The Dorians like the Adimans held to the original a of the common Greek and to F; the end ings -ni and remained unchanged, (didwri, he gives; Opowt, they the article in the nomi native plural has its Indo-European form roi and rai; the oldest form of the second personal pro noun ri (Latin, to; Sanskrit to) was kept, and rSves, was used for Kayos or ems (kayos); the older future, the so-called Doric future, (e.g. .evfiviscu) is also noteworthy; the ending in the first person plural -lies (cf. Latin -taus) is also a more original ending. Among innovations or new formations may be mentioned Ka for si and ya for ye; wparoe (from Irpaaros) for rpetros; the contrac tions of a +e, in interior of words, to 4; pootA.E(F)os for ilkorabirs; -aeai and 424 in aorist infinitive endings for -accu and -kcal (oortmifat).
Extant Greek literature begins with the Homeric poems. These are, however, to be re garded as the culmination, about 1000 s.c., of several centuries of development in the metrical use first of fEolic and then of Ionic Greek The Iliad and the Odyssey so completely domi nated the imagination of the Greeks every where, becoming as it were their Holy Book, recording the beginnings of their race, that its influence, like that of King James' translation of the Bible, was exerted on all subsequent Greek literature. Particularly in the early cen turies, not literature alone but the historical work of Herodotus and the medical treatises of an Hippocrates were written in Ionic Greek, because this was the first dialect to develop a literary form. In the homes of the tyrants of the islands of the 2Egean the /Eolian love poetry of Alczus and Sappho arose in the 7th and 6th centuries s.c., and in this dialect with the natural conservatism of literature such poetry continued to be written. Later, in the 5th and 4th centuries s.c., the pre-eminent greatness of Attic prose writers like Thucy dides, Plato and Demosthenes and of poets like /Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris tophanes and Menander gave Attic a predominance that has always persisted. The solemn choral poetry of the Dorians, especially adopted to musical utterance by its broader Doric vocalization, and its quaint archaic forms, was used by Attic poets in the choruses of tragedy and by Stesichorus, Pindar and Simonides in those lyrics in which they chanted the praises of great athletes and kings. Through his vast military projects and under takings Alexander the Great spread the Attic dialect in a modified form over all the world that he subdued, and it is from this dialect, corrupted not infrequently by the introduction of words and forms from other dialects, that the Komi. &az/true or, as it is more commonly
called, the KOW4 arose. In this language the New Testament was written, and thousands upon thousands of papyri, contemporary with the New Testament, and discovered only in the last few decades, have contributed to give us a clear conception of this wide spread lingua franca, that was found wherever Greeks and Greek civilization penetrated. From this form of the language Modern Greek has been directly evolved. The scholars of the last century who imagined that they saw in the language of to day full and clear traces of the Homeric Ionic or of the .Folic dialect were palpably and provably wrong. Only in the peculiar dialect of a few Zaconian villages of Sparta or in scattered words and phrases in Crete, Cyprus, Cappadocia or the coast towns of the Black Sea, do we find any traces and these the most meagre of the older Greek dialects. Before passing to a consideration of this modern form of the language, which is of special interest to Americans because of the recent growth in Greek immigratioa into the country, tt remains to speak of some of the most important gen eral characteristics of Attic Greek, the most highly developed form of the language. Into the relation of Greek with the other Indo European languages from the point of view either of phonetics or vocabulary it is unneces sary to go deeply. (See the articles on Giumm's LAw, PinioLocv, SANSKRrr, etc.). Words like trarOp, father; ishrvp, mother; OtrydraP, daugh ter; sffxf, two; rock, three; if, six, wine; Fipyov, work, show sufficiently that the basis of the language is the same as that of Celtic, Latin, German, Russian, etc. Greek had 24 letters, apart from an earlier digamma, F, (m. w or v), koppa P ,akin to our q,and san ,an a sound of sonic sort, which, except as numeral signs, had disappeared from the Attic Greek at an early period.
These letters may be thus classified: 10 vowels, a a, e et, t 12 diphthongs at, av, et, ev, at, ov, av, tiv, in which the two vowels must at first have had their original values, but coalesc ing under one expulsion of the breath, and therefore forming one syllable. These sounds were later modified in the dialects in different ways and in Modern Greek (by an increasing emphasis on the final vowel) et, or, v , and vs cameto be pronounced like I, while v and v also came to have the same pronunciation.