Overview of Greek
The Greek language is an Indo-European language which has existed from around the 14th century BC in the Cretan inscriptions called Linear B. Mycenaean Greek of this period is distinguished from later Classical or Ancient Greek of the 8th century BC and after, when texts came to be written in the Greek alphabet.
Modern Greek is a living tongue and one of the richest surviving languages today, with more than 600,000 words. Some scholars have overly stressed similarity to millennia-old Greek languages. Its interintelligibility with ancient Greek is a matter of debate.
It is claimed that a "reasonably well educated" speaker of the modern tongue can read the ancient dialects, but it is not made plain how much of that education consists of exposure to vocabulary and grammar obsolete in normal communication.
Greek from the Hellenistic and Byzantine times is markedly closer to Modern Greek. From 1834 to 1976 there was an attempt to impose purified language, an attempt to correct centuries of natural linguistic changes, as the only acceptable form of Greek in Greece.
After 1976, speech of the people was finally accepted by the Greek government as both the de facto and de jure forms of the language. A large number of words and expressions have remained unchanged through the centuries, and have found their way into a number of other languages, including Latin, Italian, German, French, and English.
Typical examples of such words include mostly terminology names, like astronomy, democracy, philosophy, thespian, anthropology etc.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
|
|
