Brian D Joseph, Publications
GREEK, Modern
Consultant: Brian D. Joseph, Professor of Linguistics, The Ohio State
University
NOTE: accents, diacritics, and special symbols have been
eliminated or modified in the interest of making the text readable in the
absence of the appropriate encoding system and font. Thus, long marks and
the like are not indicated, and so cited forms should be used with caution.
Language Name: Modern Greek (note that Greek
by itself, without reference to time period, usually refers to
Ancient Greek); autonym: elinika (cf. the Ancient Greek
autonym hellenike, the neuter plural nominative/accusative
of which is the source, via sound changes, of the modern term),
also neoelinika (literally, "new (i.e., modern) Greek"), and
romeika (literally, "Romaic", due to the affinities (Orthodox Christian)
Greeks felt after the 4th century AD with the Eastern Roman (= Byzantine)
Empire based in Constantinople).
Location: Prior to the late Hellenistic period, as noted in the chapter
on Ancient Greek, there were Greek speakers all over the eastern
Mediterranean, in Southern Italy, along the Black Sea coasts, in Egypt,
the Levant, Cyprus, and much of Asia Minor. This distribution continued
throughout the Hellenistic period and on through the Byzantine and
Medieval periods, and is valid even into the Modern era, though Greece and
Cyprus are the main venues for the Greek language today. Most of the
Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, what is now Turkey, were removed to
Greece after the population exchanges of the early 1920s that came in the
aftermath of the Turkish defeat of Greece's expansionist forays. New
diasporic communities have arisen in the 20th century, quite robustly in
Australia (especially Melbourne) and in North America (especially in major
cities in the USA and Canada), and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe
and Central Asia, the latter in part due to emigration brought on by the
Greek civil war after World War II.
Family: As a descendant of Ancient Greek, Modern Greek has the same
family affiliation as that given in the chapter on Ancient Greek, namely
part of the Greek or Hellenic branch of Indo-European.
Related Languages: The linguistic affinities noted in the chapter on
Ancient Greek are relevant for Modern Greek, though perhaps not as obvious
as for the ancient language. Depending on how one judges the difference
between dialects of a language as opposed to separate languages, the
highly divergent modern form of Greek known as Tsakonian, spoken still in
the eastern Peloponnesos (in Greece), could well be considered now a
separate language from the rest of Modern Greek, and the Pontic dialects
once spoken in Asia Minor along the Black Sea coast and now spoken in many
parts of Greece due to the 1923 population exchanges are divergent enough
to warrant consideration as a separate language from the rest of Greek now
(see also the next section).
Dialects: The dialect complexity of
Ancient Greek was to a large extent
levelled out during the Hellenistic period with the emergence of the
relatively unified variety of Greek known as the Koine (see chapter on
Ancient Greek). While somewhat oversimplified, since there are
differences in the realizations of Koine Greek in different parts of the
Hellenistic world, this view is essentially accurate. The dominant basis
for the Koine was the ancient Attic-Ionic dialect though there was some
limited input from the other dialects. For the most part, the Hellenistic
Koine, or actually the version of it that took hold in the Byzantine
period, was the starting point for the modern dialects, and it is
conventional to date the emergence of Modern Greek dialects to about the
10th to 12th centuries (AD). The main exception to this characterization
is Tsakonian (see above), which derives more or less directly from the
ancient Doric dialect, though with an admixture of standard Modern Greek
in recent years; in addition, the Greek of Southern Italy, still spoken
for instance in some villages in Apulia and Calabria, seems to have Doric
roots. The Pontic dialects (see above) may derive more directly from the
Hellenistic Koine.
The main modern dialects
that derive from the later Byzantine form of the
Koine are (following Newton 1972): Peloponnesian-Ionian, Northern,
Cretan, Old Athenian, and South-eastern (including the islands of the
Dodecanese and Cypriot Greek). The major features distinguishing these
dialects include deletion of original high vowels and raising of original
mid-vowels when unstressed in the Northern varieties, loss of final -n in
all but the Southeastern varieties, palatalizations of velars in all but
Peloponnesian-Ionian, use of the accusative for indirect objects in the
Northern dialects instead of the genitive, among others.
Peloponnesian-Ionian forms the historical basis for what has emerged in
the 20th century as Standard Modern Greek, and is thus the basis for the
language of modern Athens, now the main center of population (Old Athenian
being the dialect of Athens before the 1821 War of Independence, still
found in other parts of Greece due to various relocations).
Number of Speakers: As noted in the
earlier chapter, the spread of Greek
during the Hellenistic period led to significant growth in the number of
speakers of Greek, and this growth continued in the Byzantine and Medieval
periods. At present, there are approximately 13,000,000 Greek speakers,
some 10,000,000 in Greece, with about 500,000 in Cyprus, and the remainder
in the modern Hellenic diaspora (over 1,000,000 in Australia). Some
5,000,000 speakers live in the greater Athens area alone, most of them
speakers - and shapers - of the current standard language.
Origin and History: Temporally, Modern Greek has its origins in the
Hellenistic Koine (see the chapter on
Ancient Greek), since many of the
changes that constitute the key differences between Ancient and Modern
Greek are evident in nascent form in the Koine (though some ran to
completion only later). While it is customary to divide Post-Classical and
Post-Hellenistic Greek into the early Byzantine period (c. 300 AD to 1000
AD) and the later Byzantine/Medieval period (1000 to 1600), with the
(truly) modern period starting after 1600, in fact vernacular Greek of the
12th century seems quite modern in many respects.
A key feature in the development
of the modern language is the fact that
throughout the history of post-Classical Greek, the language and its
speakers could never really escape the influence of the Classical Greek
language and Classical Greece itself. The important position that
Classical Greece held culturally throughout the Mediterranean, the
Balkans, parts of the Middle East, and even parts of Western and Central
Europe, in the post-Classical period and on into the Middle Ages, meant
that Greek speakers bore a constant reminder of the language and
linguistic "monuments" of their ancestors. Classical Greek thus formed
the prescriptive norm against which speakers of later stages of Greek
generally measured themselves. This situation led to a "two-track system"
for the language, in which a high-style consciously archaizing variety
that speakers and writers modelled on Classical Greek was set against a
vernacular innovative variety. While in the Medieval period this
distinction was more a matter of a learned variety reserved for official
(usually Church-related) and many literary uses opposed to a colloquial
variety that only rarely found its way into literary expression, after the
War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821, Greeks, confronted
with the creation of a new nation-state of Greece, sought to codify and
establish a national language as part of the nation-building process. At
this point, the distinction became politicized, and the distinction arose
between what came to be known as katharevousa ("Puristic", literally
"(the) purifying (language)") as the high-style variety associated with
official functions, i.e. those pertaining to government, education,
religion, and such, and dimotiki ("Demotic", literally "(the) popular
(language)") as the language of the people in ordinary, day-to-day,
mundane affairs. This socio-linguistic state of affairs was one of the
paradigm cases that Ferguson 1959 used in developing the notion of
diglossia, and the struggle between proponents of each variety,
representing as well various concomitant social attitudes and political
positions, continued into the latter half of the 20th century. Currently,
by various acts and actions of the government in 1976, dimotiki is now the
official language, and the diglossic situation is resolved, at least
officially. Throughout the periods of diglossia, official and unofficial,
usage was actually somewhat mixed, with speakers often borrowing from one
variety and, for instance, incorporating Puristic forms into Demotic
usage, and the present state of Demotic, what has emerged as "Standard
Modern Greek" (the Greek of everyday life in the largest city and capital
of Greece, Athens) reflects a number of such borrowings from katharevousa,
involving both grammar (morphology and syntax) and pronunciation, as well
as the lexicon.
Basic Phonology: As noted in the
previous chapter, the Classical Attic
phonological system began to undergo several changes in the post-Classical
period which ultimately characterize the differences between Ancient and
Modern Greek. These included, for the consonants, the fricativization of
earlier b d g to 
y (with 
later becoming v)
and of ph th kh to f th x,
the loss of h, and the reduction of the zd cluster (represented
orthographically by <
> (zeta)) to z, which then took on phonemic
status. New instances of the voiced stops b d g were provided by loan
words and possibly also as variants of voiceless p t k.after nasals.
Not all of these changes were
completed within the Hellenistic Koine
period; the conservative pronunciation [ph th kh]
for the Classical Greek
voiceless aspirated stops, for instance, was maintained as a
sociolinguistically conservative high-prestige pronunciation in the
Byzantine scholastic tradition into the 10th century. Moreover, even
though all members of whole classes of consonants eventually were affected
by these changes, each sound in a class seems to have undergone the change
at a different time (e.g. in the Egyptian variety of the Koine, g > g was
completed by the 1st century BC,b >
(>) v by
the 3rd century AD, and d
> d by the 7th century AD).
The consonantal inventory of the late Koine is given in Table 1:
Table 1: Consonants of Koine Greek (Innovative; stable by (roughly) 5th
century AD)
| Labial | Palatal | Dental | Velar |
Glottal |
| Stops |
voiceless
unaspirated |
p | |
t |
k |
| [voiced1 |
b | | d | g] |
| Nasals | m | | n |
( )
2 |
| Fricatives |
voiced
voiceless | v
f |
| dz
ths |
Y
X |
| Liquids |
Trill
Lateral | | | r
l |
1These sounds were quite possibly not distinctive, but rather interpreted
as positional variants of the voiceless stops.
2This sound was an allophone of /n/ before velar
stops.
Several further changes took
place in the consonants to give the inventory
found in Standard Modern Greek, and all of these changes were such that
they have led to analytic ambiguities for the resulting segments in the
modern language (see the discussion in Joseph & Philippaki-Warburton
1987:231-6). Their controversial status for the Modern Greek, where a
full range of data is available, means that status of these new sounds
cannot be adequately resolved for earlier stages.
From around the 10th to 12th
centuries, affricate(-like) sounds ts and dz
began to emerge as distinctive elements, partly in loans from neighboring
languages, partly as a regular sound change of k and/or t
before front
vowels in some dialects, and partly as a sporadic outcome (possibly
lexically induced or due to dialect borrowings) of s, th, z, ks, ps, and
other sounds in various contexts. The Medieval Greek spelling for these
sounds is consistently with <
>, which is used in Modern Greek just for
the voiced [dz]; the modern outcomes, however, suggest that it stood for
[ts] as well as [dz] in Medieval Greek. Their status as unit affricates
as opposed to clusters is controversial.
Similarly, in the post-Koine
period, pure voiced stops continued to
establish themselves in the language, through loans and through sound
changes, not just post-nasal voicing of p t k but that together with the
loss of unstressed initial vowels and nasality in complex syllable onsets,
creating contrasts (e.g. Ancient en-trepomai 'be ashamed' >
endrepome > ndrepome > Modern drepome,
with initial [dr-] opposed to #dr (as in
drepani 'sickle') and#tr (as in trepo 'turn')); still,
some modern
speakers lightly nasalize even initial voiced stops (medially nasalization
is more variable though apparently on the wane for younger speakers) and
even loan words show some variability, so that the status of b d gin
contemporary Greek is controversial, with some analysts arguing for
underlying nasal + stop clusters even word-initially.
In addition, the palatal
semi-vowel [ j ] arose in the post-Koine period,
and this segment too offers analytic ambiguities. Its two historical
sources, [ g ] before front vowels and unstressed [i] before a vowel,
are sychronically recoverable in some modern words due to morphophonemic
alternations (e.g. spiti-O 'house' / spitj-a 'houses'; aniy-o 'I open' /
anij-i 's/he opens').
With regard to vowels,
in the Koine period, earlier [o:] raised to [u:],
distinctive vowel length was lost, and the movement of several vowels to
[i] was underway; in addition, the long palatal diphthongs lost their
offglide, the labial offglide w became [v] or [f] depending on the voicing
of the following sound, and each of the other diphthongs merged with some
short monophthong. The ultimate result in late Koine is the vowel system,
considerably simplified from Classical Greek, given in Table 2:
Table 2: Late Hellenistic Vowel System
The main additional change that took place to give the system found in
Standard Modern Greek was unrounding of y to i after
the 10th century, though in certain environments (e.g. around labials
and/or velars) and in some dialects y yielded u;
note also the loss of unstressed initial vowels mentioned above.
The final noteworthy
phonological development was one that was clearly
underway in the Hellenistic Koine, namely a change in the accent to a
stress accent, as opposed to the pitch accent of Classical Greek; the main
stress in Modern Greek words falls on the syllable which in earlier stages
had the high pitch (acute or circumflex). Modern Greek still observes a
restriction of the main stress to one of the last three syllables in the
word (the modern realization of the Classical moraically based
restriction), but accent placement is distinctive (cf. nomos 'law' vs.
nomos 'prefecture'), being predictable only with regard to certain
morphological classes and grammatical categories (e.g. recessive in
-ma(t)-stem neuter nouns, end-stressed in neuter i-stem
genitive singulars in -u, etc.).
Basic phonological rules: Many of the same
phonological generalizations
and processes discussed in the chapter on Ancient Greek apply as well to
later stages of Greek, though with some alterations due to sound changes,
borrowings, and such. The restriction on possible word-final consonants
(only-s, -n, -r permitted) held during the Koine and Middle Greek
periods, though the the loss of final -n via a regular sound change and
the gradual restructuring of the nominal system away from consonant-stems
to vowel-stems (e.g. earlier pater- 'father' becoming patera-,
leont- 'lion' becoming leonda-, etc.) removed most
word-final instances of -r, -n, and potential clusters;
moreover, it is still valid today really just
for native Greek vocabulary, for modern loans have brought in many words,
relatively unaltered, with other final consonants, e.g. tsek
'check', mats '(football) match', basket 'basketball', etc.
The survival of groups of
related words from Ancient Greek has led to the
survival of various morphophonemic alternations in later stages, though in
some instances in a somewhat different form due to sound changes, e.g.
(unaltered) t ~ s before i (e.g. plut-os 'wealth'
/ plus-ios 'wealthy'), (altered) fortition of fricatives
(from earlier aspirated stops) to stops before s (e.g. e-yraf-e
'(s)he was writing' /e-yrap-s-e '(s)he wrote'), among others.
A post-Classical innovation
that has led to significant morphophonemic
alternations involves the voicing of voiceless stops after a nasal,
word-internally but also in article plus noun combinations and weak
pronoun plus verb combinations. Thus, just as earlier pente 'five' and
lampo 'shine' have yielded laterpende, lambo (with variants
pende / pede, lambo / labo
found as well in the modern standard language), so too ton
tonon 'the tone/ACC', (au)ton etaraksa 'him I-disturbed' have yielded
to(n) dono (with loss of word-final -n as well), to(n) daraksa (with loss
of the unstressed initial vowel), and, with place assimilation of the
nasal, ton ponon 'the pain/ACC', (au)ton epeisamen
'him we-persuaded' have yielded to(m) bono, to(m) bisame.
The weak pronominal forms,
including direct and indirect object forms as
well as possessives, provoke accentual readjustments when attached after
their host noun (the usual position for possessives) or host verb (the
usual position for object pronominals with nonfinite (imperatival and
participial) forms). In particular, as a (transformed) continuation of
accentual effects shown by Ancient Greek enclitic elements, effects which
are evident in much of Post-Classical Greek but in flux during the
Medieval period, the weak pronominals trigger the addition of an accent,
which for many speakers becomes the primary accent, on the syllable just
before the pronominal when the host is otherwise accented on the
antepenult, e.g. onoma 'name' / onoma mu 'my name',
kitakse 'look!' / kitakse tus 'look at them!'.
Basic Morphology: Like its
ancient ancestor, Modern Greek is basically a
fusional inflecting language morphologically, with relevant grammatical
information generally being indicated through the endings of inflected
words, i.e. nouns, pronouns, adjectives, article and verbs. Each ending
typically encoded values for several categories simultaneously.
Still, compared to Ancient Greek,
Post-Classical Greek, from the Koine
through to the modern language, shows a greater number and use of analytic
structures, supplanting some of the earlier synthetic ones in Middle
Greek. This trend is found to some extent in nominal morphology but is
especially robust in the verb.
Interestingly, many of these changes in the direction of analytic
structures, e.g. with adjectival degree, indirect object marking,
periphrastic futures (especially based on the verb 'want'), finite
replacements for the infinitive, etc., are found in several of the Balkan
languages that are neighbors to Greek, including Albanian, Bulgarian,
Macedonian, and Romanian. While the relationship between the emergence of
these changes in Greek and similar developments in these other languages
is controversial - many of these changes were underway relatively early in
Post-Classical Greek and their spread may have been facilitated by contact
with speakers of these other languages not caused by the contact (and in
some instances, Greek may have been the source of these features in the
other language) - no history of the development of Modern Greek can ignore
the larger Balkan context for these changes.
Noun Morphology: The nominal forms and categories given
in the previous
chapter for Ancient Greek are valid as well into the Koine period, though
the dative case and all dual number forms begin to fall into disuse during
that time, and are completely absent from colloquial Modern Greek. In
addition, starting in the Koine period and continuing on into the Medieval
period, most noun paradigms came to be restructured, with the basis for
their organization becoming gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter)
rather than the formal stem-classes (i-stem, consonant-stem, o-stem, etc.)
of Ancient Greek. The resulting division, for the most part, has most
masculine nouns with a nominative singular in -V-s opposed to an
accusative and genitive in -V-O, and most feminine nouns with a nominative
and accusative singular in-V-O opposed to a genitive in -V-s; the neuters
are rather diverse but, as in Ancient Greek, the nominative and accusative
are always identical.
As in Ancient Greek, there is agreement in gender, number, and case within
noun phrases between adjectives and head nouns, and definiteness is marked
by the presence of an article as the first element in the noun phrase.
The sample paradigms given in the Ancient Greek chapter are valid for the
Koine nominal declension, except that the dative and the dual are
moribund; some examples of article-adjective -noun combinations for Modern
Greek are given in Table 3.
Table 3: Examples of nominal inflection for Modern Greek
'the good father'
(MASCULINE) | 'the good mother
' (FEMININE) |
'the good baby'
(NEUTER) |
NOM.SG o kalos pateras
ACC.SG ton kalo patera
GEN.SG tu kalu patera
VOC.SG kale patera |
NOM.SG i kali mitera
ACC.SG tin kali mitera
GEN.SG tis kalis miteras
VOC.SG kali mitera |
NOM.SG to kalo moro
ACC.SG to kalo moro
GEN.SG tu kalu moru
VOC.SG kalo moro |
NOM/VOC.PL i kali pateres
ACC.PL tus kalus pateres
GEN.PL ton kalon pateron |
NOM/VOC.PL i kales miteres
ACC.PL tis kales miteres
GEN.PL ton kalon miteron |
NOM/VOC.PL ta kala mora
ACC.PL ta kala mora
GEN.PL ton kalon moron |
As in Ancient Greek, the personal pronouns in Koine, Medieval, and Modern
Greek have special forms, while demonstrative and other pronouns generally
followed some other nominal declensional pattern. Adjectives show
comparative and superlative degree forms, which by Medieval Greek and on
into the modern language, are generally formed analytically (comparative
viapjo + adjective, superlative via definite article
+ pjo + adjective),
though the synthetic adjectival inflections of Ancient Greek are still
used with a few, especially common, adjectives.
Verb Morphology: As with the noun, the categories and
forms of the verbal
system of Ancient Greek are generally valid for the Koine, though with
some changes, and even, to some extent for Medieval and Modern Greek as
well. As with the nouns, all verbal dual forms go out of use. Future
periphrases begin to arise in the Koine in place of the earlier synthetic
future, and by Medieval Greek one based on the use of the verb thelo
'want' as an auxiliary holds sway as the primary type, ultimately
resulting in the Modern Greek future marker tha (from earlier 3SG thelei
with the subjunctive marker na). In the early Koine, the perfect is on
the wane and eventually disappears altogether as a category in the late
Koine, only to be reconstituted as a category several centuries later in
Medieval Greek through a periphrastic construction with 'have' as an
auxiliary together with the sole productive remnant of the earlier
infinitive. Also, as noted in the previous chapter, the infinitive in the
Koine period begins to retreat, being replaced by finite periphrases with
subordinating conjunctions; the infinitive continued as a marginal
category into the Middle Greek period (c. 15th century) and in Modern
Greek now, all functions that might be thought of as typical for
infinitivals in various languages, e.g. complementation, nominalization,
purpose clauses, control structures, etc., are expressed with fully finite
(indicative or subjunctive) clauses (see Joseph 1990 for discussion).
Similarly, the numerous participles of Ancient Greek diminish considerably
in use, and though they were more prevalent in the Koine and Medieval
Greek, there are now in Standard Modern Greek just two participial forms,
an active and a medio-passive imperfective.
The system of verbal moods
also underwent some changes, with the optative
mood becoming moribund in the Koine period and ultimately disappearing
from use altogether. Further, although the subjunctive mood has continued
throughout the history of Greek, in the Koine period and on into Medieval
and Modern Greek, it comes to be used increasingly obligatorily with an
introductory element, e.g. a conjunction, of some sort; the most common of
these was hina, originally a final conjunction ('in order that, that'),
which became Medieval and Modern Greek na and now arguably functions
solely as the marker for the subjunctive as a category (though see Table
4, footnote 1).
Aspect continues to be
a significant category in the Koine and on into
Modern Greek, and owing to the emergence of a periphrastic future with the
infinitive, a form which participated in aspectual distinctions, the
aoristic/imperfective distinction is extended into the future. Moreover,
with the re-emergence of the perfect in Medieval Greek, the relevant
aspectual oppositions (e.g. for the Moder language) become imperfective,
perfective (= aoristic), and perfect.
Voice too continues as
an important category in the language, with
essentially the same values for the forms as in Ancient Greek. One formal
change is that there comes to be no distinction between passive and middle
in any of the tenses.
Negation in the Koine and
into Medieval Greek was marked as in Ancient
Greek, i.e. by syntactic means with a separate word for 'not' associated
with (but not necessarily adjacent to) the verb. Increasingly, though,
the negative element came to stand obligatorily before the verb, and in
Modern Greek the negators de(n) (for finite, indicative forms) and mi(n)
(for subjunctive) - a pair which continues an Ancient Greek distinction -
attach to the left of the verb and can only be separated from it only by
weak pronominal forms and/or the future marker (all of which are arguably
affixal in contemporary Greek). The Ancient Greek ability of imperatival
forms to be negated to yield a prohibitive is lost, however, and in Modern
Greek mi(n) with the subjunctive (with omission of na possible) forms a
negative command.
Finally, as in Ancient Greek,
the situation is similar in later stages
with regard to marking for causative, frequentative, and iterative, in
that there is in general no regular inflection for these categories; in
Modern Greek causatives are expressed via periphrastic constructions
parallel to the use of make in English.
A full synopsis of the
Modern Greek verb grafo 'I write' is given in Table
4, with first person singular forms for all tense, aspect, voice, and all
moods but imperative, for which second singular is used, as well as the
few nonfinite participial forms (note that < y > is used here for the voiced
velar fricative):
Table 4: Synopsis of yrafo 'write'
| Present | Past |
Future | Perfect |
| Active |
| Indicative |
yrafo | eyrafa/IMPFVE
eyrapsa/AOR |
tha yrafo/IMPFVE
tha yrapso/AOR
|
exo yrapsi
ixa yrapsi/PLUPRF
tha exo yrapsi/FUT.PRF |
| Subj'nc've |
na yrafo/IMPFVE
na yrapso/AOR | **1
**1 |
------ | na exo yrapsi |
| Imperative |
yrafe/IMPFVE
yrapse/AOR | ------ |
------ | exe yrapsi |
| Participle |
yrafondas | ------ |
------ | exondas yrapsi |
| Medio-Passive |
| Indicative |
yrafome | yrafomun/IMPFVE
yraftike/AOR |
tha yrafome/IMPFVE
tha yrafto/AOR |
exo yrafti
ixa yrafti/PLUPRF
tha exo yrafti/FUT.PRF |
| Subj'nc've |
na grafome/IMPFVE
na yrafto/AOR | **1
**1 |
------ | na exo yrafti |
| Imperative |
yrafu/IMPFVE
yrapsu/AOR | ------ |
------ | exe yrafti |
| Participle |
yrafomenos | | |
yramenos |
1The marker na can combine with
indicative past forms to give various
subtle shades of modality (e.g. na eyrafa 'I should have written'); it is
not clear, though, if these constitute a legitimate category of "past
subjunctive" or instead derive from the combinatorics of the element
na.
General Rules of Word Formation: Word-formation processes in
Post-Classical Greek and on into Modern Greek remain essentially the same
as in Ancient Greek (see
previous chapter). Some minor changes evident in
the modern language include greater numbers of coordinative compounds,
e.g. maxero-piruna 'cutlery' (literally: "knife-(and)-forks") or
aniyo-klino 'open and close', and the emergence of multiply-inflected
compounds, possibly through borrowing, e.g. pedi-thavma 'child prodigy'
(literally "child-wonder") with a plural pedja-thavmata (literally
"children-wonders"); note the multiple accents, suggesting that the
individual words in this type retain their individual integrity.
Basic Syntax:
Constituent Order: What was said about basic word
order for Ancient Greek
- essentially free ordering of major constituents in a clause - holds for
all later stages of the language as well. All permutations of ordering of
subject, object, and verb can be found, though Modern Greek shows a
preference for Subject-Verb-Object ordering in neutral contexts.
Similarly, the ordering of elements within constituents, e.g. within the
noun phrase, is virtually unchanged, so that the remarks in the previous
chapter hold for later stages of Greek too.
One main area of difference,
however, is in the placement of weak
pronouns, generally referred to as "clitics". In Ancient Greek, these
elements, as well as various sentence connectives, were positioned in
relation to the clausal unit that contained them, and they usually
appeared in second position within that unit. In Modern Greek, however,
their positioning is relative to the verb - before finite verbs and after
nonfinite verbs (imperatives and participles) in the standard language -
so that weak pronouns can now occur sentence-initially. The Ancient Greek
positioning was valid throughout the Hellenistic period and on into
Byzantine Greek, but in the Medieval period, the orientation of the weak
pronouns toward the verb, as opposed to the clause, began to emerge, with
the modern distribution developing after the 16th century. The verbal
complex that results from the combination of the verb with weak pronouns
is the core of the Modern Greek clause structure, since tense, mood, and
negation markers also form part of this complex (see above in Morphology
and below regarding Negation and the Example Sentences).
Case-marking: The essentials of case-marking remained the same in
Post-Classical Greek and on into the Medieval and Modern periods as those
found in Ancient Greek. Subjects are still marked with the nominative
case and accusative marks direct objects; there is, however, no
idiosyncratic marking of direct objects with other cases in Modern Greek,
though some instances are to be found in the Koine period. The loss of the
dative case in the Koine period has led to the marking of indirect objects
by the genitive case (accusative in some dialects) and by the preposition
s(e) (earlier eis). The genitive is thus used now in ways it was not in
earlier stages, but some earlier uses of the genitive no longer occur; the
partitive, for instance, is expressed periphrastically rather than by the
genitive case. Accusative is the only case found for the object of
prepositions, except that pronominal objects with some prepositions are
usually in the genitive case (compare, e.g.,mazi mu '(together) with
me/GEN' with me emena 'with me/ACC').
Negation. As noted above in the section on morphology, negation in Modern
Greek is marked primarily by morphological means, with the two markers den
and min forming part of the verbal complex; the free word for 'no',
oxi, is used with constituents in elliptical negation, as in
thelo to mov oxi to ble 'I-want the mauve-one not the blue-one'.
Negation in the pre-Modern period, from the Koine up through Medieval
Greek, was transitional, from the Ancient Greek purely syntactic
clause-based expression of negation to the modern verb-based,
essentially morphological, system.
Other information: As noted in the previous chapter and the above section
on verbal morphology, from the Koine on into Medieval Greek,
complementation was increasingly with finite clauses only, in place of the
earlier infinitival complementation. After the 15th century,
complementation is essentially only with finite clauses headed by the
subjunctive marker na or by indicative complementizers oti, pos, or
pu.
Similarly, the participles
of Ancient Greek decreased in use in the
Post-Classical period, and the one productive participle of Modern Greek,
the active imperfective participle, is now used more like a clausal
adjunct, its subject, when unexpressed, being interpreted as coreferent
with the main clause subject.
Increasingly in the Medieval period and on into Modern Greek relative
clauses are marked with an invariant relative marker - in the modern
language pu, homophonous with one of the indicative complementizers - with
resumptive pronouns in the relative clause being fairly common. The use
of inflected relative pronouns, however, has always been possible, but is
restricted now mainly to higher style writing.
The definite article, which in Ancient Greek, among other functions,
served as a means of nominalizing virtually any part of speech, continues
in that use in later stages of the language, and provides a way in Modern
Greek or nominalizing clauses (see the example sentences).
Finally, the weak object pronouns serve important discourse functions, and
frequently co-index full noun-phrase objects, among other things to signal
emphasis and topicality (and note their use in relative clauses mentioned
above).
Basic Orthography: Throughout Post-Classical Greek
and on into the Modern
era, the Greek alphabet has been the primary medium for writing Greek,
although in the Medieval period, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets were
occasionally used in certain communities (e.g. Hebrew by the Jewish
community of Constantinople). The form of the alphabet is essentially
that of the ancient Ionian alphabet (see the chapter on
Ancient Greek),
with some additional letter combinations not found in ancient times, and
moreover, the value of some of the letters and letter combinations is
different due to sound changes. An official orthographic reform in 1976
by the government of Greece eliminated the ancient breathing marks and the
grave and circumflex accents; thus, only the acute accent is used now, and
only, for the most part, in polysyllabic words. Some variation is evident
in the spelling of some words whose sounds have more than one
representation, e.g. 
'look at' ([kitazo]),
'egg' ([avyo]).
Table 5: The Modern Greek Alphabet (modern Standard
language is the basis for the phonetic values)
Table 6: Modern Greek Digraphs
Table 7: Modern Greek Diacritics (for Pre-1976 texts; post-1976 only acute
accent is used)
Loanwords and Contact with Other Languages: As noted in the
previous
chapter, Greek absorbed many loanwords from Latin during the Koine period,
some of which have stayed in the language since, e.g. Latin hospitium
'lodgings, house' -> Post-Classical Greek hospition -> (via regular sound
changes) Modern spiti 'house'. In the Byzantine period, and on through
Medieval times, Latin is still a major source of loan words, but some
enter through the medium of Balkan Latin, shown by various telltale
phonological characteristics, e.g. pe(n)dzimenton 'baggage' from Latin
impedimentum with Balkan Latin affricatization. In the later Medieval
period, numerous loans from the Venetian dialect of Italian enter Greek,
including the verb-forming suffix -ar- (cf. Italian infinitival
-are), as
do various technical feudal terms from French, e.g. roi 'king' (French
roi). Moreover, as speakers of Greek came into contact in this period
with Slavic, Albanian, Vlach (Aromanian), and increasingly also Turkish
speakers, loans from all these languages permeate the language, with
Turkish, especially after the 14th century, providing the greatest number
by far. Turkish loans range over a variety of semantic domains and
lexical categories, including ordinary day-to-day life (e.g. jeleki
'vest', pilafi 'rice', kafes 'coffee', tsai 'tea',
boya 'paint'), military (e.g. tufeki 'rifle', askeri
'soldier'), arts (e.g. baglamas 'a musical instrument'), verbs
(e.g. baildizo 'faint', from Turkish bayil- with a
Turkish past tense suffix -d- and a Greek derivational suffix-iz-)
interjections (e.g. aman 'for mercy's sake!', de 'marker
of impatience with imperatives'), among others; further, some Turkish
derivational suffixes have become productive in Greek, especially
the suffix -dzis which forms nouns of occupation (e.g.
taksi-dzis 'taxi driver').
This period of contact
with neighboring Balkan languages also played a
critical role in the ultimate shaping of Greek structurally, in that, as
noted above, many of the structural features that characterize Modern
Greek and distinguish it from Ancient Greek, are shared by the other
languages of the Balkans, including the formation of the future tense, the
use of finite complementation, the merger of genitive and dative cases,
analytic expression of adjectival comparison, etc. Even if the
appearance of these features in Greek was not caused directly by contact -
and while the chronology might speak against that for some of them, for
others it is still an open question - it may be that their presence in
languages Greek speakers were in contact with facilitated their spread
within Greek. And, at the very least, the lexical and phrasal parallels
among all these languages, including Greek, are striking and speak to a
period of intense and intimate contact among their speakers.
Finally, in the 20th century,
French - especially in the first half of the
century - and English - especially in the latter half - have provided an
abundance of loan words, e.g. from French asenser(i) 'elevator', beton
'concrete', ble 'blue', kombinezon 'petticoat', majo 'bathing suit', etc.,
and from English futbol 'footbol', gol 'goal', mats '(football) match',
vintsi 'winch', yot 'yacht', among numerous others.
Common Words: Nouns are cited in the nominative singular
form, adjectives in nominative singular masculine; all forms listed
here are from Standard Modern Greek:
| man: | a(n)dras (i.e. male person); anthropos (i.e. human being) |
| woman: | jineka |
| water: | nero |
| sun: | ilios |
| three: | tris |
| fish: | psari |
| big: | meyalos |
| long: | makros |
| small: | mikros |
| yes: | ne; malista |
| no: | oxi |
| good: | kalos |
| bird: | puli |
| dog: | skili |
| tree: | dendro |
Example Sentences
Inasmuch as Koine syntax did not differ appreciably from Classical Greek
syntax in kind, but rather more in the extent of use of certain forms, the
examples in the previous chapter give an idea of the essentials of Koine
syntax. Thus a few sample sentences are given here from Medieval Greek
(in (1), following Ancient Greek transliteration to allow for recovery of
the orthography) and Modern Greek, to illustrate some of the
characteristics discussed above (the Medieval periphrastic future; the
Modern verbal complex with weak pronouns, future marker, and negation;
relativization; co-indexing of objects with weak pronouns; finite
complementation and nominalization of clausal complements in both periods
with the definite article; etc.):
(1)
| kai | tote | thelo |
na | ido | to |
pos | ton |
| and | then |
want/1SG.PRES | that |
see/1SG.PERFVE.SUBJ | the/NTR.SG.ACC |
how | him/MASC.SG.ACC.WEAK |
| theleis |
surein | (Ptochoprodromos
III.390 (12th cent.)) |
| will/2SG | drag/INF |
| 'And then I want to see how you will drag him' (literally:
"And then I-want that I-see the how him you-will drag") |
(2)
| den | tha | tis |
to | pume | to |
jati |
| NEG | FUT |
her/GEN.SG.WEAK | it/NTR.SG.ACC.WEAK |
say/1PL.PERFVE | the/NTR.SG.ACC |
why |
| boresame | na |
tin | afisume | s |
tin paralia | xoris |
| could/1PL.PRFVE.INDIC |
that | her/ACC.SG.WEAK |
leave/1SG.SUBJ.PRFVE | at |
the-beach/ACC | without |
| lefta | ke |
parea |
| money |
and | company/ACC |
| 'We won't tell her why we could have left
her at the beach without money or friends' (literally: "We won't tell her
it the-why we could that we leave her ...") |
(3)
| o meyalos anthropos | pu |
xthes | to vradi |
milusame | me |
| the-big-man/NOM.SG.MASC | that/COMP |
yesterday | the-evening/ACC |
spoke/1PL.IMPFVE | with |
| afton |
ixe | erthi | s |
to mayazi | mas | na |
mas |
| him/ACC.SG.STRONG | had/3SG |
come/PERF | to |
the-store/NTR.SG.ACC | our/GEN |
that | us/ACC.WEAK |
| rotisi | an |
tin | ynorisame | tin kiria Moraiti |
| ask/3SG.PERFVE.SUBJ | if |
her/ACC.SG.WEAK | knew/1PL.ACT.INDIC.PRFVE |
the-lady-Moraitis/ACC.SG.FEM |
| 'The big man that yesterday in the evening we
were talking with had come to our store to ask us if we knew Mrs. Moraitis'
(literally: "The big man that yesterday the evening we were talking with him
had come to the store of ours that he might-ask us if we knew her Mrs. Moraitis") |
Basic Bibliography
Browning, Robert. 1983.
Medieval and Modern Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holton, David, Peter Mackridge, &
Irene Philippaki-Warburton. 1997. Greek. A Comprehensive Grammar of the
Modern Language. London/New York: Routledge.
Horrocks, Geoffrey. 1997. Greek.
A History of the Language and its Speakers. London/New York: Longman.
Householder, Fred W., Kostas Kazazis,
and Andreas Koutsoudas. 1964. Reference Grammar of Literary Dhimotiki.
(=International Journal of American Linguistics 30.2/Publication
31 of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore,
and Linguistics). Bloomington: Indiana University.
Joseph, Brian D. 1990. Morphology
and Universals in Syntactic Change. Evidence from Medieval and Modern Greek.
New York/London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Joseph, Brian D. & Irene Philippaki-Warburton.
1987. Modern Greek. London: Croom Helm Publishers.
Mackridge, Peter. 1985.
The Modern Greek Language. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Mirambel, Andre. 1939.
Precis de grammaire elementaire du grec moderne.
Paris: Societe d'editions "Les Belles Lettres".
Mirambel, Andre. 1959.
La langue grecque moderne, description et analyse.
Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck (Collection Linguistique publiee par la
Societe de Linguistique de Paris).
Newton, Brian. 1972.
The Generative Interpretation of Dialect. (Cambridge
Studies in Linguistics, 7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
