was made the official language. The language phenomenon in question, which also occurs elsewhere in

14835-563: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. 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. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or

14964-492: Was also a moral and spiritual side to linguistic "correction". Korais had believed, "Because of their enslavement to foreign rulers, the Modern Greeks were incapable of thinking properly and thus of speaking properly; the correction of language would, however, lead to the correction of both thought and behaviour." It was hoped that as the damage done to the spoken language by centuries of subjection to "Oriental despotism"

15093-565: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of

15222-494: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe

15351-456: Was becoming the preserve of a small elite. By the 1870s, it had become a matter of serious concern. In the Ionian Islands, always less impressed by the social status of Katharevousa , Andreas Laskaratos wrote in 1872 that "the [logiόtatoi] Error: {{Lang}}: Non-latn text/Latn script subtag mismatch ( help ) [pedants], the enemies of the nation, while pretending to speak to the nation in a language better than its own, are speaking and writing in

15480-428: Was gradually repaired, the Greeks would begin to think more like their rational, critical and creative ancestors, and that the political and cultural life of the nation would thus be revitalized. Skarlatos Vyzantios  [ el ] played a leading role among the supporters of full Ancient Greek revival. In 1835 he published the first dictionary of spoken Demotic to be compiled by a Greek for almost two centuries:

15609-619: Was in the Ionian Islands , part of the Greek state only after 1864 and culturally still on the periphery, that the first stirrings of a new Demotic movement appeared. On the mainland, the First Athenian School of literature had been concentrating on Katharevousa since 1830; but in the Islands the Heptanesian tradition of Demotic poetry associated with Dionysios Solomos lived on, and some were still prepared to argue for

15738-474: Was inappropriate for Ionians, who possessed "a poor dialect", to impose it on "the language of the free Hellenes". However, these attitudes were to be softened over the next two decades, notably by Aristotelis Valaoritis , Ionian poet and parliamentarian, whose work significantly advanced the acceptance of Demotic as a language of poetry. During his early career in the Parliament of the United States of

15867-573: Was no single Katharevousa . Instead, proponents of the formal language put forward ever-changing variants that were never standardized. These variants approached Attic Greek in extreme cases, but they could also be closer to spoken Greek and could thus be understood by the majority of the people. The Greek language question concerns the co-existence of two forms of Greek that sometimes differ significantly. Such differences can greatly exceed common stylistic differences between written & spoken or formal & informal forms of language, as demonstrated in

15996-471: Was perhaps intended to be a temporary stop-gap, however, eventually became firmly entrenched as the established form of Greek in official use." (Mackridge (2009), p. 158) The adoption, however, was not expressed in formal or legal terms specifying Katharevousa as "the language of the state". To do so would have dashed the hopes of the many who hoped that Ancient Greek itself would one day take over that role. It would also have been difficult to specify to

16125-421: Was precisely that he wanted to avoid legislating on grammatical matters." In 1833, the year of Korais's death, a new collected edition of his "Impromptu thoughts..." prefaces was published, making his ideas available to a much wider audience than before and providing a linguistic example to follow. Two of his ideas in particular had widespread influence: his admiration of Ancient Greek beauty, and his belief in

16254-404: Was quite unrealistic but that Demotic could still be "corrected" to the less demanding level of Katharevousa . Both believed wholeheartedly in the power of the written language to transform the spoken one; they hoped that the "pure" forms would naturally trickle down to replace the "corrupted" Demotic ones and that the spoken language would thus be pulled up to a "richer" and "nobler" level. There

16383-478: Was the statesman and diplomat Spyridon Trikoupis , whose authoritative History of the Greek Revolution was written in Katharevousa . "In the introduction to his History Trikoupis attacked the archaizers and promoted Korais's 'middle way', which he followed in practice in his book .... He expressed the hope that the spoken and written language would eventually become one and the same, arguing that

16512-579: Was under the control of 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. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect

16641-671: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage

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