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73-416: Perikeiromene ( Greek : [Περικειρομένη] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |3= ( help ) ), translated as The Girl with her Hair Cut Short , is an Ancient Greek comedy by Menander (342/41 – 292/91 BC) that is only partially preserved on papyrus . Of an estimated total of between 1030 and 1091 lines, about 450 lines (between 40 and 45%) survive. Most acts lack their beginning and end, except that

146-577: 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,

219-603: A childless widower, assumes a position at the head of a family, and even Moschion will turn from a philandering young man into a respectable husband. Two ancient representations depicting the play's opening scene have been found so far. Both are inscribed Perikeiromene . One is a faded 2nd-century AD wall-painting on red ground in the reception room of a Roman terrace house, the so-called "Hanghaus 2", in Ephesus (Apartment I, Insula 2). The other one, recently discovered in Antioch,

292-603: A delayed prologue, Agnoia (personified Ignorance ) reveals that Myrrhine's son Moschion, is, in fact, as only Glykera knows, her brother by birth, which is why she allowed him to embrace her. Moschion was exposed together with her and given to Myrrhine by the same woman, now deceased, who kept and raised Glykera. In act II, the slave Daos falsely tries to take credit for Glykera's move into their house, and Moschion erroneously hopes that she has decided to become his concubine. He finds, however, that his mother keeps him away from her. In act III, Polemon tries to storm Myrrhine's house at

365-558: 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

438-560: 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

511-540: 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

584-427: A marshal of land forces ( Pk. 279-80), and finally sending him ahead as a "scout" to do reconnaissance ( Pk. 295). Polemon's act of domestic violence, the forcible haircut, is representative of the violence associated with mercenaries at the time. What redeems him as a potential husband is that Agnoia (Ignorance) in the prologue explicitly claims responsibility for his violent act ( Pk. 163-66). Moreover, his behavior

657-692: A shared idea or metaphor. A short example from R. C. Jebb 's translation of Antigone : the scene is an argument between Ismene and her sister Antigone . For further examples from Antigone , consult the text at the Internet Classics Archive [4] . ISMENE: And what life is dear to me, bereft of thee? ANTIGONE: Ask Creon; all thy care is for him. ISMENE: Why vex me thus, when it avails thee nought? ANTIGONE: Indeed, if I mock, 'tis with pain that I mock thee. ISMENE: Tell me,—how can I serve thee, even now? ANTIGONE: Save thyself: I grudge not thy escape. ISMENE: Ah, woe

730-850: A single verse line is distributed on alternating speakers. An exchange in Le Cid (1.3.215–226), by Pierre Corneille , has been called "an excellent instance of Corneille's skilful handling of 'stichomythia'". Don Diègue (an old man, the hero's father) has been appointed the prince's tutor, a post that the Count ( le Comte ) wanted. LE COMTE: Ce que je méritois, vous avez emporté. DON DIÈGUE: Qui l'a gagné sur vous l'avoit mieux merité. LE COMTE: Qui peut mieux l'exercer en est bien le plus digne. DON DIÈGUE: En être refusė n'est pas un bon signe. LE COMTE: Vous l'avez eu par brigue, ėtant vieux courtisan. DON DIÈGUE: L'éclat de mes hauts faits fut mon seul partisan. LE COMTE: Parlons-en mieux, le Roi fait honneur

803-405: A votre âge. DON DIÈGUE: Le Roi, quand il en fait, le mesure au courage. LE COMTE: Et par là cet honneur n'était dû qu'à mon bras. DON DIÈGUE: Qui n'a pu l'obtenir ne le méritoit pas. LE COMTE: Ne le méritoit pas! Moi? DON DIÈGUE: Vous. LE COMTE: Ton impudence, Téméraire viellard, aura son récompense. [ Il lui donne un soufflet In

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876-493: A widespread distribution throughout the ancient Roman world, citing mentions by Philostratus (Epist. 16) and Ovid ( Amores I.7). Korzeniewski suggests that Calpurnius Siculus' Third Eclogue is influenced by the Perikeiromene . Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ )

949-406: Is a 3rd-century AD mosaic identifying not only the play but also the act. From left to right, one sees a woman who has pulled her cloak up so that it covers her hair, a young, unbearded man in a military-style cloak ( chlamys ) sitting on a dining couch and looking at her (Ephesus) or the audience (Antioch), and an old man raising his right arm "in an emotional gesture" (Ephesus) or clearly pointing at

1022-804: 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

1095-773: 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 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

1168-479: 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

1241-481: Is confronted by his mother, the queen, about the play (III, ii) which Hamlet rigged to expose his murderous step-uncle. QUEEN: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended. QUEEN: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue. HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue. In The Merchant of Venice , Act IV, Scene i, Shylock and Bassanio enter into an argument using stichomythia at 4.1.65-9, which "catches

1314-654: Is me! And shall I have no share in thy fate? ANTIGONE: Thy choice was to live; mine, to die. ISMENE: At least thy choice was not made without my protest. ANTIGONE: One world approved thy wisdom; another, mine. Richard III , Act I, Scene ii. Richard Plantagenet , Earl of Gloucester (later Richard III of England ) threatens to kill himself unless Lady Anne, widow of Prince Edward (of Lancaster), agrees to marry him. LADY ANNE: I would I knew thy heart. GLOUCESTER: 'Tis figured in my tongue. LADY ANNE: I fear me both are false. GLOUCESTER: Then never man

1387-592: Is particularly well suited to sections of dramatic dialogue where two characters are in violent dispute. The rhythmic intensity of the alternating lines combined with quick, biting ripostes in the dialogue can create a powerful effect. Stichomythia originated in Greek drama, where, in the early plays of Aeschylus it applies to exchanges between the protagonist and the chorus . Adolf Gross concludes that stichomythia developed from choral response. J. Leonard Hancock differs in this regard, not finding overwhelming evidence for any particular origin theory, but admitting that

1460-565: Is presented as "an aberration rather than an expression of a fundamentally corrupt character" and thus appears pardonable. In this play, Menander handles the typical formula of separation and reunion in a particularly elegant way. At the very moment when the breakup between Glykera and Polemon seems to be final, with the removal of her belongings from Polemon's house, the recognition scene starts: Pataikos sees her birth clothes and recognizes Glykera as his daughter, and this in turn leads to her reconciliation with Polemon. Another important feature of

1533-519: 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

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1606-841: 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 Stichomythia Stichomythia

1679-526: 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 the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around

1752-763: 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,

1825-650: 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 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

1898-495: 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

1971-516: 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

2044-492: 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

2117-470: 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 is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into

2190-713: The Broadway musical Love Life , second in the film Gigi ) and " Anything You Can Do " (by Irving Berlin , from Annie Get Your Gun ). Another is from "The Last Supper" in Jesus Christ Superstar . When Judas says Jesus knows who will betray him, a passage of stichomythia (with a two-line interruption) follows: Jesus: Why don't you go do it? Judas: You want me to do it! Jesus: Hurry, they're waiting Judas: If you knew why I do it... Jesus: I don't care why you do it Judas: To think I admired you, for now I despise you Jesus: You liar—you Judas In

2263-486: 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

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2336-425: 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

2409-495: 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

2482-629: 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

2555-685: 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

2628-404: 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),

2701-402: 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

2774-446: The baby clothes in which she was exposed. As a result, Pataikos discovers that both Glykera and Moschion are the children he exposed long ago after he lost his fortune and his wife died in childbirth . Consequently, Glykera forgives the contrite Polemon in act V and marries him, whereas Pataikos betroths Moschion to another girl. The mercenary soldier's comical attack with a rag-tag army consisting of slaves and other non-military figures

2847-504: The classic drama of the Greeks and Romans. Stichomythic elements, however, were often absent. Where they did occur, they tended to follow the lead of Seneca in using “catchwords” as launching points for each subsequent line. Modern theatre rarely uses verse, so any construct that depends on verse, such as stichomythia, is also rare. Where a form of stichomythia has been used, the characters involved are typically building subsequent lines on

2920-415: The dramatic tension of a quasi-forensic interrogation": SHYLOCK: I am not bound to please thee with my answers. BASSANIO: Do all men kill the things they do not love? SHYLOCK: Hates any man the thing he would not kill? BASSANIO: Every offence is not a hate at first. SHYLOCK: What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice? A further intensification is often achieved by antilabe , in which

2993-404: 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 the various stages of

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3066-497: The end, his future father-in-law suggests that he should renounce mercenary service for good (1016–17). From the start, however, Polemon seems strangely lacking in martial spirit. It is his slave, Sosia, who leads the attack at the neighbor's house. Similarly, his rival, young Moschion, acts much more like the stereotypical braggart soldier, boasting with his good looks and his success with hetaerae ( Pk. 302-303), joking that he would appoint his slave Daos "overlord of Greek affairs/And

3139-618: 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 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

3212-681: The following passage from the libretto by Andrea Maffei for Giuseppe Verdi 's I masnadieri has been called "musical stichomythia", though it does not contain repetition or antithesis: AMALIA: Qual mare, qual terra da me t'ha diviso? CARLO: Deh! cessa, infelice, l'inchiesta crudel! AMALIA: Mendaci novelle ti dissero ucciso. CARLO: Beato se chiuso m'avesse l'avel! AMALIA: Tu pure, o mio Carlo, provasti gli affanni? CARLO: Li possa il tuo core per sempre ignorar! AMALIA: Anch'io, derelitta, ti piansi lung'anni. CARLO: E un angelo osava per me lagrimar? Examples from musicals are "I Remember it Well" (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner , first version in

3285-452: 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 , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in

3358-415: The happy ending, all the role of all the main characters is transformed. They all start out as figures on the margins or even outside of city-state society, but at the end they assume more conventional roles within that society. Glykera turns from a concubine with unclear citizenship into a citizen wife. Polemon, a mercenary soldier with changing alliances, becomes a settled husband and polis citizen. Pataikos,

3431-403: The head of a comical army consisting of several male slaves, a female flute-player, and a cook with a pig, but his older friend Pataikos talks him out of it. In act IV, Pataikos tries to negotiate with Glykera at Polemon's request. With Moschion secretly eavesdropping on them, Glykera tells him the truth about the embrace and begs him to retrieve her things for her from Polemon's house, including

3504-401: The idea, if you know what I mean. Dietrichson: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour. Neff: How fast was I going officer? Dietrichson: I'd say around 90. Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket? Dietrichson: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time? Neff: Suppose it doesn't take? Dietrichson: Suppose I have to whack you over

3577-460: The ideas or metaphors of previous lines, rather than words. In terms of character relationships, stichomythia can represent interactions as mundane as question-and-answer exchanges, or as tense as heated rapid-fire arguments. While the equal line lengths can create a sense of equality of voice between the characters, stichomythia can also feature one character silencing another with a vociferous rebuff, especially where one character's line interrupts

3650-439: 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

3723-467: 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

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3796-640: 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

3869-441: 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

3942-399: 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

4015-536: 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 is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It

4088-706: 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

4161-483: The other's. In terms of how stichomythia moves forward as a section of dialogue, the Ancient Greeks tended to favor subtle flavorings and reflavorings of grammatical particles, whereas Senecan (and by extension Renaissance) stichomythic passages often turned on verbal minutiae or “catchwords”. Modern theatre, on the other hand, uses the technique in such a manner that the characters use each line to add depth to

4234-420: The play probably featured Glykera's flight from Polemon's house. Recently returned from fighting abroad, the soldier had learned from Sosias, his slave , that Glykera was seen embracing the neighbor's son, Moschion. Moschion has been stalking her because he is in love with her. In a violent fit of jealousy, Polemon cuts off Glykera's long hair. Glykera finds refuge with Myrrhine, the wealthy woman next door. In

4307-665: The prose context of most film, stichomythia has been defined as a "witty exchange of one-liners" and associated with the film noir characters Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past , Sam Spade , and Philip Marlowe . Another film-noir example is in Double Indemnity (dialog by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler ). Walter Neff flirts with Phyllis Dietrichson; she resists him. Dietrichson: You were anxious to talk to [my husband] weren't you? Neff: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over

4380-429: The recognition scene is that it parodies tragic pathos. At line 779, the conversation between Pataikos and his daughter turns into a typically tragic stichomythia in which the characters take turns speaking one line at a time. In addition, the characters quote famous snippets of Euripidean tragedy comically out of context (line 788: Euripides, Wise Melanippe , frg. 484.3 KT; line 809: Euripides, "Trojan Women" 88). With

4453-510: The role of musical symmetry must have been significant. Instead he finds that the trends, within Ancient Greek aesthetics, toward agonistic expression, subtlety in language, and love of symmetry, helped to give rise to stichomythia as a popular dialogue device. Senecan stichomythia, while ultimately derived from Athenian stichomythia (as Roman theatre is derived from Greek theatre generally ) differs in several respects. First, Seneca uses

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4526-488: The scene in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 's opera The Marriage of Figaro , libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte , where Susanna learns that Marcellina is Figaro's mother, she repeats her disbelief ( Sua madre? , that is, "his mother?") to each character and is reassured in the same words. A critic has called that "the merriest and most congenial form imaginable" of stichomythia. For another example from opera,

4599-425: The soldier (Antioch). In addition, two papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus contain ink drawings that illustrated characters from the play. They probably belonged to the same illustrated manuscript. P.Oxy. 2652 offers a frontal view of a woman tagged as Agnoia. P.Oxy. 2653 represents the face of a young soldier, obviously Polemon, in a helmet with cheek-pieces. Karakasis notes that the Perikeiromene seems to have had

4672-437: 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

4745-523: The technique less than all but the earliest extant pieces of classical Greek tragedy. Secondly, the stichomythic form found in Seneca is less rigid. Finally, and most substantially, Seneca's tragedies are much more prone to revolve around literary quibbles, even leaving aside the plot of the play for entire sections while the characters engage in an essentially linguistic tangent. Renaissance Italian and French drama developed in many respects as an imitation of

4818-621: The transition between act I and II is still extant. The play may have been first performed in 314/13 BC or not much later. Probably set in Corinth , the play is a drama of reconciliation. It focuses on the relationship between Polemon, a Corinthian mercenary, and his common-law wife ( pallake ), Glykera. An act of domestic violence by the soldier triggers a sequence of events that culminates in Glykera's discovery of her father and her reconciliation with and marriage to Polemon. The lost opening of

4891-574: 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

4964-465: Was a stock scene in comedies featuring mercenaries. In Terence's Eunuchus 771ff., for example, the soldier Thraso unsuccessfully tries to storm the house of the hetaera Thais with an army that includes his parasite, Gnatho, and his cook, Sanga. Just as in Aspis and Misoumenos , the mercenary soldier in Perikeiromene has to be socialized into the polis before he can marry the romantic heroine. In

5037-568: 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

5110-494: 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

5183-648: Was true. LADY ANNE: Well, well, put up your sword. GLOUCESTER: Say, then, my peace is made. LADY ANNE: That shall you know hereafter. GLOUCESTER: But shall I live in hope? LADY ANNE: All men, I hope, live so. GLOUCESTER: Vouchsafe to wear this ring. LADY ANNE: To take is not to give. GLOUCESTER: Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst. LADY ANNE: Foul devil, for God's sake, hence, and trouble us not, In Hamlet , Act III, Scene iv (the Closet scene), Hamlet

5256-580: 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

5329-673: 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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