OSU Department of Linguistics | OSU Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures |
NOTE: accents, diacritics, and special symbols have been eliminated or modified in the interest of making the text readable in the absence of the appropriate encoding system and font. Thus, long marks and the like are not indicated, and so cited forms should be used with caution.
Language Name: Ancient Greek, Classical Greek, Greek (without reference to time period, the ancient form of the language is usually taken as the unmarked value, and within Ancient Greek, the Attic dialect (see below on Dialects) is the usual point of reference); autonym: hellenike (actually an adjective derived from Hellen, the word for a 'Greek' in general (as opposed to a member of one of the Greek dialect groups; as an adjective, it is modifying an understood noun 'language').
Location: Temporally, Ancient Greek can be located from its earliest attestation in the 14th century BC (see below on Origin & History) up through the end of the Hellenistic period in (roughly) the 4th century AD. Spatially, Ancient Greek in its earliest attested forms was spoken in the southern Balkan peninsula, in territory that is now the modern nation of Greece, both on the Greek mainland and on some of the Aegean islands, most notably Crete. By relatively early in the first millennium BC, Greek was spoken over all of the Aegean islands and Cyprus, and there were Greek-speaking colonies in Asia Minor, along the west coast of what is now Turkey, in Southern Italy, in parts of the Western Mediterranean, and in the Black Sea area. Colonization continued during the Archaic and Pre-Classical periods up to the 7th century BC and into the Classical period, but it was during the Hellenistic period, as part of the the expansion of the empire of Philip of Macedon and especially his son Alexander the Great, who both adopted Greek as the official language of their court, that Greek achieved its greatest geographic distribution, spreading all over the eastern Mediterranean, with a major cultural center in Alexandria, and the Levant, and extending as far east as India.
Family: Ancient Greek is generally taken to be the only representative (though note the existence of different dialects) of the Greek or Hellenic branch of Indo-European. There is some dispute as to whether Ancient Macedonian (the native language of Philip and Alexander), if it has any special affinity to Greek at all, is a dialect within Greek (see below) or a sibling language to all of the known Ancient Greek dialects. If the latter view is correct, then Macedonian and Greek would be the two subbranches of a group within Indo-European which could more properly be called Hellenic.
Related Languages: As noted above, Ancient Macedonian might be the language most closely related to Greek, perhaps even a dialect of Greek. The slender evidence is open to different interpretations, so that no definitive answer is really possible but most likely, Ancient Macedonian was not simply an Ancient Greek dialect on a par with Attic or Aeolic (see below). More broadly within Indo-European, Greek shows itself as a "centum" language, with a distinct outcome for the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) labiovelars, opposed to a single outcome for both the palatals and the velars of PIE. Despite some suggestive affinities to Armenian and Indo-Iranian, the general consensus is that these connections are not so strong as to warrant treating these branches as part of a larger subgroup within Indo-European. Moreover, even though culturally there are close ties in the Classical and Post-Classical periods between speakers of Greek and speakers of Latin, reflected also in Western academic circles (where courses on comparative Greek and Latin grammar are taught as part of Classical Linguistics), there is no special linguistic relationship between Greek and Latin within Indo-European.
Dialects: The main dialects of Ancient Greek, identifiable in the end of the Archaic period, are Attic-Ionic (comprising Attic and Ionic), Aeolic (consisting of Boeotian and Thessalian on the mainland and the Greek of the island of Lesbos and of adjacent northwest Asia Minor), Arcado-Cypriot (taking in Arcadian, in the Peloponnesos, and Cypriot), and West Greek (covering not only Northwest Greek, such as Aetolian, and Locrian, but also Doric, which includes Laconian (the dialect of Sparta), Corinthian, Megaran, Cretan, and Rhodian). Attic-Ionic and Arcado-Cypriot are sometimes classed together as East Greek, with Aeolic being seen as intermediate between East and West Greek. The ancients themselves were aware of some of these dialect differences, as indicated by the existence of verbs such as aiolizein 'to speak Aeolic', dorizein 'to speak Doric', and attikizein 'to speak Attic', all of which can be contrasted with hellenizein 'to speak (common) Greek' (cf. the autonym hellenike noted above).
Number of Speakers: In Mycenaean times, the number of speakers of Greek, by modern standards, was probably somewhat small, though no doubt numbering in the several tens of thousands. In the Classical period, the numbers were considerably higher; Athens, the largest city at the time, for instance, had a population of some 60,000 adult males at the height of its power and influence in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, suggesting a total population at a given moment of at least 300,000. Factoring in available information about the size of armies (some 7,000 of Alexander's soldiers were provided by the Greek League) and about other Greek cities, e.g. that 6,000 people were killed in Thebes in 335 BC when Alexander razed it, that the large amphitheaters found in many parts of the Greek world typically could hold at least 10,000 spectators, and such, one can estimate the Greek-speaking population in ancient times, perhaps quite conservatively, as approaching 800,000, at any one time. With the spread of Greek during the Hellenistic period, the number of speakers grew accordingly over Alexander's empire, and surely numbered over several million (though not all in the empire spoke Greek as their first language) at its peak.
Origin and History: The earliest stages of the prehistory of Greek, from the conventional date of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, roughly 4500 BC, to the first attestation in the Mycenaean period, c.1400 BC, are somewhat obscure. Still, it is generally agreed that Proto-Greek speakers first entered Southeastern Europe, and the Balkans in particular, sometime between 2200 BC and 1600 BC, most likely coming in several different migratory waves. The earliest of these migrations may well have been speakers of what in the first millennium BC became Arcado-Cypriot, and in the second millennium BC is represented by Mycenaean Greek (note the affinities referred to above between Mycenaean and Arcado-Cypriot), settling in the southern part of the Greek mainland and in the Peloponnesos. A later wave brought Ionic speakers into Attica as well as other parts of central Greece and the Peloponnesos. At this point, still in the second millennium BC, West Greek speakers are believed to have been grouped in the northwestern part of the southern Balkan peninsula.
Inventory: The consonant system of Classical Greek, illustrated with the Attic dialect, had nine stops, with three distinctive points of articulation - labial, dental, and velar - and three distinctive manners of articulation - voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated; two nasals (with [N] as an allophone before velars); two liquids, a trill (with a voiceless allophone in initial position) and a lateral; a voiceless sibilant (with a voiced allophone before voiced consonants); and a glottal fricative; the glides [w] and [j] occur in the coda of diphthongs (and thus could be treated as allophones of corresponding basic vowels):
Table 1: Consonants of Classical (Attic) Greek
Labial | Palatal | Dental | Velar | Glottal | |
Stops | |||||
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Nasals |
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Fricatives |
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Liquids | |||||
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Glides |
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Table 2: Vowels of Classical (Attic) Greek Table 3: Diphthongs of Classical (Attic) Greek
The front rounded vowels [y] / [y:] are found only in the Attic-Ionic dialect; the other dialects correspondingly have back rounded [u] / [u:] instead.
Basic phonological rules: A basic phonological process involving consonants was the iterative deletion of all word-final consonants other than [s r n], the only final consonants therefore allowed on the surface; thus underlying /galakt/ 'milk/NOM.SG' surfaced as [gala], and /kleptonts/ 'stealing/NOM.SG.MASC' surfaced as [klepton]. Other morphophonemic alternations include t ~ s before i (e.g. plout-os 'wealth' / plous-ios 'wealthy'), devoicing/deaspiration before s (e.g. ag-o 'I lead' / ak-s-o 'I will lead', e-graph-e '(s)he was writing' / e-grap-s-e '(s)he wrote'), and intervocalic loss of underlying s (e.g. alethes 'true/NOM.SG.NTR' / aletheO-a 'true/NOM.PL.NTR' (which in Attic contracts to alethe; compare also aletheia from /alethes-ia/)), among others. Contractions of vowel sequences are quite usual, even across word boundaries when the first element is a prosodically weak word such as the definite article or kai 'and'; the outcomes of these contractions vary from dialect to dialect and constitute one of the major isoglosses distinguishing the dialects.
Other information: The Classical Attic system given above underwent several changes in the post-Classical period, not all of which were completed by the end of the Hellenistic period, around the 4th century AD. In the consonants, earlier b d g fricativized to v d y, as did ph th kh, yieldingf th x, and hwas lost (a change found in several ancient dialects other than Attic). New instances of the voiced stops b d g were provided by loan words and possibly also as variants of voiceless p t k after nasals. In addition, the once-allophonic [z] took on phonemic statusIn the vowels, earlier [o:] raised to [u:], distinctive vowel length was lost, and the movement of several vowels to [i] was underway; the long palatal diphthongs lost their offglide, the w offglide became [v] or [f] depending on the voicing of the following sound, and each of the other diphthongs merged with some short monophthong. The ultimate result is the (considerably simplified) vowel system in Table 4:
Table 4: Late Hellenistic Vowel System
These changes in the phonology were the beginnings of the developments that characterize Modern Greek in contrast to Classical Greek; see the next chapter (
GREEK, Modern) for more details.
Table 5: Examples of nominal inflection
'the wise divinity' (MASCULINE) | 'the worthy hope' (FEMININE) |
NOM.SG ho sophos daimon ACC.SG ton sophon daimona GEN.SG tou sophou daimonos DAT.SG toi sophoi daimoni VOC.SG sophe daimon |
NOM.SG he: axia elpis ACC.SG ten axian elpida GEN.SG tes axias elpidos DAT.SG tei axiai elpidi VOC.SG axia elpi |
NOM/ACC/VOC.DU to: sopho: daimone GEN/DAT.DU toin sophoin daimonoin |
NOM/ACC/VOC.DU to: axia elpide GEN/DAT.DU tain axiain elpidoin |
NOM/VOC.PL hoi sophoi daimones ACC.PL tous sophous daimonas GEN.PL ton sophon daimonon DAT.PL tois sophois daimosi |
NOM/VOC.PL hai axiai elpides ACC.PL tas axias elpidas GEN.PL ton axion elpidon DAT.PL tais axiais elpisi |
Verb Morphology: The verbal system of Ancient Greek encoded many more categories than did the nominal system. The categories of tense (present, past, and future), aspect (distinguishing continuous action (imperfective) from simple occurrence (so-called "aoristic") from completed action (perfective)), and voice (active, passive, and so-called "middle") are relevant for all verbs, whether finite, i.e. those that show the encoding of three persons and three numbers (singular, dual, plural), in agreement with the subject, and of mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative), or nonfinite, i.e. without person, number, and mood marked, covering the participles (11 in all) and the infinitives (11 in all). Not all combinations of categories have distinct realizations or even any realization at all; for instance, there are no first person dual active forms, there are no moods other than the indicative for the past imperfective (the so-called "imperfect"), and passive and middle voice forms are identical in the present tense and the imperfect as well as in the present and past perfective (the so-called "present perfect" and "pluperfect").
Table 6: Ancient Greek Tense-Aspect Relations
Tense | Present | Past | Future |
Aspect__________ | _______________ | _______________ | _______________ |
Continuous | present | imperfect | future |
Simple |
(no realization) | aorist | future |
Completed | perfect | pluperfect | future perfect (generally only passive) |
Table 7: Synopsis of grapho
Present | Past (AOR unless marked) |
Future | Perfect (PRES unless marked) |
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Active | ||||
Indicative Subj'nc've Optative Imperative Infinitive Participle |
grapho grapho graphoimi graphe graphein graphon |
egraphon/IMPF egrapsa grapso grapsaimi grapson grapsai grapsas |
grapso ------ grapsoimi ------ grapsein grapson |
gegrapha egegraphe/PLUPRF gegrapho gegraphoimi gegraphe gegraphenai gegraphos |
Middle | ||||
Indicative Subj'nc've Optative Imperative Infinitive Participle |
graphomai graphomai graphoimen graphou graphesthai graphomenos |
egraphomen/IMPF egrapsamen grapsomai grapsaimen grapsai grapsasthai grapsamenos |
grapsomai ------ grapsoimen ------ grapsesthai grapsomenos |
gegrammai egegrammen/PLUPRF gegrammenos o gegrammenos eien gegrapso gegraphthai gegrammenos |
Passive | ||||
Indicative Subj'nc've Optative Imperative Infinitive Participle |
graphomai graphomai graphoimen graphou graphesthai graphomenos |
egraphomen/IMPF egraphthen graphtho graphtheien graphtheti graphthenai graphtheis |
graphesomai ------ graphthesoimen ------ graphthesesthai graphthesomenos |
gegrammai egegrammen/PLUPRF gegrapsomai/FUT.PRF gegrammenos o gegrammenos eien gegrapsoimen/FUT.PRF gegrapso gegraphthai gegrapsesthai/FUT.PRF gegrammenos gegrapsomenos/FUT.PRF |
General Rules: The most general rule of Greek word formation is that most derivation and inflection involves suffixes and/or vowel change (usually referred to as "ablaut" or "gradation"). Inflectional suffixes are well-illustrated above; an inflectional use of ablaut is seen in aorist elip-on 'I left' vs. present leip-o, and a derivational use inpetomai 'I fly' vs. frequentative potaomai 'I fly hither and thither'. An example of a derivational suffix is seen in attik-iz-o 'speak Attic', dor-iz-o 'speak Doric', hellen-iz-o 'speak Greek', where the (very common) suffix -iz- derives verbs from nominal bases. There is, however, one inflectional prefix, the so-called "augment" which occurs with past tense forms (imperfect, aorist, pluperfect); with most consonant-initial verbs it has the form e-, as in egraphon, egrapsa, egegraphe in Table 7; contractions with vowel-initial verbs give different results for the "augmented" forms. There are also a few infixes, as in the present stem la-m-b-vs. aorist stem lab- 'take'. Also, reduplication figures in the formation of the perfect, as in gegrapha in Table 7. In derivation, there is the wide use of lexical (content) prefixes, sometimes referred to as "preverbs", to alter or add to the basic meaning of a root, as in grapho 'I write' versus kata-grapho'I register' (literally "I write down") versus hupo-grapho 'I write under' (cf. hupo 'under'), etc. Finally, Greek makes extensive use of compounding to create new words, generally involving stems as first members, including noun-noun compounds (e.g. khoro-didaskalos 'chorus-teacher'), verb-noun compounds (e.g. terpsi-noos 'soul-delighting', literally "delighting soul"), and exocentric compounds (e.g. kako-daimon 'ill-fated', literally "having a bad fate"), among others.
Other Informtion: Several changes in morphological categories took place between Classical Greek and Hellenistic Greek. In both the noun and the verb, dual number became increasingly restricted in use, and ultimately was lost. In the noun, the dative case was being replaced in Hellenistic times by various prepositional alternatives and in some functions by the genitive case. In the verb, the optative mood was increasingly on the wane, partly the result of sound changes that led to partial homophony, in several forms in the paradigm, with the subjunctive and, less so, with the indicative). Similarly, the various forms of the perfect (present perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect) were used less and less, eventually being lost. In a change that affected both the morphology and the syntax, the infinitive began to give way in this period to finite subordinate clause substitutes. There were also several changes in the actual form of grammatical endings, due to sound changes and analogical changes within the various systems of endings.
Constituent Order: The order of major constituents in a sentence was generally free, so that both Subject - Verb and Verb - Subject orders are found. Similarly, the object may precede or follow the verb or even the subject, though weak pronominal objects generally occurred as clitics in second position within their clause, often as part of a string of clitic elements, including sentence connectives. These possibilities are illustrated in the example sentences at the end of chapter.
(1) a. ho sophos basileus 'the wise king'
Within the noun phrase, the article afforded great flexibility, with extended prenominal modifiers possible, even multiple "embeddings" of articulated nouns (see (4) below).
Case-marking: Nominative case is used to mark the subjects of finite verbs, while accusative is the usual case for the subject of an infinitive. Accusative is also the typical case for the direct object, though some verbs idiosyncratically govern objects in other cases (e.g. arkhomai 'begin' takes a genitive object). The dative case marks indirect objects, as well as parties with an interest in some action, possession with 'be', agent with some passives, instrument or case, accompaniment, time at which, and place in which. The genitive marks a variety of relations between nouns, including possession, and can be used for partitive verbal objects, e.g. (Thucydides 1.30) tes ges etemon 'they ravaged some of the land' (literally: "of-the land they-ravaged"). The vocative is essentially an asyntactic case, being used for direct address.
Negation: Greek negation is marked by one of two separate (adverbial) words, distributed mainly according to verbal mood: ou occurs with the indicative and the optative moods, whereas me occurs with the subjunctive and the imperative. The two negation markers can cooccur, with their relative order correlating with different functions; for example ou me is an emphatic negator with a future tense, but me ou can be used in an interrogative sentence that implies a negative answer.
Other information: The system of verbal complementation in Ancient Greek was quite elaborate, with many nonfinite forms - infinitives and participles - available to serve as complements to main verbs, and also many finite (tensed, aspectual, modal) forms cooccurring with various subordinating conjunctions. Moreover, there was a fairly complex set of conditions governing allowable combinations of tenses and moods, especially in indirect discourse and in conditional sentences.
The earliest writing system for Greek was the so-called Linear B syllabary, adapted from another system originally designed for an entirely different language; the source system probably was that now known as "Linear A", found all over Crete and at other Minoan sites from the second millennium BC). Greek Linear B was in use at the various Mycenaean palaces in the second millennium BC, most notably Pylos in the Peloponnesos and Knosos on Crete (after the Mycenaean invasion there), and has been found mostly inscribed onto clay tablets for record-keeping purposes, though, more rarely, the signs have been found painted onto vases as well. In Cyprus in the first millennium BC, inscriptions occur that are written in a syllabary, entirely different from, but surely related to, the Mycenaean one, with both most likely having a common source, presumably Minoan Linear A.
Table 8: The Greek Alphabet (Ionian version, as used for Classical Attic; 5th century BC
Loanwords and Contact with Other Languages
Ancient Greek shows a long history of the results of contact with speakers of other languages, and as noted above, the Koine period was characterized by extensive contacts between Greek speakers and non-Greek speakers, with a considerable number of Latin words entering the language. There are some words in Greek that seem to come from "pre-Greek" (sometimes referred to as "Pelasgian"), i.e. from an indigenous language of the Balkans before the coming of the Greeks, e.g. plinthos 'brick', where the cluster -nth- is otherwise unusual in Greek. Also, the Ancient Greek lexicon contains some early loan words from Anatolian languages, e.g. elephas 'ivory' (attested in Mycenaean Greek), and Semitic languages, e.g. khiton 'tunic', kuminon 'cumin', etc. (both attested in Mycenaean).
Common Words: Nouns are cited in the nominative singular form, adjectives in nominative singular masculine; all forms cited are taken from the Classical Attic dialect as (somewhat artificially) representative of all of Ancient Greek):
man: | aner (i.e. male person); anthropos (i.e. human being) |
woman: | gunev |
water: | hudor |
sun: | hevlios |
three: | treis (MASC/FEM.NOM), tria (NTR.NOM) |
fish: | ikhthus |
big: | megas |
long: | makros |
small: | mikros |
yes: | nai; malista; ge (and note that there are other affirmative adverbs as well) |
no: | ou (ouk before vowels); oukhi |
good: | agathos |
bird: | ornis |
dog: | kuon |
tree: | dendron |
Example Sentences
The following sentences provide instances of several of the verbal and nominal categories discussed above, and illustrate some aforementioned aspects of Greek syntax, e.g. possible placements of subjects and objects relative to the verb, negation, use of moods, use of cases, and the versatility provided by the definite article through the placement of modifiers between the article and the noun (multiple times in (4)) within the noun phrase:
(2)
o | Sokrates, | nun | men | Anutoi | ou | peisometha, | all' | aphiemen | se | (Plato Apology 29c) |
O | Socrates/VOC | now | but | A./DAT.SG | not | believe/1PL.FUT.MID | but | acquit/1PL.PRES | you/ACC | |
'O Socrates! At this time we will not believe Anutos, but we (will) acquit you' |
ei | oun | me | epi | toutois | aphioite, | eipoimi | an | humin |
if | indeed | me/ACC | on | these/DAT | acquit/2PL.PRES.OPT | say/1SG.AOR. | OPT PART | you/DAT.PL |
hoti | "ego | humas | aspazomai | men | kai | philo, | peisomai |
that | I/NOM | you/ACC.PL | salute/1SG.PRES.MID | but | and | love/1SG.PRES | obey/1SG.FUT.MID |
de | mallon | toi theoi | e; | humin | (Plato Apology 29d) |
but | rather | the-god/DAT.SG | than | you/DAT.PL | |
'If indeed you were to acquit me on these terms, I would say to you (that) "I salute and love (you), but I will obey the god rather than you"' |
ta | gar | tes | ton pollon | psukhes | ommata |
the/NTR.NOM.PL | for | the/FEM.GEN.SG | the-many/MASC.GEN.PL | soul/FEM.GEN.SG | eyes/NTR.NOM.PL |
karterein | pros | to theion | aphoronta |
endure/PRES.INF | towards | the-divine/ACC.NTR | looking/NTR.NOM.PL.PRES.ACT.PPL |
adunata | (Plato Sophist 254a) | ||||
powerless/NTR.NOM.PL | |||||
'For the eyes of the soul of the multitude are powerless to endure looking towards the divine' |
Basic Bibliography
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