Greek Grammar
Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected, for example, 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, three voices, as well as three persons and three numbers and various other forms. Modern Greek is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive.
Other noticeable changes in the its grammar include the loss of the infinitive, the dual number and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, like augment and reduplication.
Greek is written in the Greek alphabet which dates from the 8th century BC. The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters
Historical sound changes include the main phonetic changes between Ancient and Modern Greek, which are a simplification in the vowel system and a change of some consonants to fricative values.
Ancient Greek had five short vowels, seven long vowels, and numerous diphthongs. This has been reduced to a simple five-vowel system. Most noticeably, the sounds i, e, y, ei, oi have all become i. The consonants b, d, g became v, dh, gh (dh is /D/ and gh is /G/). The aspirated consonants ph, th, kh became f, th, kh (where the new pronunciation of th is /T/ and the new pronunciation of kh is /x/).
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