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: Modern Greek (note that Greek by itself, without reference to time period, usually refers to Ancient Greek); autonym: elinika (cf. the Ancient Greek autonym hellenike, the neuter plural nominative/accusative of which is the source, via sound changes, of the modern term), also neoelinika (literally, "new (i.e., modern) Greek"), and romeika (literally, "Romaic", due to the affinities (Orthodox Christian) Greeks felt after the 4th century AD with the Eastern Roman (= Byzantine) Empire based in Constantinople).
Location: Prior to the late Hellenistic period, as noted in the chapter on Ancient Greek, there were Greek speakers all over the eastern Mediterranean, in Southern Italy, along the Black Sea coasts, in Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, and much of Asia Minor. This distribution continued throughout the Hellenistic period and on through the Byzantine and Medieval periods, and is valid even into the Modern era, though Greece and Cyprus are the main venues for the Greek language today. Most of the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, what is now Turkey, were removed to Greece after the population exchanges of the early 1920s that came in the aftermath of the Turkish defeat of Greece's expansionist forays. New diasporic communities have arisen in the 20th century, quite robustly in Australia (especially Melbourne) and in North America (especially in major cities in the USA and Canada), and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe and Central Asia, the latter in part due to emigration brought on by the Greek civil war after World War II.
Family: As a descendant of Ancient Greek, Modern Greek has the same family affiliation as that given in the chapter on Ancient Greek, namely part of the Greek or Hellenic branch of Indo-European.
Related Languages: The linguistic affinities noted in the chapter on Ancient Greek are relevant for Modern Greek, though perhaps not as obvious as for the ancient language. Depending on how one judges the difference between dialects of a language as opposed to separate languages, the highly divergent modern form of Greek known as Tsakonian, spoken still in the eastern Peloponnesos (in Greece), could well be considered now a separate language from the rest of Modern Greek, and the Pontic dialects once spoken in Asia Minor along the Black Sea coast and now spoken in many parts of Greece due to the 1923 population exchanges are divergent enough to warrant consideration as a separate language from the rest of Greek now (see also the next section).
Dialects: The dialect complexity of Ancient Greek was to a large extent levelled out during the Hellenistic period with the emergence of the relatively unified variety of Greek known as the Koine (see chapter on Ancient Greek). While somewhat oversimplified, since there are differences in the realizations of Koine Greek in different parts of the Hellenistic world, this view is essentially accurate. The dominant basis for the Koine was the ancient Attic-Ionic dialect though there was some limited input from the other dialects. For the most part, the Hellenistic Koine, or actually the version of it that took hold in the Byzantine period, was the starting point for the modern dialects, and it is conventional to date the emergence of Modern Greek dialects to about the 10th to 12th centuries (AD). The main exception to this characterization is Tsakonian (see above), which derives more or less directly from the ancient Doric dialect, though with an admixture of standard Modern Greek in recent years; in addition, the Greek of Southern Italy, still spoken for instance in some villages in Apulia and Calabria, seems to have Doric roots. The Pontic dialects (see above) may derive more directly from the Hellenistic Koine.
Number of Speakers: As noted in the earlier chapter, the spread of Greek during the Hellenistic period led to significant growth in the number of speakers of Greek, and this growth continued in the Byzantine and Medieval periods. At present, there are approximately 13,000,000 Greek speakers, some 10,000,000 in Greece, with about 500,000 in Cyprus, and the remainder in the modern Hellenic diaspora (over 1,000,000 in Australia). Some 5,000,000 speakers live in the greater Athens area alone, most of them speakers - and shapers - of the current standard language.
Origin and History: Temporally, Modern Greek has its origins in the Hellenistic Koine (see the chapter on Ancient Greek), since many of the changes that constitute the key differences between Ancient and Modern Greek are evident in nascent form in the Koine (though some ran to completion only later). While it is customary to divide Post-Classical and Post-Hellenistic Greek into the early Byzantine period (c. 300 AD to 1000 AD) and the later Byzantine/Medieval period (1000 to 1600), with the (truly) modern period starting after 1600, in fact vernacular Greek of the 12th century seems quite modern in many respects.
Basic Phonology: As noted in the previous chapter, the Classical Attic phonological system began to undergo several changes in the post-Classical period which ultimately characterize the differences between Ancient and Modern Greek. These included, for the consonants, the fricativization of earlier b d g to y (with later becoming v) and of ph th kh to f th x, the loss of h, and the reduction of the zd cluster (represented orthographically by <> (zeta)) to z, which then took on phonemic status. 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.
Table 1: Consonants of Koine Greek (Innovative; stable by (roughly) 5th century AD)
Labial | Palatal | Dental | Velar | Glottal | |
Stops | |||||
|
p |
t |
k |
||
|
b | d | g] | ||
Nasals | m | n | () 2 | ||
Fricatives | |||||
|
v f |
d th |
Y X |
||
Liquids | |||||
|
r l |
Table 2: Late Hellenistic Vowel System
The main additional change that took place to give the system found in Standard Modern Greek was unrounding of y to i after the 10th century, though in certain environments (e.g. around labials and/or velars) and in some dialects y yielded u; note also the loss of unstressed initial vowels mentioned above.
Basic phonological rules: Many of the same phonological generalizations and processes discussed in the chapter on Ancient Greek apply as well to later stages of Greek, though with some alterations due to sound changes, borrowings, and such. The restriction on possible word-final consonants (only-s, -n, -r permitted) held during the Koine and Middle Greek periods, though the the loss of final -n via a regular sound change and the gradual restructuring of the nominal system away from consonant-stems to vowel-stems (e.g. earlier pater- 'father' becoming patera-, leont- 'lion' becoming leonda-, etc.) removed most word-final instances of -r, -n, and potential clusters; moreover, it is still valid today really just for native Greek vocabulary, for modern loans have brought in many words, relatively unaltered, with other final consonants, e.g. tsek 'check', mats '(football) match', basket 'basketball', etc.
Basic Morphology: Like its ancient ancestor, Modern Greek is basically a fusional inflecting language morphologically, with relevant grammatical information generally being indicated through the endings of inflected words, i.e. nouns, pronouns, adjectives, article and verbs. Each ending typically encoded values for several categories simultaneously.
Noun Morphology: The nominal forms and categories given in the previous chapter for Ancient Greek are valid as well into the Koine period, though the dative case and all dual number forms begin to fall into disuse during that time, and are completely absent from colloquial Modern Greek. In addition, starting in the Koine period and continuing on into the Medieval period, most noun paradigms came to be restructured, with the basis for their organization becoming gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter) rather than the formal stem-classes (i-stem, consonant-stem, o-stem, etc.) of Ancient Greek. The resulting division, for the most part, has most masculine nouns with a nominative singular in -V-s opposed to an accusative and genitive in -V-O, and most feminine nouns with a nominative and accusative singular in-V-O opposed to a genitive in -V-s; the neuters are rather diverse but, as in Ancient Greek, the nominative and accusative are always identical.
Table 3: Examples of nominal inflection for Modern Greek
'the good father' (MASCULINE) |
'the good mother ' (FEMININE) |
'the good baby' (NEUTER) |
NOM.SG o kalos pateras ACC.SG ton kalo patera GEN.SG tu kalu patera VOC.SG kale patera |
NOM.SG i kali mitera ACC.SG tin kali mitera GEN.SG tis kalis miteras VOC.SG kali mitera |
NOM.SG to kalo moro ACC.SG to kalo moro GEN.SG tu kalu moru VOC.SG kalo moro |
NOM/VOC.PL i kali pateres ACC.PL tus kalus pateres GEN.PL ton kalon pateron |
NOM/VOC.PL i kales miteres ACC.PL tis kales miteres GEN.PL ton kalon miteron |
NOM/VOC.PL ta kala mora ACC.PL ta kala mora GEN.PL ton kalon moron |
As in Ancient Greek, the personal pronouns in Koine, Medieval, and Modern Greek have special forms, while demonstrative and other pronouns generally followed some other nominal declensional pattern. Adjectives show comparative and superlative degree forms, which by Medieval Greek and on into the modern language, are generally formed analytically (comparative viapjo + adjective, superlative via definite article + pjo + adjective), though the synthetic adjectival inflections of Ancient Greek are still used with a few, especially common, adjectives.
Verb Morphology: As with the noun, the categories and forms of the verbal system of Ancient Greek are generally valid for the Koine, though with some changes, and even, to some extent for Medieval and Modern Greek as well. As with the nouns, all verbal dual forms go out of use. Future periphrases begin to arise in the Koine in place of the earlier synthetic future, and by Medieval Greek one based on the use of the verb thelo 'want' as an auxiliary holds sway as the primary type, ultimately resulting in the Modern Greek future marker tha (from earlier 3SG thelei with the subjunctive marker na). In the early Koine, the perfect is on the wane and eventually disappears altogether as a category in the late Koine, only to be reconstituted as a category several centuries later in Medieval Greek through a periphrastic construction with 'have' as an auxiliary together with the sole productive remnant of the earlier infinitive. Also, as noted in the previous chapter, the infinitive in the Koine period begins to retreat, being replaced by finite periphrases with subordinating conjunctions; the infinitive continued as a marginal category into the Middle Greek period (c. 15th century) and in Modern Greek now, all functions that might be thought of as typical for infinitivals in various languages, e.g. complementation, nominalization, purpose clauses, control structures, etc., are expressed with fully finite (indicative or subjunctive) clauses (see Joseph 1990 for discussion). Similarly, the numerous participles of Ancient Greek diminish considerably in use, and though they were more prevalent in the Koine and Medieval Greek, there are now in Standard Modern Greek just two participial forms, an active and a medio-passive imperfective.
Table 4: Synopsis of yrafo 'write'
Present | Past | Future | Perfect | |
Active | ||||
|
yrafo | eyrafa/IMPFVE eyrapsa/AOR |
tha yrafo/IMPFVE tha yrapso/AOR |
exo yrapsi ixa yrapsi/PLUPRF tha exo yrapsi/FUT.PRF |
|
na yrafo/IMPFVE na yrapso/AOR |
**1 **1 |
------ | na exo yrapsi |
|
yrafe/IMPFVE yrapse/AOR |
------ | ------ | exe yrapsi |
|
yrafondas | ------ | ------ | exondas yrapsi |
Medio-Passive | ||||
|
yrafome | yrafomun/IMPFVE yraftike/AOR |
tha yrafome/IMPFVE tha yrafto/AOR |
exo yrafti ixa yrafti/PLUPRF tha exo yrafti/FUT.PRF |
|
na grafome/IMPFVE na yrafto/AOR |
**1 **1 |
------ | na exo yrafti |
|
yrafu/IMPFVE yrapsu/AOR |
------ | ------ | exe yrafti |
|
yrafomenos | yramenos |
1The marker na can combine with indicative past forms to give various subtle shades of modality (e.g. na eyrafa 'I should have written'); it is not clear, though, if these constitute a legitimate category of "past subjunctive" or instead derive from the combinatorics of the element na.
General Rules of Word Formation: Word-formation processes in Post-Classical Greek and on into Modern Greek remain essentially the same as in Ancient Greek (see previous chapter). Some minor changes evident in the modern language include greater numbers of coordinative compounds, e.g. maxero-piruna 'cutlery' (literally: "knife-(and)-forks") or aniyo-klino 'open and close', and the emergence of multiply-inflected compounds, possibly through borrowing, e.g. pedi-thavma 'child prodigy' (literally "child-wonder") with a plural pedja-thavmata (literally "children-wonders"); note the multiple accents, suggesting that the individual words in this type retain their individual integrity.
Basic Syntax:
Constituent Order: What was said about basic word order for Ancient Greek - essentially free ordering of major constituents in a clause - holds for all later stages of the language as well. All permutations of ordering of subject, object, and verb can be found, though Modern Greek shows a preference for Subject-Verb-Object ordering in neutral contexts. Similarly, the ordering of elements within constituents, e.g. within the noun phrase, is virtually unchanged, so that the remarks in the previous chapter hold for later stages of Greek too.
Case-marking: The essentials of case-marking remained the same in Post-Classical Greek and on into the Medieval and Modern periods as those found in Ancient Greek. Subjects are still marked with the nominative case and accusative marks direct objects; there is, however, no idiosyncratic marking of direct objects with other cases in Modern Greek, though some instances are to be found in the Koine period. The loss of the dative case in the Koine period has led to the marking of indirect objects by the genitive case (accusative in some dialects) and by the preposition s(e) (earlier eis). The genitive is thus used now in ways it was not in earlier stages, but some earlier uses of the genitive no longer occur; the partitive, for instance, is expressed periphrastically rather than by the genitive case. Accusative is the only case found for the object of prepositions, except that pronominal objects with some prepositions are usually in the genitive case (compare, e.g.,mazi mu '(together) with me/GEN' with me emena 'with me/ACC').
Negation. As noted above in the section on morphology, negation in Modern Greek is marked primarily by morphological means, with the two markers den and min forming part of the verbal complex; the free word for 'no', oxi, is used with constituents in elliptical negation, as in thelo to mov oxi to ble 'I-want the mauve-one not the blue-one'. Negation in the pre-Modern period, from the Koine up through Medieval Greek, was transitional, from the Ancient Greek purely syntactic clause-based expression of negation to the modern verb-based, essentially morphological, system.
Other information: As noted in the previous chapter and the above section on verbal morphology, from the Koine on into Medieval Greek, complementation was increasingly with finite clauses only, in place of the earlier infinitival complementation. After the 15th century, complementation is essentially only with finite clauses headed by the subjunctive marker na or by indicative complementizers oti, pos, or pu.
Basic Orthography: Throughout Post-Classical Greek and on into the Modern era, the Greek alphabet has been the primary medium for writing Greek, although in the Medieval period, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets were occasionally used in certain communities (e.g. Hebrew by the Jewish community of Constantinople). The form of the alphabet is essentially that of the ancient Ionian alphabet (see the chapter on Ancient Greek), with some additional letter combinations not found in ancient times, and moreover, the value of some of the letters and letter combinations is different due to sound changes. An official orthographic reform in 1976 by the government of Greece eliminated the ancient breathing marks and the grave and circumflex accents; thus, only the acute accent is used now, and only, for the most part, in polysyllabic words. Some variation is evident in the spelling of some words whose sounds have more than one representation, e.g. 'look at' ([kitazo]), 'egg' ([avyo]).
Table 5: The Modern Greek Alphabet (modern Standard language is the basis for the phonetic values)
Table 6: Modern Greek Digraphs
Table 7: Modern Greek Diacritics (for Pre-1976 texts; post-1976 only acute accent is used)
Loanwords and Contact with Other Languages: As noted in the previous chapter, Greek absorbed many loanwords from Latin during the Koine period, some of which have stayed in the language since, e.g. Latin hospitium 'lodgings, house' -> Post-Classical Greek hospition -> (via regular sound changes) Modern spiti 'house'. In the Byzantine period, and on through Medieval times, Latin is still a major source of loan words, but some enter through the medium of Balkan Latin, shown by various telltale phonological characteristics, e.g. pe(n)dzimenton 'baggage' from Latin impedimentum with Balkan Latin affricatization. In the later Medieval period, numerous loans from the Venetian dialect of Italian enter Greek, including the verb-forming suffix -ar- (cf. Italian infinitival -are), as do various technical feudal terms from French, e.g. roi 'king' (French roi). Moreover, as speakers of Greek came into contact in this period with Slavic, Albanian, Vlach (Aromanian), and increasingly also Turkish speakers, loans from all these languages permeate the language, with Turkish, especially after the 14th century, providing the greatest number by far. Turkish loans range over a variety of semantic domains and lexical categories, including ordinary day-to-day life (e.g. jeleki 'vest', pilafi 'rice', kafes 'coffee', tsai 'tea', boya 'paint'), military (e.g. tufeki 'rifle', askeri 'soldier'), arts (e.g. baglamas 'a musical instrument'), verbs (e.g. baildizo 'faint', from Turkish bayil- with a Turkish past tense suffix -d- and a Greek derivational suffix-iz-) interjections (e.g. aman 'for mercy's sake!', de 'marker of impatience with imperatives'), among others; further, some Turkish derivational suffixes have become productive in Greek, especially the suffix -dzis which forms nouns of occupation (e.g. taksi-dzis 'taxi driver').
Common Words: Nouns are cited in the nominative singular form, adjectives in nominative singular masculine; all forms listed here are from Standard Modern Greek:
man: | a(n)dras (i.e. male person); anthropos (i.e. human being) |
woman: | jineka |
water: | nero |
sun: | ilios |
three: | tris |
fish: | psari |
big: | meyalos |
long: | makros |
small: | mikros |
yes: | ne; malista |
no: | oxi |
good: | kalos |
bird: | puli |
dog: | skili |
tree: | dendro |
Example Sentences
Inasmuch as Koine syntax did not differ appreciably from Classical Greek syntax in kind, but rather more in the extent of use of certain forms, the examples in the previous chapter give an idea of the essentials of Koine syntax. Thus a few sample sentences are given here from Medieval Greek (in (1), following Ancient Greek transliteration to allow for recovery of the orthography) and Modern Greek, to illustrate some of the characteristics discussed above (the Medieval periphrastic future; the Modern verbal complex with weak pronouns, future marker, and negation; relativization; co-indexing of objects with weak pronouns; finite complementation and nominalization of clausal complements in both periods with the definite article; etc.):
(1)
kai | tote | thelo | na | ido | to | pos | ton |
and | then | want/1SG.PRES | that | see/1SG.PERFVE.SUBJ | the/NTR.SG.ACC | how | him/MASC.SG.ACC.WEAK |
theleis | surein | (Ptochoprodromos III.390 (12th cent.)) | |||
will/2SG | drag/INF | ||||
'And then I want to see how you will drag him' (literally: "And then I-want that I-see the how him you-will drag") |
(2)
den | tha | tis | to | pume | to | jati |
NEG | FUT | her/GEN.SG.WEAK | it/NTR.SG.ACC.WEAK | say/1PL.PERFVE | the/NTR.SG.ACC | why |
boresame | na | tin | afisume | s | tin paralia | xoris |
could/1PL.PRFVE.INDIC | that | her/ACC.SG.WEAK | leave/1SG.SUBJ.PRFVE | at | the-beach/ACC | without |
lefta | ke | parea | ||||||||||||||
money | and | company/ACC | ||||||||||||||
'We won't tell her why we could have left her at the beach without money or friends' (literally: "We won't tell her it the-why we could that we leave her ...") |
(3)
o meyalos anthropos | pu | xthes | to vradi | milusame | me |
the-big-man/NOM.SG.MASC | that/COMP | yesterday | the-evening/ACC | spoke/1PL.IMPFVE | with |
afton | ixe | erthi | s | to mayazi | mas | na | mas |
him/ACC.SG.STRONG | had/3SG | come/PERF | to | the-store/NTR.SG.ACC | our/GEN | that | us/ACC.WEAK |
rotisi | an | tin | ynorisame | tin kiria Moraiti | |||
ask/3SG.PERFVE.SUBJ | if | her/ACC.SG.WEAK | knew/1PL.ACT.INDIC.PRFVE | the-lady-Moraitis/ACC.SG.FEM | |||
'The big man that yesterday in the evening we were talking with had come to our store to ask us if we knew Mrs. Moraitis' (literally: "The big man that yesterday the evening we were talking with him had come to the store of ours that he might-ask us if we knew her Mrs. Moraitis") |
Basic Bibliography
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