Difference between revisions of "Greek"

Revision as of 09:56, 31 July 2005

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.

Pantocratorian Greek / Παντοκρατορια Ελληνικά

The Greek spoken in Pantocratoria branched off and evolved from Byzantine Greek at the same time as Modern Greek, and although the two are similar (and although Modern Greek and Pantocratorian Greek speakers shouldn't find it too difficult to communicate), Pantocratorian Greek is somewhat more archaic in nature. It doesn't incorporate so-called "loan words" from Italian or Turkish, and Pantocratorian Greek grammar is marginally closer to Attic Greek than is Modern Greek's grammar. Pantocratorian Greek speakers share the pronounciation for which Byzantine Greek scholars were so heavily criticised by Western scholars of Classical Greek. The derisive, somewhat hyperbolic remarks of scholars like Roger Ascham (16th century) made about Byzantine pronounciation hold true for Pantocratorian pronounciation: "all sounds in Greek are now exactly the same, reduced, that is to say, to a like thin and slender character, and subjected to the authority of a single letter, the iota; so that all one can hear is a feeble piping like that of sparrows, or an unpleasant hissing like that of snakes." Pantocratorian Greek speakers tend to pronounce many vowel sounds which were distinct in the classical language in the same fashion: ι, η, υ, ει, οι, and υι all tend to be pronounced as "i".