GREEK LANGUAGE. Greek is one of the Indo-European languages, and in its mod ern form which illustrates fully the analytic tendency of all modern languages, it is still spoken by 8 or 10,000,000 Greeks, who inhabit nearly the same regions as in ancient times. These included the southern part of the Balkan peninsula, i.e., Greece proper, with Epirus and parts of Macedonia, the eastern shores of the lEgean Sea with all its islands, extensive colo nies on the coasts of the Propontis and Black Sea, the large islands Crete and Cyprus, settle ments, like that of Cyrene, on the northern coast of Africa, colonies in southern Italy and Sicily which controlled these regions so fully that the name Magna Grzecia clung to them until long after they came to form parts of the Roman empire. Only in the western Mediterra nean has there been any marked decrease, and this chiefly in mediaval and modern times, in the numbers of Greek-speaking inhabitants. The earliest home of the Greeks, the region in which, as far as we can tell, their speech first developed a character of its own, seems to have been in the great plains of the Danube, or among the mountains of the Balkan ranges. The homogeneity of the language in sounds, forms and vocabulary is indicative of a consid erable lapse of time between the period of breaking off from the parent Aryan or Indo European stock, and the later splitting up, in successive waves of immigration, into the vari ous small and separate states of Greece with their individual dialectic peculiarities. These states were in early times so cut off from one another that a common language could hardly have developed among them at that early period. Rather did their mountainous barriers and the difficulties and dangers of early navigation tend to develop groups that differed from each other in dialect and in race consciousness.
Ancient Greek.— Numerous inscriptions of the 7th century B.c., written chiefly in an alphabet derived from Semitic sources, are the earliest testimony that we have as to the form of the language after it had reached this dialect stage, but references in the early literature show that the Greeks were preceded in their land by various peoples of, as far as we know, thonous Mediterranean stock, who spoke a Indo-European language. Such were the lasgi, scattered over many parts of Greece, the Leleges in central Greece and the Cyclades, and the Carians in southwest Asia Minor and the neighboring islands. These peoples were
ually absorbed by the invading Greeks, but doubtedly influenced the language of their conquerors to a greater or less extent. Proper names ending in -ettos, -issos, -ossos and -inthos, such as Hymettos, Lycabettos, sos, Gnossos, Corinthos, Parnassos and Parnes, which seem to have no meaning as Greek words, and have no cognates in the other European languages, are probably survivals from the speech of these older inhabitants. It is truly remarkable and confirmatory to a high degree of our faith in inherited legends, that the mythical tales of racial wanderings and tlements, handed down by the Greeks in their legends agree so fully with the evidence derived from linguistic sources. Tribes and cities far removed in space retain in their speech traces of their early consanguinity. The first wave from the north that swept into Greece made its way into Attica and Eubcea, the northeastern part of the Peloponnesus and its northern or (later) Achaan coast. Probably_ under the pressure of a later wave of immigrants, the most venturesome and daring among them, seemingly chiefly men, made their way by the islands slands to the central part of western Asia Minor, where, by contact with the Carian civilization and intermarriage with the women of the land, that distinctively Ionic dialect and culture arose, which differed so markedly from the Attic-Ionic type. We find a fairly uniform speech in Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, Chios and Samos, in the cities of the Ionian olis, the Cyclades Eubcea, and in the colo nies founded from Miletus before the 7th century s.c. The Ionians seem to have bor rowed epic poetry from their northern Greek neighbors, the "Eolians, whose southern colo nies they subdued in the 9th century B.C. In the Iliad and the Odyssey they added a realistic and finely descriptive element to the imagina tive, vigorously creative gift of the early /Eolian rhapsodists. From Chalcis as well as from Mile tus this Ionicizing influence spread to Chalcidice, Thrace and the Black Sea, to Italy and Sicily, where it was, however, finally forced to yield ground in the 5th century to the Doric. Ionic changed least in the Cyclades and Eubcea, where its isolated condition tended to preserve it, and changed most in Athens where a variety of in fluences were brought to bear on it.