Right Pronunciation of importanti names

<-- Back

ANCIENT GREEK

Which family does Greek belong to?

 

Helleniké Glossa is an Indo-European language of the Kentum group, originally spoken by the Indo-European people settled in continental Greece and in the Greek Archipelago, dating at least from the 2nd millennium B.C.

   Phrygian and Ancient Macedonian were probably the languages most closely related to it.

 

 

Where does Greek come from?

 

The earliest phase of Greek is known as Mycenaean, attested by the Linear B tablets found especially in Knossos,  Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, dating from about 1500 B.C. The following Ancient Greek phase is traditionally divided into Archaic (c. 9th–6th centuries BC), Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods. The Hellenistic phase is known as Koiné Glossa ("common language"), and is based mainly on the variety of Greek spoken in Athens.

   Dialects are very important in the history of Greek. The most important are the following, stemming from different areas in the Greek continental and insular world:

 

- Eastern Dialects: Attic, Ionic

- Central Dialects: Aeolic, Arcado-Cypriot

- Western Dialects: Doric

 

Literature in Ancient Greek begins with Homer (the mysterious author of Iliad and Odyssey) and has developed into one of the most important (possibly the most influential) literatures worldwide. In Greek wrote the Athenian playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander; the historians such as Herodotos, Thucydides and Xenophon; the philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle; the poets such as Sappho and Pindar, Theocritus and Callimachus.

 

 

What are the main linguistic features of Greek?

 

Greek has complex syllables, which can be composed of a high number of consonants beside the vowel or diphtong. This means that groups of consonants are allowed and frequent. Diphtongs in ancient Greek are the following: ai, ei, oi, au, eu, ou (pronounced u). Vowel length has phonological import, opposing a long and a short version of  e and o.

   Among the consonants, Greek has partly maintained the original aspirated sounds of  indoeuropean, whose gh, bh and dh are represented respectively in Greek by kh, ph and th.

 

Greek morphology is quite complex, allowing case inflection for nouns and adjectives, and a verbal system where word endings encode, beside the different persons, at least 5 tenses (present, imperfect, aorist, perfect, future), 4 moods (indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative, plus infinitive and participle), 3 aspects (imperfective, perfective-aorist and perfective-resultative), and 3 diatheses (active, middle and passive).

 

Ancient Greek syntax was mainly based on the use of cases, with or without prepositions, marking syntactic functions of nominal constituents, and conjunctions introducing coordinate and subordinate clauses. Word order was mainly verb-final, i.e. SOV, but with exceptions. Nouns were preceded by the article.

 

The Greek lexicon was highly developed, due to the great cultural development of the Greek civilization. This has provided a solid basis for the subsequent phases of culture in the Western tradition. As a matter of fact, it is not exaggerated to say that the vast majority of the international scientific lexicon is based on Greek words and lexical roots.

 

As it is well known, Greek has always been written (after the Linear B phase) with it own alphabet, which also provided the basis for the latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. Here on Pronny, Greek names are given in a standard transcription.

the Greek alphabet

Αα

Alpha

Ββ

Beta

Γγ

Gamma

Δδ

Delta

Εε

Epsilon

Ζζ

Zeta

Ηη

Eta

Θθ

Theta

 

Ιι

Iota

Κκ

Kappa

Λλ

Lambda

Μμ

Mu

Νν

Nu

Ξξ

Xi 

Οο

Omicron

Ππ

Pi

 

Ρρ

Rho

Σσς

Sigma

Ττ

Tau

Υυ

Ypsilon

Φφ

Phi

Χχ

Chi

Ψψ

Psi

Ωω

Omega

 

 

 

CREDITS 

 

- Enciclopedia Grolier

 

http://www.wikipedia.org/