GREEK GRAMMAAR

2

3

INTRODUCTION.

THE GREEK LANGUAGE AND DIALECTS.

The Greek language is the language spoken by the Greek race. In the historic period, the people of this race called themselves by the name Hellenes, and their language Hellenic. We call them Greeks, from the Roman name Graeci. They were divided into Aeolians, Dorians, and Ionians. The Aeolians inhabited Aeolis (in Asia), Lesbos, Boeotia, and Thessaly; the Dorians inhabited Peloponnesus, Doris, Crete, some cities of Caria (in Asia), with the neighboring islands, many settlements in Southern Italy, which was known as Magna Graecia, and a large part of the coast of Sicily; the Ionians inhabited Ionia (in Asia), Attica, many islands in the Aegean Sea, a few towns in Sicily, and some other places.

In the early times of which the Homeric poems are a record (before 850 B.C.), there was no such division of the whole Greek race into Aeolians, Dorians, and Ionians as that which was recognized in historic times; nor was there any common name of the whole race, like the later name of Hellenes. The Homeric Hellenes were a small tribe in South-eastern Thessaly, of which Achilles was king; and the Greeks in general were called by Homer Achaeans, Argives, or Danaans.

4

The dialects of the Aeolians and the Dorians are known as the Aeolic and Doric dialects. These two dialects are much more closely allied to each other than either is to the Ionic. In the language of the Ionians we must distinguish the Old Ionic, the New Ionic, and the Attic dialects. The Old Ionic or Epic is the language of the Homeric poems, the oldest Greek literature. The New Ionic was the language of Ionia in the fifth century B.C., as it appears in Herodotus and Hippocrates. The Attic was the language of Athens during her period of literary eminence (from about 500 to 300 B.C.).¹ In it were written the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, the histories of Thucydides and Xenophon, the orations of Demosthenes and the other orators of Athens, and the philosophical works of Plato.

The Attic dialect is the most cultivated and refined form of the Greek language. It is therefore made the basis of Greek Grammar, and the other dialects are usually treated, for convenience, as if their forms were merely variations of the Attic. This is a position, however, to which the Attic has no claim on the ground of age or primitive forms, in respect to which it holds a rank below the other dialects.

The literary and political importance of Athens caused her dialect gradually to supplant the others wherever Greek was spoken; but, in this very extension to regions widely separated, the Attic dialect itself was not a little modified by various local influences, and lost some of its

5

early purity. The universal Greek language which thus arose is called the Common Dialect. This begins with the Alexandrian period, the time of the literary eminence of Alexandria in Egypt, which dates from the accession of Ptolemy II. in 285 B.C. The Greek of the philosopher Aristotle lies on the border line between this and the purer Attic. The name Hellenistic is given to that form of the Common Dialect which was used by the Jews of Alexandria who made the Septuagint version of the Old Testament (283-135 B.C.) and by the writers of the New Testament, all of whom were Hellenists (i.e. foreigners who spoke Greek). Towards the end of the twelfth century A.D., the popular Greek then spoken in the Byzantine Roman Empire began to appear in literature by the side of the scholastic ancient Greek, which had ceased to be intelligible to the common people. This popular language, the earliest form of Modern Greek, was called Romaic (Ῥωμαϊκή), as the people called themselves Ῥωμαῖοι. The name Romaic is now little used; and the present language of the Greeks is called simply Ἑλληνική, while the kingdom of Greece is Ἑλλάς and the people are Ἕλληνες. The literary Greek has been greatly purified during the last half-century by the expulsion of foreign words and the restoration of classic forms; and the same process has affected the spoken language, especially that of cultivated society in Athens, but to a far less extent. It is not too much to say, that the Greek of most of the books and newspapers now published in Athens could have been understood without difficulty by Demosthenes or Plato. The Greek language has thus an unbroken literary history, from Homer to the present day, of at least twenty-seven centuries.

6

The Greek is descended from the same original language with the Indian (i.e. Sanskrit), Persian, German, Slavonic, Celtic, and Italian languages, which together form the Indo-European (sometimes called the Aryan) family of languages. Greek is most closely connected with the Italian languages (including Latin), to which it bears a relation similar to the still closer relation between French and Spanish or Italian. This relation accounts for the striking analogies between Greek and Latin, which appear in both roots and terminations; and also for the less obvious analogies between Greek and the German element in English, which are seen in a few words like me, is, know, etc.

7