Linguistic characteristics

Phonology

The phonological systems of Ancient Greek differ noticeably from one period to another and from one dialect to another. The system that has been chosen to serve as an example here is that which may be attributed to Old Attic of about 500 bce.

In Old Attic there are seven vowel qualities: i, open and closed e, a, open and closed o, and u, each of which has a long and a short form, except open e and open o, which have only the long form. Diphthongs originally included ei, ai, oi and eu, au, ou, but ei began to evolve toward long closed ē and ou toward long closed ō. In addition, there is a diphthong ui, and, usually at the end of words, there are the diphthongs -ēi, -āĭ, -ōi, with long first elements, which much later were reduced respectively to long ē, long ā, and long open ō.

The consonantal structure is characterized by relative richness in stops (sounds produced by momentary complete closure at some point in the vocal tract)—unvoiced p, t, k, aspirated ph, th, ch, voiced b, d, g—and by few spirants, only s and h (h restricted to initial position before a vowel). There are two liquid sounds, l and r, and two nasals, m and n. The velar nasal (as in ink) is not distinctive but is only a variant of the n in front of a velar stop or a variant of g in front of a nasal. Neither y nor w occurs as a distinctive sound. Most consonants can be doubled between vowels. The only consonant sounds normally allowed at the end of the word are s, n, and r.

Apart from some unaccented monosyllabic or disyllabic terms of minor importance, each word is marked by an accent (the highest tone within the word) on one of the vowels (one of the last three vowels, if the word has more than three syllables). Short vowels, if they carry the accent, have only a rising tone (noted from the Alexandrian grammarians onward by the sign of the acute accent); long vowels or diphthongs may have either a rising tone (noted by the acute accent) or a rising tone followed by a falling tone (noted by the circumflex). When a word carrying an acute accent on the vowel of the final syllable is followed by another word within the same phrase, its accent is noted by the sign of the grave accent, in order to indicate that its tone is lower than that of the vowel of the initial syllable of the next word. Sometimes two otherwise identical words are differentiated by the nature or the position of the accent: for example, oîkoi (‘houses’) is a nominative plural form and oíkoi (‘at home’) an adverb of place; tómos means ‘a cut’ and tomós ‘cutting.’

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Languages & Alphabets

The accent (which is not associated with stress) does not play any part in the rhythm of the language. The rhythm of both prose and poetry is based upon the distribution of short and long syllables. For a syllable to be short, it must end in a short vowel; syllables ending in a long vowel and closed syllables (i.e., those ending in a consonant) are long. The rhythm of Ancient Greek is therefore said to be quantitative.

Morphology

Every nominal (noun or adjective) or verbal form combines a stem that carries the lexical sense of the word and a certain number of grammatical markers that serve to specify the meaning of the whole word (e.g., plural, future) or to indicate its syntactic function (e.g., subject, object) in the sentence.

The category of gender, which differentiates masculine, feminine, and neuter, concerns only the substantive (noun), adjective, and pronoun. The category of person (first, second, and third person) is restricted to the personal pronoun and the verb. There are three numbers—singular, dual, and plural—that are distinguished in both the noun and the verb. The survival of the dual is an archaism; although a living form in the Mycenaean period, it tends to be replaced by the plural in the 1st millennium. Attic is one of the dialects in which the dual number is best preserved down to the threshold of the Hellenistic period.

Not counting the vocative case, the Greek declension in the Mycenaean period still contained five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative, and instrumental. Between the Mycenaean period and the 8th century the instrumental ceased to exist as a distinct case, its role having been taken over by the dative.

The verb system is organized around four principal tense stems, which are built on the verb stem: “present,” aorist, “perfect,” and future. The first three are often called aspects, a term taken over from Slavic grammar. According to this terminology, the “present” stem is used for imperfective aspect (ongoing or repeated process), the “perfect” stem for stative aspect (state resulting from the completion of the process), and the aorist stem for perfective aspect (completed process). In principle, each tense stem provides five moods for the finite verb (with personal endings), a participle, and an infinitive. There are two assertive moods (nonpast and past indicative) and three nonassertive moods (subjunctive, optative, imperative). The expression of time relations is based on the combination of the values of the tenses (“aspects”) and those of the moods. For instance, the past indicative of the “present” (the so-called imperfect) is used for ongoing or repeated processes in the past, that of the aorist for completed processes in the past, and that of the “perfect” (the so-called pluperfect) for states in the past. The Greek verb has two voices, active and mediopassive (reflexive and passive), which are expressed (leaving aside the aorist passive) by the opposition of two series of personal endings, for each mood (with participle and infinitive) of each tense stem.

Syntax

Since syntactical relations are expressed by means of case endings (and so on), Greek word order is relatively free. The creation of the definite article (post-Mycenaean and post-Homeric) is an important innovation. The availability of infinitive and participle clauses, with or without the article, as alternatives for all kinds of subordinate clauses permits the construction of very long and complex sentences that are nevertheless entirely transparent as to their syntactic structure. This accomplishment of Attic prose (known as periodic style) is unmatched in other languages.

Vocabulary

If one considers the roots of words, it seems that, although the essential basis of the vocabulary is of Indo-European origin, a fairly large number of terms are borrowings. Most of these loans were taken from the idioms of the populations living in Greece prior to the arrival of the Proto-Greeks. Many words had already penetrated into Greek in the 2nd millennium, for there are forms found in Mycenaean that correspond to plant names such as elaiā ‘olive,’ pyxos ‘box tree,’ and selīnon ‘celery’; animal names such as leōn ‘lion’ and onos ‘ass’; names for objects such as asaminthos ‘bathing tub,’ depas ‘vase,’ and xiphos ‘sword’; and names of materials such as elephās ‘ivory,’ chrȳsos ‘gold,’ and kyanos ‘dark blue enamel.’

Whatever the origins of its verbal and nominal roots, the Greek language developed a vocabulary full of nuances and of great scope (by using preverbs and by forming compounds and derived words). At all periods the lexical creativity of Greek has been very productive, thus giving it a vocabulary of extraordinary richness.