The Ancient Greek language
Ancient Greek is studied in linguistics usually as the whole of its
dialects spoken in the polises of Ancient Greece. Before the Macedonian
conquest in the 4th century BC, Greece had never been a united state, and
this, naturally, did not allow its citizens to elaborate a unified form
of the language. Though the majority of literature sources we have from
ancient Greece, was written in Attic Greek, the
dialect of Athens, still other dialects played an important part in the
history of the language.
The language of documents from the archives in Crete, Mycenae and Pylos
(14th - 12th centuries BC) is the most ancient witnessed dialect of Ancient
Greek. After the Dark Ages in the history of Greece Homer's fundamental
epic works "Iliad" and "Odyssea" were written in a dialect closer to Ionic
(although sometimes several stages of writing the Iliad can be traced back:
Achaean, Aeolian, and Ionic). In the Golden Age of Greek culture, each
Greek polis made documents in its own dialect. The unified literature norm
was created only after the 4th century BC, when the Greek
Koine language appeared.
Ancient
Greek is one of the most archaic Indo-European tongue, demonstrating a
perfect Indo-European system of phonetics and morphology. The system of
vowels included five short and five long sounds (a, e, i, o, u).
There was a rich system of diphthongs. There were 17 consonants: voiced
stops (b, d, g), unvoiced stops (p, t, k),
aspirated stops resulting from Indo-European voiced aspirates (ph,
th, kh < *bh, *dh, *gh), sonants (m, n, r, l)
and affricates (ks, ps, dz, s). Indo-European semivowels
*w and *y disappeared in the majority of dialects
leaving only an aspiration in the beginning of the word. The same is true
for the initial *s: Greek herp- 'to crawl'
vs. Latin serpere. One of the dialectal differences was the
reflection of Indo-European labiovelar stops *kw, *gw, *gwh
- they obviously remain labiovelar in Mycenaean, turn to labials in Aeolian
and vary in other dialects. The Greek accent was tonal, with three main
tones: acute, gravis, circumflex.
Ancient Greek morphology had three noun genders, three numbers including
dual, five main noun cases. In Mycenaean and
in relics of the other dialects, some other case forms are noticeable,
they are partly agglutinative (e.g. -de of the "directive"
case). All nouns were divided into three types of declension: those for
feminine a-stems, for masculine and neuter o-stems
(or thematic stems), and consonant stems. The verb had a complex system
of conjugated forms: four moods, three voices (active, medium, passive),
two groups of tenses: general (present, future, perfect) and "historical"
(aorist, imperfect, pluperfect). This variety of forms meant that the paradigm
of every verb in Ancient Greek had up to 100 forms, each having its own
inflection. Such a development of the verb system could not exist for long,
in the Koine language the number of categories starts to decline.
The vocabulary of Greek includes a significant number of pre-Indo-European
terms evidently spoken by the aboriginal (so-called Pelasgian) population
of Greece. They mostly refer to the scientific, medical, agriculture and
construction spheres. A lot of words were borrowed in the Classical epoch
from Semitic (Phoenician), Old Persian, Egyptian, later Latin.
Mycenaean Greek was written in Linear
B, a non-Indo-European script borrowed from Crete. In the 9th century
BC, the Greek alphabet was
invented on the basis of the Phoenician alphabet: it was adapted to serve
the Greek language and is still used today in Greece and Cyprus.
This general description of Ancient Greek would not be sufficient, so
we have decided to add the detailed descriptions of the main dialects of
the language which you can access on the map.