Ancient Greek (, ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic or Homeric period (), and the Classical period ().
Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth- and fourth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek.
From the Hellenistic period (), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek, and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek, and Koine may be classified as Ancient Greek in a wider sense – being an ancient rather than medieval form of Greek, though over the centuries increasingly resembling Medieval and Modern Greek.
Ancient Greek comprised several dialects, such as Attic, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and Arcadocypriot; among them, Attic Greek became the basis of Koine Greek. Unlike Koine, which is generally treated as a later form of Ancient Greek, Mycenaean Greek is treated separately from the later language, reflecting its age, and the very different nature of the material and of the type of scholarship required to study it.
Dialects
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.
There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects.
History The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form.
Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed no later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions—and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians.
The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation.
One standard formulation for the dialects is:
West Group Northwest Greek Doric Aeolic Group Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic Thessalian Boeotian Ionic-Attic Group Attic Ionic Euboean and colonies in Italy Cycladic Asiatic Ionic Arcadocypriot Greek Arcadian Cypriot West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'.
Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.
Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree.
Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence.
Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian, such as the Pella curse tablet, as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet, Emilio Crespo and most scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect, which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly. Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification.
The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian.
Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian, the dialect of Sparta), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian).
All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects.
Language tree The following tree is based on the work of Lucien van Beek:
Graeco-Phrygian Greek South Greek Achaean Mycenaean Arcadocypriot Attic–Ionic Attic Western Ionic Central Ionic Eastern Ionic North Greek Aeolic Boeotian (it also has West Greek features; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and West Greek) Lesbian (it also has at least one archaic South Greek innovation; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and South Greek) Thessalian West Greek Doric Northwest Greek Ancient Macedonian Phrygian
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek.
Related languages
Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia, which is regarded by current consensus to have been closely related to Greek.Brixhe, Cl. "Le Phrygien". In Fr. Bader (ed.), Langues indo-européennes, pp. 165–178, Paris: CNRS Editions. "Unquestionably, however, Phrygian is most closely linked with Greek." (p. 72). Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with ArmenianJames Clackson. Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 11–12. (see also Graeco-Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 181.Henry M. Hoenigswald, "Greek", The Indo-European Languages, ed. Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paolo Ramat (Routledge, 1998 pp. 228–260), p. 228.BBC: Languages across Europe: Greek
Phonology
Differences from Proto-Indo-European
Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics, ancient Greek words could end only in a vowel or ; final stops were lost, as in "milk", compared with "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: PIE became at the beginning of a word (debuccalization): Latin , English six, ancient Greek . PIE was elided between vowels after an intermediate step of debuccalization: Sanskrit , Latin (where s > r by rhotacism), Greek * > * > ancient Greek (), Attic () "of a kind". PIE became (debuccalization) or (fortition): Sanskrit , ancient Greek "who" (relative pronoun); Latin , English yoke, ancient Greek . PIE , which occurred in Mycenaean and some non-Attic dialects, was lost: early Doric , English work, Attic Greek . PIE and Mycenaean labiovelars changed to plain stops (labials, dentals, and velars) in the later Greek dialects: for instance, PIE became or in Attic: Attic Greek "where?", Latin ; Attic Greek , Latin "who?". PIE "voiced aspirated" stops were devoiced and became the aspirated stops in ancient Greek.
Phonemic inventory
The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek. 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 once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as (iotacism). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives, and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent. Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes.
The examples below represent Attic Greek in the 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent.
Consonants Labial Alveolar Velar GlottalNasal ()1 Plosive voiced voiceless aspirated Fricative 2 3Approximant Trill 4
1 occurred as an allophone of that was used before velars and as an allophone of before nasals. 2 was assimilated to before voiced consonants. 3 was earlier written , but when the same letter (eta) was co-opted to stand for a vowel, was dropped from writing, to be restored later in the form of a diacritic, the rough breathing. 4 was probably a voiceless when word-initially and geminated (written and ).
Vowels Front Back unrounded rounded Close Close-mid Open-mid Open
raised to , probably by the 4th century BC.
Morphology
Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative) and three voices (active, middle, and passive), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms.