Ancient Greek



Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic (c. 9th–6th centuries BC), Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC–6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine ("common") or Biblical Greek, and its late period mutates imperceptibly into Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form it closely resembles Classical Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects.

The Ancient Greek language is one of the most prominent in human cultural history, as it was the language of the works of Homer, of the historians, playwrights and philosophers during the Athenian Golden Age, and of the New Testament. It has made a large contribution to the vocabulary of English and was a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. The New Latin used in the scientific binomial classification system continues today to draw vigorously from Ancient Greek vocabulary.

This article treats primarily the Archaic and Classical phases of the language — see also the article on Koine Greek.

Dialects of Ancient Greek
The origins, early forms, and early development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood, owing to the lack of contemporaneous evidence. There are several 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 BC), and about 1200 BC. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form.

The major dialect groups of the Ancient Greek period can be assumed to have developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasion(s), and 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; moreover, 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 ancient Greeks themselves considered there to be three major divisions of the Greek people&mdash;Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining hello 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.

One standard formulation for the dialects is:

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. Arcado-Cyprian, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cyprian vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-west is called East Greek.

The Arcado-Cyprian group apparently descended more closely 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 it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence.

Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: possibly a dialect of Greek; a sibling language to Greek; or a close cousin to Greek, and perhaps related to some extent, to Thracian and Phrygian languages.

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).

The 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, notable exceptions being fragments of the works of the poetess Sappho from the island of Lesbos and the poems of the Boeotian poet, Pindar.

After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 300's 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 Doric dialect has survived to the present in the form of the Tsakonian dialect of Modern Greek, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 500's AD, 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, Aeolic Greek; otherwise /ra/ and /la/, but /ar/ and /al/ before resonants and analogously. Example: Indo-European *str-to- becomes Aeolic strotos, otherwise stratos, "army".
 * Loss of /h/ (including /h/ from original /s/) (except initially) and of /j/. Examples: treis "three" from *treyes; Doric nikaas "having conquered" for nikahas from nikasas.
 * Loss of /w/ in many dialects (later than loss of /h/ and /j/). Example: etos "year" from wetos.
 * 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 /ss/ or /tt/ (Attic)
 * /gj/, /dj/ → /dz/ or /zd/ (see Zeta)
 * /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 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&mdash;i.e., the set of verbs derived from Ancient Greek contracted verbs&mdash;represents one of the two main classes of verbs in that language.)

Phonology
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.

Long vowels
probably raised to by the fourth century BC.

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.

Consonants
was an allophone of, used before voiced consonants; occurred as an allophone of  used before velars and as an allophone of  before nasals, 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.

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 become , and dentals disappear.
 * Before a (aorist passive stem), velars become, labials become , 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.

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), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven tenses: the present, future and imperfect tenses are imperfective in aspect; the aorist tense (perfective aspect); a  present-perfect, pluperfect and future perfect (all with perfect aspect). Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. There are infinitives and participles corresponding to  the finite combinations of tense, aspect and voice.

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. In verbs with a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the prefix and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσεβάλoν in the aorist.

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.

Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i. A nasal consonant appears after the reduplication in some verbs.

Writing system
Ancient Greek was written in the Greek alphabet, with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of Ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks, interword spacing, modern punctuation, and sometimes mixed case, but these were all introduced later.

Example text
The following polytonic Greek text is from the Apology by Plato:

Transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme:
 * Hóti mèn humeîs, ô ándres Athēnaîoi, pepónthate hupò tôn emôn katēgórōn, ouk oîda: eg d' oûn kaì autòs hup' autōn olígou emautoû epelathómēn, hoútō pithanôs élegon. Kaítoi alēthés ge hōs épos eipeîn oudèn eirkasin.

Translated into English:
 * What you, men of Athens, have learned from my accusers, I do not know: but I, for my part, nearly forgot who I was thanks to them since they spoke so persuasively. And yet, of the truth, they have spoken, one might say, nothing at all.

Another example, from the Iliad of Homer:

Modern use of Ancient Greek
The study of Ancient Greek in European countries in addition to Latin occupied an important place in the syllabus until the beginning of the 20th century. Ancient Greek is still taught as a compulsory or optional subject especially at traditional or élite schools throughout Europe, such as Public schools and Grammar schools in the United Kingdom, the Liceo classico in Italy, the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Germany (usually as a 3rd language after Latin and English, from age 14 till 18). In 2006/07, 15,000 pupils studied Greek in Germany according to Statistisches Bundesamt. Moreover it's an optional subject, in high schools of many countries. Ancient Greek is also taught at most major universities worldwide, often combined with Latin as part of Classics.

Ancient Greek is often used in the coinage of modern technical terms in the European languages: see English words of Greek origin.

Modern authors rarely write in Ancient Greek, though Jan Křesadlo wrote some poetry and prose in Ancient Greek, some volumes of Asterix have been written in Attic Greek and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been translated into Ancient Greek.

Ancient Greek is also used by, mainly Greek, organizations and individuals who wish to denote their respect, admiration or preference to the use of this language. This use is sometimes considered graphical, nationalistic or funny. In any case, the fact that modern Greeks can still wholly or partly understand texts written in non-archaic forms of ancient Greek shows the affinity of modern Greek language to its ancestral predecessor.