68-486: See text Orthophlebiidae is an extinct family of scorpionflies known from the Triassic to Cretaceous , belonging to the superfamily Panorpoidea . The family is poorly defined and is probably paraphyletic , representing many primitive members of Panorpoidea with most species only known from isolated wings, and has such been considered a wastebasket taxon . Based on The genus Protorthophlebia has been moved to
136-577: 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,
204-558: 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
272-560: 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
340-414: A female. Hangingflies (Bittacidae) provide a nuptial meal in the form of a captured insect prey, such as a caterpillar, bug, or fly. The male attracts a female with a pheromone from vesicles on his abdomen; he retracts these once a female is nearby, and presents her with the prey. While she evaluates the gift, he locates her genitalia with his. If she stays to eat the prey, his genitalia attach to hers, and
408-505: A few areas, some species are the first insects to arrive at a cadaver , making them useful in forensic entomology . Mecopterans vary in length from 2 to 35 mm (0.1 to 1.4 in). There are about six hundred extant species known, divided into thirty-four genera in nine families. The majority of the species are contained in the families Panorpidae and Bittacidae . Besides this there are about four hundred known fossil species in about eighty-seven genera, which are more diverse than
476-540: 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
544-554: A long labium , long mandibles and fleshy palps , which resemble those of the more primitive true flies . Like many other insects, they possess compound eyes on the sides of their heads, and three ocelli on the top. The antennae are filiform (thread-shaped) and contain multiple segments. The fore and hind wings are similar in shape, being long and narrow, with numerous cross-veins, and somewhat resembling those of primitive insects such as mayflies . A few genera, however, have reduced wings, or have lost them altogether. The abdomen
612-468: A refractory period during which the female does not mate with other males: all of these increase the number of offspring the male is likely to have. The female lays the eggs in close contact with moisture, and the eggs typically absorb water and increase in size after deposition. In species that live in hot conditions, the eggs may not hatch for several months, the larvae only emerging when the dry season has finished. More typically, however, they hatch after
680-505: A relatively short period of time. The larvae are usually quite caterpillar -like, with short, clawed, true legs, and a number of abdominal prolegs . They have sclerotised heads with mandibulate mouthparts. Larvae possess compound eyes, which is unique among holometabolous insects. The tenth abdominal segment bears either a suction disc, or, less commonly, a pair of hooks. They generally eat vegetation or scavenge for dead insects, although some predatory larvae are known. The larva crawls into
748-804: 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
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#1732775661249816-479: 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
884-404: Is cylindrical with eleven segments, the first of which is fused to the metathorax . The cerci consist of one or two segments. The abdomen typically curves upwards in the male, superficially resembling the tail of a scorpion , the tip containing an enlarged structure called the genital bulb. The caterpillar -like larvae have hard sclerotised heads with mandibles (jaws), short true legs on
952-557: Is low, with Trinidad, Taiwan and Japan, where they are found, having had recent land bridges to the nearest continental land masses. The European scorpionfly was named Panorpa communis by Linnaeus in 1758 . The Mecoptera were named by Alpheus Hyatt and Jennie Maria Arms in 1891. The name is from the Greek , mecos meaning long, and ptera meaning wings. The families of Mecoptera are well accepted by taxonomists but their relationships have been debated. In 1987, R. Willman treated
1020-415: 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 ,
1088-432: Is monophyletic, sister to Siphonaptera: Diptera (true flies) [REDACTED] Pistillifera (scorpionflies, hangingflies, 400 spp .) [REDACTED] Boreidae (snow scorpionflies, 30 spp.) [REDACTED] Nannochoristidae (southern scorpionflies, 8 spp.) [REDACTED] (fleas, 2500 spp.) [REDACTED] All the families were formerly treated as part of a single order, Mecoptera. The relationships between
1156-519: 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
1224-763: 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,
1292-585: Is that they can sting with their tails. Greek language 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
1360-819: Is the most basal, and the relationships of the rest are not completely clear. Nannochoristidae Boreidae (snow scorpionflies) [REDACTED] Siphonaptera (fleas) [REDACTED] Eomeropidae (mainly fossil ( Triassic to present), 1 extant sp.) [REDACTED] (?) Bittacidae (hangingflies) Meropeidae (earwigflies) [REDACTED] Choristidae (Australian scorpionflies) [REDACTED] Apteropanorpidae (Tasmanian snow scorpionflies) (?) Bittacidae (hangingflies) [REDACTED] Panorpodidae (short-faced scorpionflies) Panorpidae ( Jurassic to present, common scorpionflies) [REDACTED] Mecoptera are small to medium-sized insects with long beaklike rostra , membranous wings and slender, elongated bodies. They have relatively simple mouthparts, with
1428-674: 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
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#17327756612491496-624: The Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek 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
1564-627: 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
1632-495: 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
1700-516: 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
1768-954: The Permochoristidae , to the Middle Triassic . During the Late Triassic through the Middle Jurassic , Aneuretopsychina species were gradually replaced by species from the Parachoristidae and Orthophlebiidae. Modern mecopteran families are derived from the Orthophlebiidae. Mecoptera have special importance in the evolution of the insects. Two of the most important insect orders, Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and Diptera (true flies), along with Trichoptera (caddisflies), probably evolved from ancestors belonging to, or strictly related to,
1836-657: 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
1904-1013: The Siphonaptera (fleas) are inside that clade, so that the traditional "Mecoptera" taxon is paraphyletic. However the earlier suggestion that the Siphonaptera are sister to the Boreidae is not supported; instead, there is the possibility that they are sister to another Mecopteran family, the Nannochoristidae . The two possible trees are shown below: (a) Mecoptera (clades in boldface) is paraphyletic, containing Siphonaptera: Diptera (true flies) [REDACTED] Pistillifera (scorpionflies, hangingflies, 400 spp .) [REDACTED] Boreidae (snow scorpionflies, 30 spp.) [REDACTED] Nannochoristidae (southern scorpionflies, 8 spp.) [REDACTED] Siphonaptera (fleas, 2500 spp.) [REDACTED] (b) Mecoptera
1972-492: 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
2040-486: 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
2108-495: 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
Orthophlebiidae - Misplaced Pages Continue
2176-629: 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
2244-685: 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
2312-964: The Mecoptera as a clade , containing the Boreidae as sister to the Meropeidae, but in 2002 Michael F. Whiting declared the Mecoptera so-defined as paraphyletic, with the Boreidae as sister to another order, the Siphonaptera (fleas). Among the earliest members of the Mecoptera are the Nannochoristidae of Upper Permian age. Fossil Mecoptera become abundant and diverse during the Cretaceous , for example in China, where panorpids such as Jurassipanorpa , hangingflies (Bittacidae and Cimbrophlebiidae), Orthophlebiidae, and Cimbrophlebiidae have been found. Extinct Mecoptera species may have been important pollinators of early gymnosperm seed plants during
2380-454: The Mecoptera. Evidence includes anatomical and biochemical similarities as well as transitional fossils , such as Permotanyderus and Choristotanyderus , which lie between the Mecoptera and Diptera. The group was once much more widespread and diverse than it is now, with four suborders during the Mesozoic . It is unclear as of 2020 whether the Mecoptera form a single clade, or whether
2448-404: 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),
2516-402: 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
2584-567: The clade Aneuretopsychina . Their lengths range from 3 mm (0.12 in) in Parapolycentropus burmiticus to 28 mm (1.1 in) in Lichnomesopsyche gloriae . The proboscis could be as long as 10 mm (0.39 in). It has been suggested that these mecopterans transferred pollen on their mouthparts and head surfaces, as do bee flies and hoverflies today, but no such associated pollen has been found, even when
2652-581: The families are, however, a matter of debate. The cladogram, from Cracraft and Donoghue 2004, places the Nannochoristidae as a separate order, with the Boreidae, as the sister group to the Siphonaptera, also as its own order. The Eomeropidae is suggested to be the sister group to the rest of the Mecoptera, with the position of the Bittacidae unclear. Of those other families, the Meropeidae
2720-437: The family Panorpidae occurs, such as the eastern United States, these scorpionflies can be the first insects to arrive at a donated human cadaver, and remain on a corpse for one or two days. The presence of scorpionflies thus indicates that a body must be fresh. Scorpionflies are sometimes described as looking "sinister", particularly from the male's raised "tail" resembling a scorpion 's sting. A popular but incorrect belief
2788-404: The female lowers herself into an upside-down hanging position, and eats the prey while mating. Larger prey result in longer mating times. In Hylobittacus apicalis , prey 3 to 14 millimetres (0.12 to 0.55 in) long give between 1 and 17 minutes of mating. Larger males of that species give prey as big as houseflies, earning up to 29 minutes of mating, maximal sperm transfer, more oviposition, and
Orthophlebiidae - Misplaced Pages Continue
2856-439: 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
2924-533: The insects were finely preserved in Eocene Baltic amber . They likely pollinated plants such as Caytoniaceae , Cheirolepidiaceae , and Gnetales , which have ovulate organs that are either poorly suited for wind pollination or have structures that could support long-proboscid fluid feeding. The Aneuretopsychina were the most diverse group of mecopterans in the Latest Permian, taking the place of
2992-424: The larvae being able to jump like fleas . Hangingflies, family Bittacidae, occur in forests, grassland and caves with high moisture levels. They mostly breed among mosses, in leaf litter and other moist places, but their reproductive habits have been little studied, and at least one species, Nannochorista philpotti , has aquatic larvae. Adult mecopterans are mostly scavengers , feeding on decaying vegetation and
3060-538: The late Middle Jurassic to mid– Early Cretaceous periods before other pollinating groups such as the bees evolved. These were mainly wind-pollinated plants, but fossil mecopterans had siphon-feeding apparatus that could have fertilized these early gymnosperms by feeding on their nectar and pollen . The lack of iron enrichment in their fossilized probosces rules out their use for drinking blood. Eleven species have been identified from three families, Mesopsychidae , Aneuretopsychidae , and Pseudopolycentropodidae within
3128-467: 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
3196-702: The living members of the order. The group is sometimes called the scorpionflies, from the turned-up "tail" of the male's genitalia in the Panorpidae. Distribution of mecopterans is worldwide; the greatest diversity at the species level is in the Afrotropic and Palearctic realms , but there is greater diversity at the generic and family level in the Neotropic , Nearctic and Australasian realms . They are absent from Madagascar and many islands and island groups; this may demonstrate that their dispersal ability
3264-576: 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
3332-441: 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
3400-399: 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
3468-706: 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
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#17327756612493536-468: The order inhabit moist environments in tropical locations. The Mecoptera are closely related to the Siphonaptera (fleas), and a little more distantly to the Diptera (true flies). They are somewhat fly-like in appearance, being small to medium-sized insects with long slender bodies and narrow membranous wings. Most breed in moist environments such as leaf litter or moss, and the eggs may not hatch until
3604-541: 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
3672-426: The separate family Protorthophlebiidae. Mecoptera Mecoptera (from the Greek : mecos = "long", ptera = "wings") is an order of insects in the superorder Holometabola with about six hundred species in nine families worldwide. Mecopterans are sometimes called scorpionflies after their largest family, Panorpidae , in which the males have enlarged genitals raised over the body that look similar to
3740-431: The soft bodies of dead invertebrates. Panorpa raid spider webs to feed on trapped insects and even the spiders themselves, and hangingflies capture flies and moths with their specially modified legs. Some groups consume pollen , nectar , midge larvae, carrion and moss fragments. Most mecopterans live in moist environments; in hotter climates, the adults may therefore be active and visible only for short periods of
3808-445: The soil or decaying wood to pupate , and does not spin a cocoon. The pupae are exarate , meaning the limbs are free of the body, and are able to move their mandibles, but are otherwise entirely nonmotile. In drier environments, they may spend several months in diapause , before emerging as adults once the conditions are more suitable. Forensic entomology makes use of scorpionflies' habit of feeding on human corpses . In areas where
3876-424: The stingers of scorpions , and long beaklike rostra . The Bittacidae , or hangingflies, are another prominent family and are known for their elaborate mating rituals, in which females choose mates based on the quality of gift prey offered to them by the males. A smaller group is the snow scorpionflies, family Boreidae , adults of which are sometimes seen walking on snowfields. In contrast, the majority of species in
3944-437: 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
4012-533: The thorax, prolegs on the first eight abdominal segments, and a suction disc or pair of hooks on the terminal tenth segment. The pupae have free appendages rather than being secured within a cocoon (they are exarate). Mecopterans mostly inhabit moist environments although a few species are found in semi-desert habitats. Scorpionflies, family Panorpidae, generally live in broad-leaf woodlands with plentiful damp leaf litter. Snow scorpionflies, family Boreidae, appear in winter and are to be seen on snowfields and on moss;
4080-447: 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
4148-529: 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
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#17327756612494216-441: The wet season arrives. The larvae are caterpillar-like and mostly feed on vegetable matter, and the non-feeding pupae may pass through a diapause until weather conditions are favorable. Early Mecoptera may have played an important role in pollinating extinct species of gymnosperms before the evolution of other insect pollinators such as bees. Adults of modern species are overwhelmingly predators or consumers of dead organisms. In
4284-429: The year. Various courtship behaviours have been observed among mecopterans, with males often emitting pheromones to attract mates. The male may provide an edible gift such as a dead insect or a brown salivary secretion to the female. Some boreids have hook-like wings which the male uses to pick up and place the female on his back while copulating. Male panorpids vibrate their wings or even stridulate while approaching
4352-574: 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
4420-568: 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
4488-557: 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
4556-580: 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
4624-673: 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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