Greek

This article deals with Greek as it relates to NationStates. For more general information, see the Wikipedia article on this subject.

The Greek language (Ελληνικά /Elini'k{/) 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.

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.

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