Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek refers to the dialects of the Hellenic language family from about 1100 B.C to 600 A.D., including during the historical periods of Archaic Greece (roughly 1000 B.C. to 500 B.C.), Classical Greece (roughly 500 B.C. to 300 B.C.), and the Hellenistic world (roughly 300 B.C. to 600 A.D.).

It is the language of the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the great works of literature and philosophy of the Athenian Golden Age, of the foundations of our modern mathematics and sciences, and of the Christian Bible.

It was spoken in the independent Greek city states of Classical Greece and the empires founded by Alexander the Great, it was the second official language of the classical Roman Empire, and it was the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire in its early years.

For information on the Hellenic language family prior to the Ancient Greek period, see articles Mycenaean Greek and Proto-Greek.

Dialects of Ancient Greek

The origins, early forms, and early development of the Hellenic language family is not well understood. There are several competing theories about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Indo-European language (not later than 2000 B.C.), and about 1200 B.C. The only certainly-known dialect from this period is Mycenaean, but it is assumed that there were others, certainly the Northwest Greek group or its predecessor.

The major dialect groups of the Ancient Greek period can be assumed to have developed not later than 1100 B.C., at the time of the Dorian invasions, and they first appear documented in writing beginning in the 8th Century B.C.

The ancient Greeks themselves considered there to be three major divisions of the Greek people, into 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 Cyprian, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation.

Today the most standard formulation for the dialects is:

Northwest Greek
- Northwest Greek
- Doric

Aeolic
- Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic
- Thessalian
- Boeotian

Ionic
- East Ionic
- Central Ionic
- West Ionic
- Attic

Arcado-Cyprian
- Arcadian
- Cypriot

The non-Northwest groups are generally grouped together in opposition to Northwest Greek, and then sometimes in subsets of Ionic and Aeolic vs. Arcado-Cyprian, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cyprian vs. Ionic. Various names are used for these groupings such as "West" vs. "East" Greek.

The Arcado-Cyprian group is descended from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze age.

Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree.

Pamphylian, spoken in a small area on the south-western coast of Asia Minor and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence.

The highly controversial native language of Ancient Macedonia may have been a non-Greek Indo-European language, or a highly-divergent branch of Northwest Greek, or an additional major dialect group of Ancient Greek.

Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or 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). The famous Lesbian dialect was a member of the Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic sub-group. 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.

The dialects outside the Ionic group are known mainly from inscriptions, with the notable exceptions of fragments of the works of the Lesbian poetess Sapho and the Spartan poet Pindar surviving.

After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C., 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 Doric dialect has survived to the present in the form of the Tsakonian and Southern Italian dialects of Modern Greek. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century A.D., the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek.

Sound changes

These sound changes since Proto-Greek affect most or all Ancient Greek dialects:

Syllabic /r/, /l/ become /ro/ and /lo/ in Mycenean Greek and Aeolic Greek; otherwise /ra/ and /la/, but /ar/ and /al/ before resonants and analogously.
Loss of /h/ from original /s/ (except initially) and of /j/.
Loss of /w/ in many dialects (later than loss of /h/ and /j/).
Loss of labiovelars, which were converted (mostly) into labials, sometimes into dentals or velars.
Contraction of adjacent vowels resulting from loss of /h/ and /j/ (and, to a lesser extent, from loss of /w/); more in Attic Greek than elsewhere.
Rise of a distinctive circumflex accent, resulting from contraction and certain other changes.
Limitation of the accent to the last three syllables, with various further restrictions.
Loss of /n/ before /s/ (incompletely in Cretan Greek), with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel.

Note that /w/ and /j/, when following a vowel and not preceding a vowel, combined early on with the vowel to form a diphthong and were thus not lost.

The loss of /h/ and /w/ after a consonant were often accompanied by compensatory lengthening of a preceding vowel. The loss of /j/ after a consonant was accompanied by a large number of complex changes, including diphthongization of a preceding vowel or palatalization or other change to a directly preceding consonant. Some examples:

/pj/, /bj/, /phj/ -> /pt/
/lj/ -> /ll/
/tj/, /thj/, /kj/, /khj/ -> /s/ when following a consonant; otherwise /tt/ (Attic), /ss/ (Ionic)
/gj/, /dj/ -> /zd/
/mj/, /nj/, /rj/ -> /j/ is transposed before consonant and forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel
/wj/, /sj/ -> /j/, forming a diphthong with the preceding vowel

The results of vowel contraction were complex and differed from dialect to dialect. Such contractions occur in the inflection of a number of different noun and verb classes and are among the most difficult aspects of Ancient Greek grammar. They were particularly important in the large class of contracted verbs, denominative verbs formed from nouns and adjectives ending in a vowel. (In fact, the reflex of contracted verbs in Modern Greek—i.e., the set of verbs derived from Ancient Greek contracted verbs—represents one of the two main classes of verbs in that language.)

Sounds

The pronunciation of Post-Classic Greek changed considerably from Ancient Greek, although the orthography still reflects features of the older language (see W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca – a guide to the pronunciation of Classical Greek). For a detailed description on the phonology changes from Ancient to Hellenistic periods of the Greek language, see the article on Koine Greek.

The examples below are intended to represent Attic Greek in the 5th century BC. Although ancient pronunciation can never be reconstructed with certainty, Greek in particular is very well documented from this period, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represented.

Vowels

Short vowels

	Front		Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close
Mid
Open

Long vowels

	Front		Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

probably raised to by the fourth century BC.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Dental	Velar	Glottal
Plosive
Aspirated Plosive
Nasal
Trill
Fricative
Lateral approximant

was an allophone of , used before voiced consonants; was an allophone of used before velars, while , written (), was probably a voiceless allophone of used word initially.

Consonant classes

There are three main classes of consonants:

Stops. This include three subclasses: velars (), labials (), and dentals ().
Sonorants are .
Fricatives are .

Consonant contractions

In verb conjugation, one consonant often comes up against the other. Various sandhi rules apply.

Rules:

Most basic rule: When two sounds appear next to each other, the first assimilates in voicing and aspiration to the second.
- This applies fully to stops. Fricatives assimilate only in voicing, sonorants do not assimilate.
Before an (future, aorist stem), velars become , labials , and dentals disappear.
Before a (aorist passive stem), velars become , labials , and dentals become .
Before an (perfect middle first-singular, first-plural, participle), velars become , nasal+velar becomes , labials become , dentals become , other sonorants remain the same.

Compensatory lengthening

There are different schemes for compensatory lengthening, depending on where it happens. The differences are in whether becomes or , and whether and become the closed values and or the open ones and .

Augment

The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least) a prefix /e-/. This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist).

There are two kinds of augment in Greek, syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r, however, add er). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel:

a, ā, e, ē -> ē
i, ī -> ī
o, ō -> ō
u, ū -> ū
ai -> ēi
ei -> ēi or ei
oi -> ōi
au -> ēu or au
eu -> ēu or eu
ou -> ou

Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e -> ei. The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels.

Following Homer's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry, especially epic poetry.

The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below.

Reduplication

Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (Note that a few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) There are three types of reduplication:

Syllabic reduplication: Most verbs beginning with a single consonant, or a cluster of a stop with a sonorant, add a syllable consisting of the initial consonant followed by e. An aspirated consonant, however, reduplicates in its unaspirated equivalent: Grassmann's law.
Augment: Verbs beginning with a vowel, as well as those beginning with a cluster other than those indicated previously (and occasionally for a few other verbs) reduplicate in the same fashion as the augment. This remains in all forms of the perfect, not just the indicative.
Attic reduplication: Some verbs beginning with an a, e or o, followed by a sonorant (or occasionally d or g), reduplicate by adding a syllable consisting of the initial vowel and following consonant, and lengthening the following vowel. Hence er -> erēr, an -> anēn, ol -> olōl, ed -> edēd. This is not actually specific to Attic Greek, despite its name; but it was generalized in Attic. This originally involved reduplicating a cluster consisting of a laryngeal and sonorant; hence h₃l -> h₃leh₃l -> olōl with normal Greek development of laryngeals. (Forms with a stop were analogous.)

Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab) has the perfect stem eilēpha (not *lelēpha) because it was originally slambanō, with perfect seslēpha, becoming eilēpha through (semi-)regular change.

Morphology

Main article: Ancient Greek grammar

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), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated across three aspects, the imperfective forms including present, future and imperfect tenses, perfective forms, restricted to the aorist, which in the indicative, and perfect forms, which include the present-perfect and pluperfect. There is a full complement of moods for each aspect, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative; in addition, infinitives and participles for all corresponding finite combinations of tense, aspect and voice, excluding the imperfect and pluerfect, are found.

Example text

Hóti mèn humeîs, ô ándres Athēnaîoi, pepónthate hupò tôn emôn katēgórōn, ouk oîda: eg d' oûn kaì autòs hup' autōn olígou emautoû epelathómēn, hótō pithanôs élegou. Kaítoi althés ge hōs épos eipeîn oudèn eirkasin.

How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know; but I, for my part, almost forgot my own identity, so persuasively did they talk; and yet there is hardly a word of truth in what they have said. Plato, Apology

External links

Elpenor's Lessons in Ancient Greek and study tools
Ancient Greek Grammar on the Web
Perseus Greek and Roman Materials
Perseus Greek dictionaries
Greek dictionary, tutorial and hangman program with texteditor Aimed at learning New Testament Greek
Textkit : Greek & Latin Learning Tools
Gentium — a typeface for the nations, a freely available font including polytonic Greek support

Hellenic languages and dialects | Ancient languages | Classical languages | Ancient Greece

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Ancient Greek