Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek was the language of Homer, and of the historians, playwrights, and philosophers of fifth-century Athens. It names the forms of Greek spoken in ancient Greece and the wider ancient world, stretching from around 1500 BC down to 300 BC. Scholars carve that long span into stages with familiar-sounding labels. Mycenaean Greek sits near 1400, the Dark Ages near 1200, the Archaic or Homeric period near 800, and the Classical period near 500. A single tongue, then, but never a single thing. How did one language splinter into rival dialects, each tied to a people who thought themselves distinct? Why did the speech of Athens outlast the rest? And why is a language last spoken natively thousands of years ago still required reading in classrooms today? The answers begin with the way Greeks themselves divided their own world.
Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric were the main dialect groups of a language that was, in the scholars' phrase, pluricentric. Greek had no single home. Some dialects survive in polished literary forms, others only in scratched inscriptions. The Greeks of the period believed their whole people split three ways, into Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, the last including the Athenians. Each carried its own distinctive speech.
Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the heart of Greek scholarship, were the two the ancient division overlooked. Allowing for that gap, the Greeks' own three-part scheme lines up closely with modern archaeological and linguistic findings. The strongest and earliest split runs between West Greek and everything else, the latter often grouped together as East Greek.
Doric carried the most internal variety, breaking down into Island Doric, which took in Cretan Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, which included Laconian, the dialect of Sparta, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric, which included Corinthian. Boeotian had absorbed strong Northwest Greek influence and reads as a transitional dialect. The Boeotian poet Pindar shows this, writing in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian leaned the same way, though less so.
The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic, and the surviving fragments of the poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos, come down to us in Aeolian. Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a narrow strip on the southwestern coast of Anatolia, is barely preserved in inscriptions. It may be a fifth major group, or it may be Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric and shaded by a non-Greek native influence. The ancient Macedonians spark their own debate, and a buried clay tablet would help settle it.
The Pella curse tablet is among the first texts ever found written in Macedonian, surfacing from epigraphic work and archaeological digs in the Greek region of Macedonia over recent decades. Hatzopoulos and other scholars point to it as new evidence in an old argument. Diverse theories had long circulated about how the ancient Macedonians actually spoke.
Emilio Crespo and most scholars, weighing the tablet and other findings, conclude that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect. It shares isoglosses, the marker features linguists use to draw dialect boundaries, with the neighboring Thessalian spoken in northeastern Thessaly. Some scholars have argued instead for an Aeolic Greek classification. The disagreement shows how a single inscription can reopen a question scholars thought closed, and how thin the evidence often is for the language's deepest roots.
The origins and earliest development of the Hellenic family are not well understood, simply because contemporaneous evidence is scarce. Several theories try to fill the gap between the moment early Greek-like speech broke off from Proto-Indo-European and the Classical period. They share a general outline and quarrel only over detail. The one attested dialect from this murky stretch is Mycenaean Greek.
Scholars place the rise of the major dialect groups no later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions. Their first appearance as precise alphabetic writing came in the 8th century BC. An invasion only earns the name Dorian if the invaders bore some cultural tie to the historical Dorians. The displacement pushed populations into the later Attic-Ionic regions, whose people saw themselves as descendants of those driven out by, or struggling against, the Dorians.
Arcadocypriot appears to descend more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age than the other historical dialects do. That thread back to the Bronze Age makes it a living link to the earliest stage anyone can read.
The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek, and the gap is not a small one. Ancient Greek had long and short vowels, many diphthongs, double and single consonants, and stops that were voiced, voiceless, or aspirated. It also carried a pitch accent, where the voice rose and fell in tone. Modern Greek has flattened much of this. All its vowels and consonants are short, many once-distinct vowels and diphthongs now sound as a single /i/, a change called iotacism, and the pitch accent has become a stress accent.
PIE s offers a clean example of how far the sounds drifted from Proto-Indo-European. At the start of a word it weakened to /h/, a shift called debuccalization, so the root behind Latin sex and English six surfaces in Greek as ἕξ. Between vowels that same s eventually vanished entirely. Final stops fell away too, which is why the word for milk is γάλα while its genitive keeps the older consonant in γάλακτος.
The so-called labiovelars, sounds made at the back of the mouth with rounded lips, collapsed into plain stops in the later dialects. Where Latin kept the qu in quō and quis, Attic shows ποῦ for where and τίς for who. The consonant w, alive in Mycenaean and some non-Attic dialects, was lost outright. Early Doric ϝέργον became Attic ἔργον, the ancestor of English work, the original sound surviving only as a ghost on the page.
Five cases govern every Greek noun, including proper names: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. Greek, like the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected, and it clings to Proto-Indo-European forms with unusual stubbornness. Nouns also carry three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, and three numbers, where alongside singular and plural sits the dual, a form reserved for exactly two.
Verbs open out into an even wider grid. They take four moods, the indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative, and three voices, the active, middle, and passive, across three persons. Seven combinations of tense and aspect, loosely called tenses, sort into two families. The present, future, and imperfect are imperfective, describing action as ongoing. The aorist, present perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect are perfective, viewing action as a whole.
The augment shows how the system encodes time. Past tenses in the indicative add a prefix e-, probably once a separate word meaning something like then. It comes in two kinds. The syllabic augment simply prefixes e to stems that begin with a consonant. The quantitative augment instead lengthens an initial vowel, so a short a stretches into a long e. When a verb already carries a preposition as a prefix, the augment slips inside, between the preposition and the verb. προσβάλλω, meaning I attack, becomes προσέβαλον in the aorist, the marker buried in the middle of the word.
Linear B, a syllabic script, holds the earliest surviving examples of Greek writing, dated to around 1450 BC. Each sign stood for a syllable rather than a single sound. The shift to the Greek alphabet began in the 8th century BC and became standard, though it varied somewhat from dialect to dialect.
Early texts ran in boustrophedon style, the lines turning back on themselves like an ox plowing a field, before left-to-right won out during the classic period. The accents, breathing marks, spaces between words, punctuation, and occasional mixed case that fill modern editions were all added much later. A reader in Classical Athens saw none of them.
After Alexander the Great's conquests in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect called Koine, or Common Greek, took shape, built largely on Attic but flavored by the others. It slowly displaced the older dialects and, by about the 6th century AD, had metamorphosed into Medieval Greek. Yet Doric did not vanish without trace. It survives in the Tsakonian language, still spoken in the region of modern Sparta, and it handed its aorist endings down into most verbs of Demotic Greek.
The Renaissance returned Ancient Greek to the classroom, and for centuries it held an important place alongside Latin in European study, from then until the start of the 20th century. The pattern crossed the Atlantic. Many of the United States' founders received a classically based education, and while American colleges stressed Latin, Greek was required in the colonial and early national eras. Interest swelled in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the age of American philhellenism, when female intellectuals named mastery of ancient Greek essential to becoming a woman of letters.
In 2006/07, 15,000 pupils studied ancient Greek in Germany, according to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, while 280,000 studied it in Italy, where it is compulsory in the liceo classico. The subject is compulsory in all gymnasiums and lyceums in Greece, required in the gymnasium in the Netherlands, and offered, usually as a third language after Latin and English, in the humanities-oriented German gymnasium for students aged 14 to 18. In 2010 it reached three primary schools in the UK to sharpen children's language skills.
Modern authors rarely write in the language, but a few keep it breathing. Jan Křesadlo composed poetry and prose in it, and translations exist of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, of some volumes of Asterix, and of The Adventures of Alix. Ὀνόματα Kεχιασμένα, the first magazine of crosswords and puzzles in ancient Greek, appeared in April 2015 as an annex to Hebdomada Aenigmatum. Akropolis World News still reports a weekly summary of the most important news in the language. And far beyond such tributes, ancient Greek roots quietly supply the coinage of modern technical terms across the European languages, naming species and disciplines that did not exist when anyone last spoke it.
Common questions
What is Ancient Greek and when was it spoken?
Ancient Greek is the set of forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is divided into Mycenaean Greek around 1400, the Dark Ages around 1200, the Archaic or Homeric period around 800, and the Classical period around 500.
What were the main dialects of Ancient Greek?
The main dialect groups of Ancient Greek were Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric. Attic Greek became the basis of Koine Greek, while the Lesbian dialect, used in the surviving fragments of the poet Sappho, was Aeolic.
How is Ancient Greek different from Modern Greek in pronunciation?
Ancient Greek had long and short vowels, many diphthongs, double and single consonants, voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops, and a pitch accent. In Modern Greek all vowels and consonants are short, many vowels and diphthongs are pronounced as a single /i/ through iotacism, and the pitch accent has become a stress accent.
What was the writing system used for Ancient Greek?
The earliest surviving examples of Ancient Greek writing, dated to around 1450 BC, are in the syllabic script Linear B. The Greek alphabet became standard beginning in the 8th century BC, with early texts written in boustrophedon style before left-to-right became standard during the classic period.
What language followed Ancient Greek after Alexander the Great?
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect called Koine, or Common Greek, developed, largely based on Attic Greek. By about the 6th century AD, Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek.
Where is Ancient Greek still taught and used today?
Ancient Greek is compulsory in all gymnasiums and lyceums in Greece, in the liceo classico in Italy, and in the gymnasium in the Netherlands, and is widely taught at universities as part of classics. In 2006/07, 15,000 pupils studied it in Germany and 280,000 studied it in Italy, and works including Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have been translated into the language.
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