GREEK LANGUAGE. This term is commonly applied to the tongues of both ancient and modern Greece. These, however, differ so much that it is necessary to deal with them in separate sections.
Of both the alphabet is as follows: Greek, one of the Indo-European languages, was spoken in one or other of its forms (dialects) in the Balkan peninsula, on the west coast of Asia Minor, in south Italy and Sicily, and in the islands of the Ionian and Aegean seas. By the fourth century B.C. the political supremacy of Athens and the greatness of Attic literature had caused the Attic dialect to become the basis of a lingua franca for all Greeks, which in the long run superseded the other dialects. The conquests of Alex ander the Great caused Greek (in the form of this lingua franca or aoivn to become the speech of the whole Near East (Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt). Under the Romans these regions continued to use Greek, and at the present day Russians and Serbians use a modified form of the Greek alphabet.
Authenticity of Our Texts.—Documents written in Greek have reached us, some in the originals, others in copies. The originals are : (a) inscriptions, decrees, treaties, temple inventories, dedications, etc., engraved on stone and found in Greece and all over the Near East; the earliest may date from the eighth cen tury B.C. and they become numerous in the fifth and later centuries; (b) documents (letters, contracts, petitions, accounts, etc.) written on papyrus between the late fourth century B.C. and the eighth century A.D., and preserved by the dry sands of Egypt, from which the excavations, mainly of the end of the gth and beginning of the loth century, have brought them to light in large numbers (see PAPYROLOGY). Papyri have not been recovered from other parts of the Greek-speaking world (except at Herculaneum, where they were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. i9), but legal documents written on vellum in the second and first centuries B.C. have been found at Salihiyeh (the ancient Dura-Europos, in Mesopotamia), and at Avroman (Parthia).
Important accessions to our knowledge of the language, its pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary, have resulted from the recovery of so many well-authenticated texts. So long as the mediaeval copies were the only source of our knowledge it was impossible to have much confidence in the spelling which they offered, and certain variations which they exhibited, e.g. the variation between EL and c -rLµ17; a 7ror€LaaL-a7roTiaaL, etc.) presented a little understood problem. Moreover, the grammatical treatises of Herodian (2nd century A.D.), Choero boscus (6th century A.D.) and others, show that these problems presented themselves already in the early centuries of the Christ ian era; these grammarians drew up lists of words recommending particular spellings in doubtful cases. It remained doubtful, however, how far the grammarians could be regardhd as knowing the truth or as providing a trustworthy criterion for the correc tion of the mss.
The inscriptions and papyri often provide evidence which settles once and for all a disputed question of spelling. They often carry us back to a time when speech-sounds which later became identical were still distinct from one another. For instance, the inscriptions and papyri of any date earlier than about 150 B.C. are almost wholly free from the hesitation between EL and L. They have EL without exception in certain words (e.g. airoreiaaL " to pay ") and L without exception in certain others (e.g., TLµ17). Before 150 B.C. (approximately) the two spellings represented distinct sounds; after 150 B.C. the sounds were iden tical; and the spellings EL and L were _interchangeable. Again the Greek of the 3rd century B.C. possessed the long diphthongs at cot (the spelling a n w is not older than the I 2th century A.D.). From the end of the 2nd century B.C. they are written a ij w without the iota. The uniformity with which this happens, and the appearance of the iota in the wrong place (spellings like avwL for avw are frequent) shows that the iota, which must have been pronounced in the 3rd century B.C., had ceased to be pronounced in the ist century B.C., and was sometimes added in writing by persons who thought (rightly or wrongly) that they knew the older spelling. At least one erroneous restoration of iota has been perpetuated. Where our mediaeval mss. (even the most accurate of them) and late inscriptions give us baL9vµEiv, the papyri of the 3rd century B.C. have AaOvµsiv (without iota), which must be the original and only correct spelling. Unlike ; ciSwS, the word can never have been pronounced with an iota. Many of the inscriptions and still more of the papyri are written by persons of little education, whose spelling tends to be pho netic; their very errors throw light on the pronunciation. One instance must suffice: the word iavrov in inscriptions and papyri of the 1st century B.C. is often written iarov, whereas avrov is not written arov. The reason is that Eavrov was pronounced at first Eavrov (being derived by contraction from go avrov like the Ionic Fwvrov which has a different type of contraction) later E&rov. By the study of such spelling-variations the chief changes in the pronunciation of Greek can be dated with considerable accuracy. Many of the changes which mark the passage from ancient to modern Greek took place in the three or four centuries preceding and the three or four centuries following the Christian era. The language of the period (2nd century A.D.) in which Herodian spoke and wrote was already so different from Attic that his spelling-rules must be assumed to be based not on observation of contemporary pronunciation (it was in fact the divergence between this and the traditional spelling which made spelling-rules a necessity) but on antiquarian research, and in this field the modern investigator has the advantage over him.
Nature of the Tradition of the Accents.—Greek texts, whether on stone, papyrus, vellum or paper, are usually written without spaces between the words, and the continuous use of breathings and accents is found only in mediaeval mss. from the 9th century onwards. Inscriptions (with rare exceptions) and non literary papyri are entirely without breathings and accents. The same is often true of literary papyri, but these are sometimes more or less sporadically marked with breathings and accents, especially if epic, dramatic or lyric texts. The accentuated literary papyri are in the main not older than the opening cen turies of our era. On the other hand, the features of pronuncia tion of which breathings and accents are the written signs are more ancient than the use of the signs. From numerous refer ences in Greek authors, and especially from Apollonius Dyscolus and his son Herodian, who wrote in the 2nd century A.D., we learn many details of the accentuation of Greek, which was a variation of pitch; the syllable marked with the acute accent was high-pitched, the others, those which in the printed books are marked with the grave accent or with no mark at all, were spoken on the low pitch, while circumflexed syllables, were spoken on a descending pitch, the first part of the syllable being higher than the second. Such is the most probable inference from the statements of grammarians and certain other evidence (e.g. the marks found in accented papyri, and the scanty remains of Greek music), though several points are still disputed.
The general accuracy, and at the same time the great an tiquity, of the traditional accentuation of Greek in modern printed editions may be proved by means of a comparison between it and the accentuation of Vedic Sanskrit; the two exhibit a num ber of striking coincidences which point to an unbroken oral tradition in both cases from the hypothetical parent "Indo European." In 1876 Karl Verner demonstrated that certain consonant changes in Germanic could be explained if the posi tion of the accent thus observed in Greek and Sanskrit were admitted to have existed at one time in Germanic also. The antiquity of the distinction between the acute and the circumflex has been demonstrated by a comparison with the accentuation of modern Lithuanian, in which a corresponding distinction has been observed.
The breathings and accentual marks found in our text of a classical author, such as Plato, cannot have been copied, even at many removes, from his autograph: Plato cannot have written more than the bare series of letters forming the words. It is, however, clear that he pronounced an h or a high pitch even when he did not put it down in writing, and that those who, in transmitting his text to us, inserted the breathings and accentual marks (in the main Byzantine scholars of the gth century) were guided by contemporary living speech (the position of the accent is in general still the same in Modern Greek), and by antiquarian knowledge to a very large measure of success.
Varieties of Early Greek.—The language of the inscriptions from the 7th to the 4th century B.C. presents varieties of two kinds, varieties of alphabet and spelling, and varieties of dialect.
(I) Varieties of alphabet and spelling. The Greek alphabet is an adaptation of the Semitic alphabet, and differs according to locality and date. One of these differences throws much light on the language, viz., the varying mode of representing E sounds and o sounds.
The contraction of E+E (e+e) must obviously have resulted, to begin with, in a long e, and similarly the contraction of o+o must have given o. Hence Et in the 4th century Attic (and later Greek) form E7rEcT0lTEc (from E7r€trr tm-E) must have been pronounced from the beginning not as a diphthong, but as a long e, and similarly the ov of µcc9DyµFv (from µccOoo,uEv) must have been from the first pronounced o, not as a diphthong ov. In the oldest inscriptions these sounds are in fact written E and o (E7rEQTaTE, µuc9oµEv). When a and ov are thus demonstrably monophthongs, they are called "spurious diphthongs." In the local Attic and many other alphabets there was no vowel-symbol ri (H), and no w (S2). In such alphabets E had to represent three sounds, viz., E (as in (Alpo)), e (as in E7reoramE) and the other kind of e which was written i when that letter was introduced (avEOEKE, later avE9fKE). Similarly o had to rep resent o (in (1)EpoµEv), a (in and the other o which was later written w (8opov later 8wpov).
But Et and ov are not always spurious diphthongs. In Eiµc ("I shall go") the a is, in origin at least, a diphthong (Lith. einu, " I go," Lat. eo from ei-o through e[y]-o, i-tur from ei-tur; Gr. iµev shows the i-element bereft of the e). In Ei.X17XovOa the v is the same as in i)XvOov, so that ov is here in origin a genuine diphthong. In early inscriptions, a and ov are in certain words fixed and not capable of alternating with E and o. Thus EL7rE, 6oKei (from 6oKE-EC), 7rpEC/3ELa, 7rctOojivocs, grra (Dat. of giros), E7raL (" when"), El, aTEXECa, oVK, ovBEVos, are constant spellings, of course without accents even in an inscription (Dittenberger, 64) which has only E and o in place of the later " spurious diphthongs" (Evac, TpEs, TO 6E/10, TO OcOS, TO 'OXvil rlo, OIKOVTES, etc.). Thus the early inscriptions sometimes yield information attainable in no other way, e.g. they tell us that ovK, ovros, EtirE and c/ pEts (AEpe . have genuine diphthongs.
The spurious diphthongs sometimes owe their origin to what is known as " compensatory lengthening." Just as the long a in 7ras arises from a lengthening of the a in *rays (from *7ravr-s cf. Genitive 7ravr-6s) to compensate for the loss of the v, so the nominative *TCOivT-s became *TCOivs and then rc9Es, which is written rc9ES on the older inscriptions, Tc9Eis in later Attic, and TLOiis in some other dialects.
At the end of the 5th century B.C. the local Ionic alphabet, which possessed the vowel signs n and w in addition to E and o, began to supersede the other Greek alphabets. It was officially adopted at Athens in place of the Attic alphabet in 403 B.c., and by the end of the 4th century it was in general use through out Greece.
The e and o which resulted from contraction and compensatory lengthening were not everywhere written in the same way in the 4th century B.C. In some dialects we find not TEXEZTE, Tc9ELS, S&bobs, but TEMTE, bcbws. Within the Doric area both spell ings are. found (e.g. in some places '71µev, in others Eiµev, from es men, infinitive of the verb " to be"). The difference is perhaps one not of pronunciation, but only of spelling.
The distinction between genuine and spurious diphthongs shows itself even after general adoption of the Ionic alphabet in the case of contractions with a preceding vowel; e.g. opaECs Op&a, which have the genuine a, become optics opae (opgs opa in mediaeval mss.), but opaecv, which has the spurious et, becomes opay. Similarly in ovKdO' oµcws TL/AS gaEac (I1. 9, 6o5), Tcµits is the con tracted form of TcµrJELS, which has the spurious Et (TCµn-[F]ECs from -FEvr-s cf. gen. -EVT-OS, Sanskrit -vent-). In Il. 3, 13, where the mss. have KovicaXos wpvvr' aeXXi)e, Buttmann's conjecture, that the last word is a contraction of &eXXnas " eddying," in volves only a change of accent (to &eXXiis) : it would be a mistake to write, as he proposed, &eXX c.
The study of the ancient Greek language is based on written documents and the textual critic seeks to restore and interpret the actual letters of the autograph, in cases where this autograph has not reached us.
The mediaeval mss. offer texts written in the Ionic alphabet, and in a spelling which, at its most accurate, is that of the 3rd century B.C., but more often shows signs of the passing of the centuries between that date and the 9th and loth centuries A.D. The spelling of the 3rd century B.c. is clearly not appropriate to authors who wrote in the 5th century B.C. (especially the begin ning of it), or earlier; in the case of Homer the composition of the poems was earlier than the knowledge of writing in Greece.
Many of the great Athenians (Sophocles, Euripides, Aris tophanes, Thucydides) wrote in the second half of the 5th century. They may well have used the Ionic alphabet, which inscriptions prove to have been used at Athens some decades before 403 B.C. Aeschylus, who wrote in the first half of the 5th century, is more likely to have used the Attic alphabet, employed in frag ments of the earlier lyrics which are painted on Attic vases of the 6th and 5th centuries. The old spellings may well have sur vived longest in the case of the oldest books (Homer, Hesiod, Theognis, Alcman, etc.) .
The study of the Homeric poems from this point of view has led to tangible results. In the older alphabets of Greece, E and o, as already mentioned, can stand for e and o (" spurious"EL and ov), and a single consonant is written where the later prac tice is to write it double (a\oyXwcos = &XXoyXcwccovs). Both features are to be seen in TECXcocns ( = Tet toi,ocns) in a Mile sian inscription of the 6th century B.c. In the line Kacpowfwv 8'6Ooviwv airoXEL/3Erac vypov EXacov (Od. 7. 107) KacpocEwv is the archaic spelling of Kacpovoriwv, a word which was so rare that the rhapsodes of the 6th century did not understand what they found in their written texts of Homer. In this way the spelling escaped modernization. The word avnpeLt'avro which is given by our mss. of I1. 20, 234 is a mistake for avnpil'avro as we now know from the forms a[va]pEt/iaro in a Paean of Pindar and avape/'aµEVrt in mss. of Hesiod (Theog. 99o). In Il. 7, 434 gypero means " gathered, assembled," and is the archaic spelling of the aor. of ayeipw (later written ijypEro). It was mistaken for the aor. of EyELpw (gypero ") and to this mistake it owes its preservation. In I1. 5, 293: aiXµii 8' i eXf,O7 (" came out ") 7rapa vefarov avOepec va the poet clearly meant EEEXv9E, the unaug mented form corresponding to the augmented EEi Xv9E; because it resembled the aorist passive of EKXvw and because the metre demanded a long vowel in the last place, it became i eX Oi.
The two instances just given (gypEro, EEeXbOn) show us a Homer written in an alphabet which possessed no H, but used E instead.
Certain other indications point to a time when the poems existed only in oral transmission and had not yet been written down. Bentley showed that many irregularities in the metre vanished when once it was admitted that at the time of the composition of the poems the language possessed the sound w (written F in dialect-inscriptions, but nowhere written in our mss. of Homer) .
The traces of this sound consist of lengthenings of a preceding vowel (e.g., KaXOS is really KaXFos—this form occurs in a Boeo tian inscription of the 7th century B.c.), and of cases of hiatus (e.g., Ora apvwv I1. 4, dialect inscriptions have Fapiiv, Fapvos).
Bentley's observations were true, but more recently it has been recognized that some lines in the poems may have been composed when the w-sound was already lost from the language. It is probable that the composing of the poems extended over a long period, within which the w ceased to be pronounced.
In Il. 24, 1S4 os &EEC is defective both metrically and in point of sense; the parallel Os c' 4a (line 183) shows that the poet meant in 154 65 Fh' &EEC, where F/iE is the older form of the Attic E (Doric FE and Pamphylian FhE are found in inscriptions). Such cases (there are several of them) bring out clearly the reality of the sound w in Homer. In a number of other respects the spelling which we find in our mss. of Homer can be shown to be unoriginal. The first person plur. subj. of gcrrtv is written oTELoµev (Il. r 5, 297), instead of o ri)oµev as the analysis requires (the root is cra, cf. Lat. stare, which gives Ionic urn-, and the sign of the subjunctive in unthematic verbs is a short -o- or -E-). The later Ionic form OTEwµev (which arose by a regular change of -rho- to -Ew- cf. ao Xilos : f3ac X wi) occurs in I1. i 1. The reciters found vreoµev in their written texts of I1. 15. 297, and lengthened the E to e (which they wrote EL, as we have seen), because, as the living form was aTEwµev, it did not occur to them that CTTEOµEV was the old way of writing The group -rho- thus came to be written -ECO- in many other words as well.
The word EivaTEpes was believed by Herodian to be the plural of EfvaT'qp. Inscriptions have proved however that the nomina tive sing. was EvaTqp, and EivamEpes is the poet's arbitrary way of modifying the word in order to fit it into a hex ameter. Here again, the lengthening of e is expressed by the spurious diphthong, the introduction of which into the text can hardly be much older than the 4th century B.C. Other examples of EC and ov resulting from metrical lengthening are Eiv ayopp, IletpfOoos, SovXixoSECpos (for 3oXvx6BepFos) ovX6 evos, OvXvµrroco, and many others. The numerous forms of which opowvres, opaaaOat are specimens, in which the older ao, aE seem to have become ow and aa, have no parallel in dialect inscriptions. The poets (whether in writing or in oral composition) must have used the forms opaovmES, upaeoOac. In the course of the transmission the later contracted forms opc7vres, opaaOac tended to be substituted, but the metre compelled the reciters to " pull out " the contracted forms into opOwvr€r and opaao at, by prefixing in each case to the long vowel (which resulted from the contraction) its short form (o, a). Forms, such as vaceraE6, which did not survive (there was no vatera in later Greek), were not exposed to this modernizing tendency, and were left un touched.
Distinct from differences of alphabet and spelling are dif ferences between the spoken forms of the language in different places, i.e., differences of dialect. Our knowledge of the dialects is derived mainly from inscriptions of the 6th, 5th, 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.; from the time of the Athenian supremacy the Attic dialect begins to supersede the others, so that many docu ments show a mixture of non-Attic and Attic elements. In later centuries there were revivals of the use of dialects in inscrip tions, but their artificial character is proved by the presence in them of forms which earlier inscriptions show to have been long obsolete, e.g. patkiFv6Qs (= pa'cqSOS) in a late Boeotian inscrip tion, whereas earlier Boeotian inscriptions indicate that F be tween vowels had long been lost. The literary documents written in dialect are often of larger compass than the inscriptions, and therefore in some ways more instructive, especially for the vocabulary; but the variations in the manuscript tradition (e.g., of Hippocrates and Herodotus) constitute a difficulty which only the inscriptions can help us to overcome. The inscriptions have in fact enabled us to pick our way with greater certainty among the variants, and to detect (for instance) the fact that the con sistent absence of the so-called v E4 €XKvanicav from our mss. of Herodotus is not a feature of the Ionic dialect, but is the result of unintelligent editing by some unknown ancient critic; the Ionic inscriptions have this v in even greater profusion than the Attic (Ion. E7roLELv where Att. has Eirofei) .
The main dialect divisions are: (I) Ionic, of which Attic is a sub-dialect; (2) Aeolic; (3) Arcadian and Cyprian; (4) Doric. In the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. the local distribution was as follows: Ionic was spoken in the central part of the coast of Asia Minor, in many of the Aegean islands, in Euboea and the Chalcidian peninsula, and (in its Attic form) in Attica. Aeolic is the collective name of the dialects spoken in the northern part of the Asiatic coast (Aeolis) including Lesbos, and (with a Doric admixture) in Thessaly and Boeotia. Arcadian and Cyprian are named from the places in which they were spoken; the recognition of their close resemblance in spite of the great distance between them was one of the surprises which resulted from the discovery of Arcadian and Cyprian inscriptions and of the deciphering of the Cyprian syllabary in the ' 7os and '8os of the i 9th century. Lastly Doric in many varieties was spoken in the Peloponnese (except Arcadia) in north-west Greece (Lo cris, Phocis, Epirus) in the more southerly Aegean islands, espe cially Thera, Crete, Cos, Rhodes, and on the neighbouring part of the Asiatic coast.
Colonists took with them the dialect of the mother-city; we find Ionic spoken in several Milesian settlements on the Black sea coast, and Doric in Syracuse and other Doric foundations in Sicily and south Italy.
Such, in outline, is the geographical distribution of the Greek dialects at the period when they become known to us. For an earlier period we have to rely mainly on the evidence of Greek historians (especially Herodotus and Thucydides) . From them we learn that there was in early times a migration from Epirus into the Aeolic land of Thessaly, which drove before it another migration from Thessaly into Boeotia. At the time of the Trojan War, according to Thucydides, the later Boeotians were not yet in Boeotia. From Herodotus, Strabo and Pausanias, we learn of the former presence of Ionians in Cynuria, and on the shores of the Saronic gulf. The resemblance between the land enclosed Arcadian dialect and the distant Cyprian is less sur prising when we find that Arcadian was at one time spoken as far south as the promontory of Taenarum. This is proved by the name of the festival to Poseidon which was celebrated there, viz., IIohou3ata. The dialect of Taenarum in historical times was Laconian (Doric), in which v between vowels had become h. Accordingly Hohou5ata is the Laconized form of Ilorou5aca, and an Arcadian inscription proves that IIoaouSav was the Arcadian name of the god. It may be inferred that Arcadian was once spoken throughout the Peloponnese and perhaps over a still wider area, before it was overwhelmed and shut in by the Dorian migration.
Greek and the Other Indo-European Languages.—The dialects show considerable differences from one another in respect of sounds, inflexions, syntax and vocabulary, and the comparison of the dialects with one another often throws light on the past, enabling us to reconstruct an earlier condition of the Greek language. In this reconstruction use is made at the same time of a comparison with the other Indo-European languages. In what follows an attempt will be made to indicate briefly some of the more important sound-changes to which Greek owes its differences from the other languages.
Of the consonants which the parent speech had, Greek has lost inter-vocalic y and s; Sanskrit trayas "three" and Greek (Cre tan) rpEer are both descended from Indo-Eur. treyes; Sanskrit tras-ati " trembles" and Greek rpE-w come from tres-. At the beginning of a word both y and s became h: Os (rel. pron.) corresponds to Sanskrit yas (Indo-Eur. yos), and the article 6 to Sanskrit sa (Indo-Eur. so). Sometimes y became (Sanskrit yug 4m, Gr. 'vyov). The earliest records of many dialects show a complete loss of the sound w (e.g., as [ots] from Indo-Eur. owls, cf. Lat. ovis) but other dialects retain this sound (which is writ ten F [digamma]), e.g., oFevs (accus. plur.) is found in an Argive inscription of the 5th century B.C.
The loss of these three sounds often left two vowels standing next one another in a word; this was at first tolerated, but later led to contraction into a single vowel. These contractions occurred in the main after the composition of the Homeric poems, and the method of contraction differs in different dialects. Hence forms like vaceraa in Homer, and the contrast between (e.g.) Att. TiµC7), and Dor. TcµW, rcµp or between Att. c/AXCo and Ion. (itMco.
In combination with liquids and nasals y, s and w often caused a lengthening of the preceding vowel before disappearing; freLva (pronounce greva) arose from E-rev-s-a, TEfvw (pron. TP,vw) from TEV-yw, Ion. Ee vos (pron. evos) from EEVFos (irpO EVFos occurs in an inscription). Here too, the dialects diverge; the details are too complex to be enumerated here.
A y following a guttural, dental or labial stop combined with it into a single sound: 4wXarc-vco became 4vX uio o, µ€O-yos (cf. Lat. medius, Sanskrit madhyas) became .do o os and then µEnos, µey-ywv became 1.d wv (Ion.), XaXeir-yw became XaM7rrw.
A nasal before a (which generally arose, as in µEnos, from a dental +y, sometimes from a dental +s) disappeared in most dialects (e.g., Att. 'raga from iravaa, rLOeZva from rtOEVaa) leav ing behind it a lengthened vowel. Some dialects, however.
When the numerous long vowels which arose from contraction and from compensatory lengthening are left out of account, the remainder of the Greek vowels are found to be, in the main, survivals from the parent speech: e.g., (Dor. etc.), Lat. mater; bwpov, Lat. do-num; (p )is, Lat. vis; Lat. rifts ; 7rxii-ro, Lat. ple-nus; ayw, Lat. ago; 6(F)Lc, Lat. ovis; ckpw, Lat. fero; sometimes when most of the languages agree in (7rarilp, pater, etc.) Sanskrit has I (pitar-); in such cases the parent-form is believed to have had an indistinct vowel like the first o in potato.
The Indo-Eur. gutturals are of two kinds, technically called palatals and labio-velars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Texts. A list of editions of Greek authors, inscripBibliography.-Texts. A list of editions of Greek authors, inscrip- tions and papyri will be found in Pt. i (Oxford, 1925) of the 9th ed. of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (see below). For Facsimiles see PALAEOGRAPHY. Grammars. The fullest reference work (it is not always up to date) is R. Kiihnec's Ausfiihrliche Grammatik Apart from numerous differences in dialect, there are two broad types of language used in modern Greece, viz., the "pure," or xaBapeVovaa and the "popular," or Ssµorux , to use the most dig nified of the terms employed to distinguish them. The former is a conscious and artificial return to Ancient Greek, and is taught in schools, and used for official purposes and generally by news papers; the latter is the natural language of the people, and em bodies a good many foreign words which have crept into the language in the course of later Greek history. The "popular" is primarily a spoken language, that of the Greek songs and bal lads, and as such has not a fixed orthography, but it possesses the force of a living language, and is largely employed by modern writers of poetry and fiction. Tendencies towards compromise may be observed between the "purist" and "popular" schools.
Phonetics.—One broad distinction between Ancient Greek and the modern language is that the ancient accent was a "pitch" or "musical" accent, the modern is a "stress" accent, so that if a line of ancient Greek poetry, say of Homer, is read aloud with the modern stress value assigned to the accented syllables, the rhythm is destroyed, and the modern Greek can only regain its effect by arbitrarily shifting the stress accent in such a way that the values of the ancient quantities are approximately reproduced.
This change in the effect, though not in the position, of the accent in Modern Greek has resulted in a levelling out of vowel values, although the ancient vowel forms are retained in writing, a is pronounced, continental fashion, as ah (father) ; e as eh (led) ; v have all the same value -ee (see) ; o and w oh (cope) . Of the diphthongs, at is pronounced as e; cc, oc, vc as rl, etc.; ov as oo (brood); av as ahv, except before the hard consonants (K, 7r, T, X, cj), 0, a), when it is pronounced ahf. Similarly ev is pronounced as ev and of respectively, sv as eev and eef. The con sonants approximate to the sounds of the corresponding English consonants, with these exceptions: (3 is pronounced as v; y as hard gh, except before e, n, v, ac, ev, oc, vt, when it has the value of y; when doubled or before K, it has the value of ng; S is sounded as th (the), as f; x as ch in Scotch loch, but before the vowels and diphthongs mentioned under y it is soft, as in German ich; i' has the value of ps. To express the equivalents of English b, d and hard g, Modern Greek uses VT and yK respectively. In the middle of words, rr after J2 has a b sound, e.g., EJ2rropos=emboros; T after v a d sound, e.g., Evrporrri=endropee. The final v of the ar ticle and the initial ir or T of the following word also undergo a change of sound. Thus rov rraripa tom batera, T1lV TEXvrlv teem dechneen. The above are the main rules for pronunciation, though some refinements of minor importance for the English student are omitted. The accented syllable is strongly stressed, so much so that the beginner seems only to catch the accented syllable. The distinction between acute, grave and circumflex is immaterial for speaking, but is generally retained in writing after the manner of Ancient Greek. There is no aspirate in pronunciation, though the signs for rough and smooth breathing are retained in writing.