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Attic Greek



 
 
Attic Greek is the prestige dialect
Prestige dialect

A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestige people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect....
 of Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
 that was spoken in Attica
Attica

Attica is a Peripheries of Greece in Greece, containing Athens, the capital of Greece. Attica is subdivided into the prefectures of Greece of Athens Prefecture, Piraeus Prefecture, East Attica and West Attica....
, which includes Athens
Athens

Athens , the Capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the List of cities by time of continuous habitation, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....
. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek".

lass="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m314368",this)' onMouseout='hide("m314368")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Greek_language">Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 is an independent branch of the Indo-European
Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
 language classification, a family that includes English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
. In historical times, it already existed in several dialects (see article on Greek dialects), one of which was Attic.

The earliest written records in Greek date to the 16th to 11th centuries BC and exist in an Achaic writing system, Linear B
Linear B

Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean language, an early form of Greek language. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean Greece civilization....
, belonging to the Mycenaean
Mycenaean

Mycenaean may refer to:* Mycenae, coming from or belonging to this ancient town in Peloponnese in Greece* Mycenaean Greece, the Greek-speaking regions of the Aegean Sea as of the Late Bronze Age, named after the Mycenae of the Trojan War epics...
 Greeks.






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Encyclopedia


Attic Greek is the prestige dialect
Prestige dialect

A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestige people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect....
 of Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
 that was spoken in Attica
Attica

Attica is a Peripheries of Greece in Greece, containing Athens, the capital of Greece. Attica is subdivided into the prefectures of Greece of Athens Prefecture, Piraeus Prefecture, East Attica and West Attica....
, which includes Athens
Athens

Athens , the Capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the List of cities by time of continuous habitation, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....
. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek".

Provenience and range

Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 is an independent branch of the Indo-European
Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
 language classification, a family that includes English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
. In historical times, it already existed in several dialects (see article on Greek dialects), one of which was Attic.

The earliest written records in Greek date to the 16th to 11th centuries BC and exist in an Achaic writing system, Linear B
Linear B

Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean language, an early form of Greek language. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean Greece civilization....
, belonging to the Mycenaean
Mycenaean

Mycenaean may refer to:* Mycenae, coming from or belonging to this ancient town in Peloponnese in Greece* Mycenaean Greece, the Greek-speaking regions of the Aegean Sea as of the Late Bronze Age, named after the Mycenae of the Trojan War epics...
 Greeks. The distinction between Eastern and Western Greek, it is logical to suppose, had arisen by Mycenaean
Mycenaean Greece

Mycenaean Greece is a cultural period of ancient Greece taking its name from the archaeological site of Mycenae in northeastern Argolis, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece....
 times or before. Mycenaean Greek represents an early form of Eastern Greek, a main branching to which Attic also belongs. Because of the gap in the written record between the disappearance around 1200 BC of Linear B and the earliest inscriptions in the later Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 around 750 BC, the further development of dialects remains opaque. Later Greek literature spoke of three main dialect divisions: Aeolic
Aeolic Greek

Aeolic or Aeolian Greek is a Linguistics term used to describe a set of rather Archaic period in Greece Greek language sub-dialects, spoken mainly in Boeotia , in Lesbos Island and in other Greek colonies....
, Doric
Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a ancient Greek dialects of ancient Greek Greek language. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon....
 and Ionic
Ionic Greek

Ionic Greek was a sub-dialect of the Attic-Ionic dialectal group of Ancient Greek .Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C....
. Attic was part of the Ionic dialect group. "Old Attic" is a term used for the dialect of Thucydides
Thucydides

Thucydides was a Greeks history and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century B.C. war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 B.C....
 (460-400 BC) and the dramatists of Athens' remarkable 5th century; "New Attic" is used for the language of later writers.

Attic Greek persisted until the 4th century BC, when it was replaced by its similar but more universal offspring, Koine Greek
Koine Greek

Koine Greek is the popular form of Greek which emerged in post-Classical antiquity . Other names are Alexandrian, Hellenistic, Common, or New Testament Greek....
, or "the Common Dialect" (? ????? d???e?t??). The cultural dominance of the Athenian Empire and the later adoption of Attic Greek by king Philip II of Macedon
Philip II of Macedon

Philip II of Macedon,...
 (382-336 BC), father of the conqueror Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great , also known as Alexander III of Macedon was an ancient Greeks King of Macedon . He was one of the most successful military commanders of all time and is presumed undefeated in battle....
, were the two keys that ensured the eventual victory of Attic over other Greek dialects and the spread of its descendant, Koine, throughout Alexander's Hellenic empire. The rise of Koine is conventionally marked by the accession in 285 BC of (Greek-speaking) Ptolemy II, who ruled from Alexandria
Alexandria

Alexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving about 80% of Egypt's imports and exports....
, Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
 and launched the "Alexandrian period", when the city of Alexandria and its expatriate Greek-medium scholars flourished.

In its day, the original range of the spoken Attic dialect included Attica
Attica

Attica is a Peripheries of Greece in Greece, containing Athens, the capital of Greece. Attica is subdivided into the prefectures of Greece of Athens Prefecture, Piraeus Prefecture, East Attica and West Attica....
, Euboea
Euboea

For the Greek mythology figure, see Euboea Euboea is the second largest of the Greece Aegean Islands and the second largest List of islands of Greece overall in area and population, after Crete....
, some of the central Cyclades
Cyclades

The Cyclades are a Greece island group in the Aegean Sea, south-east of the mainland of Greece; and an administrative prefectures of Greece of Greece....
 islands, and northern Aegean coastal areas of Thrace
Thrace

Thrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe. Today the name Thrace designates a region spread over southern Bulgaria , northeastern Greece , and European Turkey ....
 (i.e. Chalcidice
Chalcidice

Chalkidiki, also Halkidiki or Chalcidice, less often Khalkidiki and rarely Chalkidice , is one of the prefectures of Greece....
 or, in Greek, ?a???d???). The closely related dialect called "Ionian" was spoken along the western and northwestern coasts of Asia Minor (modern Turkey
Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in southwest Asia and Thrace in the Balkans region of Southern Europe....
) on the east side of the Aegean Sea
Aegean Sea

The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkans and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey respectively....
. Eventually, literary Attic (and the classic texts written in it) came to be widely studied far beyond its original homeland, first in the Classical civilizations of the Mediterranean (Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 and the Hellenistic world
Hellenistic civilization

File:Diadochen1.pngHellenistic civilization represents the zenith of Ancient Greece influence in the Classical Antiquity from 323 BC to about 146 BC ....
), and later in the Muslim world
Muslim world

.The term Muslim world has several meanings. In a Culture sense it refers to the worldwide community of Muslims, adherents of Islam. This community Islam by country, roughly one-fifth of the world population....
, Europe, and wherever European civilization spread to other parts of the world.

Literature in the Attic dialect

The earliest recorded Greek literature
Greek literature

Greek literature refers to those writings autochthonic to the areas of Greeks influence, typically though not necessarily in one of the Greek dialects, throughout the whole period in which the Greek language people have existed....
, that attributed to Homer
Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
 and dated to the 7th or 8th centuries BC, was not written in the Attic dialect, but in "Old Ionic". Athens and its dialect remained relatively obscure until its constitutional changes led to democracy in 594 BC, the start of the classical period
Classical period

Classical period can refer to the following:*The Classical_Greece of ancient Greece, which fell between its Archaic period in Greece and Hellenistic Greece....
 and the rise of Athenian influence.

The first extensive works of literature in Attica are the plays of the dramatists Aeschylus
Aeschylus

Aeschylus was an Ancient Greece playwright. He is often recognized as the father or the founder of tragedy, and is the earliest of the three Greek tragedy whose Play survive extant, the others being Sophocles and Euripides....
, Sophocles
Sophocles

Sophocles was the second of the three classical Greece tragedy whose work has survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus and earlier than those of Euripides....
, Euripides
Euripides

Euripides was the last of the three great tragedy of classical Athens . Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias....
 and Aristophanes
Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comedy playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays have come down to us virtually complete....
 in the 5th century BC. The works of the Athenian philosopher Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
 also date to that remarkable century of literature. The military exploits of the Athenians led to some universally read and admired history, the works of Thucydides
Thucydides

Thucydides was a Greeks history and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century B.C. war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 B.C....
 and Xenophon
Xenophon

Xenophon , son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens and Xenophon of Thebes, was a soldier, mercenary and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates....
. Slightly less known because they are more technical and legal are the orations by Antiphon
Antiphon

An antiphon is a response, usually sung in Gregorian chant, to a psalm or some other part of a religious service, such as at Vespers or at a mass ....
, Demosthenes
Demosthenes

Demosthenes was a prominent Greeks statesman and orator of History of Athens. His oratorys constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual prowess and provide an insight into the politics and culture of ancient Greece during the 4th century BC....
, Lysias
Lysias

Lysias was an Attic orators....
, Isocrates
Isocrates

File:Isocrates pushkin.jpgIsocrates , an ancient Greek rhetorician, was one of the ten Attic orators. In his time, he was probably the most influential rhetorician in Greece and made many contributions to rhetoric and education through his teaching and written works....
 and many others. The Attic Greek of the philosopher Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
 (384-322 BC), whose mentor was Plato, dates from the period in which Classical Attic transitioned into koine.

Students learning Ancient Greek today usually start with the Attic dialect, proceeding, depending on their interest, to the koine of the New Testament
New Testament

The New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christianity Bible, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
 and other early Christian
Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism#Christian view religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus and interpreted by Christians to have been prophesied in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament....
 writings, or Homeric Greek
Homeric Greek

Homeric Greek is the form of Ancient Greek that was used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey. It is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek....
 to read the works of Homer and Hesiod, or Ionic Greek
Ionic Greek

Ionic Greek was a sub-dialect of the Attic-Ionic dialectal group of Ancient Greek .Ionic dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C....
 to read the histories of Herodotus or the medical texts of Hippocrates.

Attic alphabet


The classic Attic Alphabet is made up of the familiar 24 (capital) Greek letters: ?, ?, G, ?, ?, ?, ?, T, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, S, ?, ?, F, ?, ?, O.

It has seven vowels: ?, ?, ? (long e), ?, ?, ?, O (long o). The rest are consonants.

The first form of written Greek was not the Greek Alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 as it later became known, but the syllabary
Syllabary

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound....
 known as Linear B
Linear B

Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean language, an early form of Greek language. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean Greece civilization....
, in which one character stood for the combination of a consonant and a vowel.

The first use of what became the classic Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 remains unknown. By the time it was attested for in general use in the 8th century BC it was already divided into a western and eastern variety, from which the Etruscan/Latin alphabets and the later Greek alphabet came respectively. What is today referred to as the Greek alphabet was originally the Phoenician alphabet
Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
 borrowed to spell Greek words, with some originally Semitic
Semitic languages

File:Amarna Akkadian letter.pngThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa....
 consonantal letters -- such as aleph (Greek Alpha
Alpha (letter)

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet Aleph ....
 = A), he (Greek Epsilon
Epsilon

Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a close-mid front unrounded vowel /e/. It is also the primary letter used in Real Analysis....
 = E), and 'ayin (Greek Omicron
Omicron

Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 70. It is rarely used in mathematics because it is indistinguishable from the Latin alphabet letter O and easily confused with the Numerical digit 0 ....
 = O) -- used to represent Greek vowels. The creation of true vowel letters was the most revolutionary linguistic contribution of the Greeks to the development of the alphabet. (For the early forms of the letters, the full complement of letters, and the first inscriptions, see the article Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
.)

As the utility of an alphabet became evident, local varieties (sometimes called "epichoric" ) came into use. The early Attic alphabet still did not distinguish between long and short vowels (i.e. e and ?, ? and ?). It lacked the letters ? (psi) and ? (xi), using FS and ?S instead. Lower case letters (a, ß, ?, etc.) and iota subscript
Iota subscript

Iota subscript in Greek language polytonic orthography is a way of writing the letter iota as a small vertical stroke beneath a vowel. It was used in the so-called "long diphthongs" in Ancient Greek phonology, that is, diphthongs of which the first part is a long vowel: and ....
 (a mediaeval invention) were still far in the future. Digamma
Digamma

Digamma is an Archaic Greece letter of the Greek alphabet, used primarily as a Greek numeral.The letter had the phonetic value of a voiced labial-velar approximant ....
 (no longer in use in the Classical period) stood for a W.

Meanwhile in Ionia
Ionia

Ionia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest Izmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Hellenes settlements....
 across the Aegean, a new Ionic form of the Attic alphabet was coming into being. It distinguished between long and short o (O and ?) and stopped using ? (eta) to mark the rough breathing (i.e. H sound). Instead it created a sign for a long e with it, keeping the letter ? for the short e. The digamma dropped out, and ? and ? came into existence, bringing the Attic alphabet to its classic 24-letter form. By 403 BCE, the by now internationally experienced city-state of Athens
Athens

Athens , the Capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the List of cities by time of continuous habitation, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....
 had perceived a need to standardize the alphabet, so it officially adopted the Ionic alphabet in that year. Many other cities had already adopted it.

When the ordinary citizen of Ancient Greece read inscriptions and the educated Greek read literature, what they saw was an all upper case Ionic alphabet: ?, ?, G, ?, etc. By the time lower case letters, iota subscripts, accent marks, rough or smooth breathing marks over letters, and punctuation appeared in written Greek in the Middle Ages, Attic Greek writings had not been produced by native speakers for some centuries. Ancient Attic literature as published today thus makes use of a number of such non-ancient features. Uninformed modern readers might think that what they see on the page is the writing system exactly as the ancient Greeks used it in Classical Greece, but it is really Ancient Greek as transcribed by mediaeval Byzantine
Byzantine

The word Byzantine may refer to:Topics directly related to the Byzantine Empire* A citizen of Byzantine Empire, or native Greeks during the Middle Ages ....
 scribes.

Phonology

A few of the most salient phonological characteristics of the Attic dialect are stated below.

Vowels

  • Attic-Ionic changes an Indo-European a to e (long a to ?); e.g., Latin mater/ Attic meter ("mother"). Attic keeps the a after e, i, r: Attic chora/ Ionic chore, "country". Apparent exceptions are from subsequent sound changes: Attic *korwa to *korwe to kore, "girl".
  • East Greek changes an Indo-European short a to short e: Artemis/ Artamis.
  • Attic/Ionic interchanges i and u to assimilate with an i or u in a following syllable: biblion/ bublion, "book".
  • In cases where an earlier e or o become e or o, Attic has spurious (non-original) diphthongs: eimi/ emi from *esmi, "I am", where the e lengthens to compensate for loss of s.
  • Ancient Greek ? was originally pronounced as the oo in food and was replaced in other dialects by ??, but in Attic developed into a sound like the French u or German ü: Attic kurios, Boeotian kourios, "lord."
  • In the original long diphthong
    Diphthong

    In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
    s ai, ei, oi, the i stopped being pronounced. The mediaeval iota subscript captured this fact.
  • A or a followed by e or e contracts to a, by ô or o to o in Attic: nika-ein to nikan, "to conquer"; *Poseidawon to *Poseidaon to Poseidon, "Poseidon." However, e followed by a remains uncontracted: Timeas (personal name); while e followed by e becomes the spurious diphthong, ei: *treies to *trees to treis, "three", and e followed by o becomes the spurious diphthong, ou: *genesos to *geneos to genous, "of a gens."
  • In Attic e followed by a short vowel may become e followed by a long vowel (quantitative metathesis): epic neos but Attic neos, "of a ship"; Ionic basileos but Attic basileos, "of a king."
  • Sometimes one phoneme is created from two by taking away one of them (hyphaeresis): Attic boethos for epic boethoos, "help."
  • Long diphthongs are shortened before . This occurs mainly in dat. pl. in 3rd declension: basilew- + si(n) > basileusi(n), but Ionic basileusi(n).


Consonants

  • Attic typically has tt (tt) where Ionic has ss (ss). Buck explains it as an original *ky or *chy- becoming tt and then changing to ss in Ionic, as in glotta/glossa, "tongue", from *glochya (Hofmann). To this he adds *ty and *tw in some cases, as in tettares/tessares, "four", Latin quattuor.
  • Attic-Ionic uses moveable n, an n inserted at the end of a word ending in a vowel to prevent collision with a vowel at the start of the next word, under some circumstances, such as a dative or third person plural ending in -s?; or to a third person singular ending in -e; or to esti, is. For example, pasi legousi, "they speak to all", but pasin elegon, "they were speaking to all".
  • Attic lost the w (digamma) before historical times: Boeotian kalwos, Attic kalos, "good."
  • Many dialects, including Attic, changed t to s before i or u: Eutretis, Boeotian place name, Attic Eutresis; Doric tu, Attic-Ionic su, "thou."
  • ss became s in Attic.
  • Attic is one of the h-dialects (Buck's term); that is, the spiritus asper, or rough breathing, typically came from a dropped initial s or i, but the h-dialects retained the spiritus; the others did not: Attic histamen (*sist-), Cretan istamen, "we stand."


Morphology

Morphology as used here means "word formation." It can also include inflection
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
, the formation of the forms of declension
Declension

In linguistics, declension is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns and adjectives, indicating such features as grammatical number , grammatical case , and grammatical gender....
 or conjugation
Conjugation

Conjugation may refer to:*Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form, including:**Latin conjugation**Spanish conjugation...
 by suffixing endings, but that topic is presented under Ancient Greek grammar
Ancient Greek grammar

Ancient Greek grammar ?here mainly referring to that of the Attic Greek? is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European language morphology....
.
  • Attic tends to replace the -ter "doer of" suffix with -tes: dikastes for dikaster "judge".
  • The Attic adjectival ending -eios and corresponding noun ending, both two-syllable with the diphthong
    Diphthong

    In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
     ei, stand in place of eios, with three syllables, in other dialects: politeia, Cretan politeia, "constitution", both from politewia, where the w drops out.


Grammar

Attic Greek grammar is to a large extent ancient Greek grammar
Ancient Greek grammar

Ancient Greek grammar ?here mainly referring to that of the Attic Greek? is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European language morphology....
, or at least when the latter topic is presented it is with the peculiarities of the Attic dialect. This section only mentions some of the Attic peculiarities.

Declension

With regard to declension
Declension

In linguistics, declension is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns and adjectives, indicating such features as grammatical number , grammatical case , and grammatical gender....
, the stem is the part of the declined word to which case endings are suffixed. In the a-, alpha- or first declension feminines, the stem ends in long a, parallel to the Latin first declesion. In Attic-Ionic the stem vowel has changed to long e (eta) in the singular, except (in Attic only) after e, i, r: gnome, gnomes, gnome(i), gnomen, etc., "opinion", but thea, theas, thea(i), thean, etc., "goddess."

The plural is the same in both cases: gnomai and theai, but other sound changes were more important in its formation. For example, original -as in the nominative plural was replaced by the diphthong, -ai, which did not undergo the change of a to e. In the few a-stem masculines, the genitive singular follows the o-declension: stratiotes, stratiotou, stratiotei, etc.

In the o-, omicron- or second declension, mainly masculines (but some feminines), the stem ends in o or e, which is composed in turn of a root plus the thematic vowel, an o or e in Indo-European ablaut
Indo-European ablaut

In linguistics, the term ablaut designates a system of vowel gradation in Proto-Indo-European language and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages....
 series parallel to similar formations of the verb. It is the equivalent of the Latin second declension. The alternation of Greek -os and Latin -us in the nominative singular is familiar to readers of Greek and Latin.

In Attic Greek an original genitive singular ending *-osyo after losing the s (as happens in all the dialects) lengthens the stem o to the spurious diphthong -ou (see above under Phonology, Vowels): logos "the word", logou from *logosyo, "of the word". The dative plural of Attic-Ionic had -oisi, which appears in early Attic but simplifies to -ois in later": anthropois "to or for the men".

See also

  • Greek Alphabet
    Greek alphabet

    The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
  • Greek language
    Greek language

    Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
  • Ancient Greek
    Ancient Greek

    Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
  • Ancient Greek dialects
  • Ancient Greek phonology
    Ancient Greek phonology

    Ancient Greek phonology is the study of the phonology, or pronunciation, of Ancient Greek. Because of the passage of time, the original pronunciation of Ancient Greek, like that of all ancient languages, can never be known with absolute certainty....
  • Ancient Greek grammar
    Ancient Greek grammar

    Ancient Greek grammar ?here mainly referring to that of the Attic Greek? is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European language morphology....
  • Attic numerals
    Attic numerals

    Attic numerals were used by the ancient Greece, possibly from the 7th century BC. They were also known as Herodianic numerals because they were first described in a 2nd century manuscript by Aelius Herodianus....


External links

  • - provides attic Greek audio pronunciations of letters and words