Greeks Wikipedia

Greek demonstrates several linguistic features that are shared with other Balkan languages, such as Albanian, Bulgarian and Eastern Romance languages (see Balkan sprachbund), and has absorbed many foreign words, primarily of Western European and Turkish origin. Most Greeks speak the Greek language, an independent branch of the Indo-European languages, with its closest relations possibly being Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan). The modern-day Griko community of southern Italy, numbering about 60,000, may represent a living remnant of the ancient Greek populations of Italy. In ancient times, the trading and colonizing activities of the Greek tribes and city states spread the Greek culture, religion and language around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, especially in Southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia"), Spain, the south of France and the Black sea coasts. In recent anthropological studies, both ancient and modern Greek osteological samples were analyzed demonstrating a bio-genetic affinity and continuity shared between both groups. This revival provided a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.

With respect to personal names, the two main influences are Christianity and classical Hellenism; ancient Greek nomenclatures were never forgotten but have become more widely bestowed from the 18th century onwards. The democratic form of government declined during the Hellenistic and Roman eras, only to be revived as an interest in Western Europe during the early modern period. In the West, classical Greek art was influential in shaping the Roman and later the modern Western artistic heritage.

Timeline

It was a period of political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific gyro king jacksonville menu achievements that formed a legacy with unparalleled influence. Greek political ideas have influenced modern forms of government, Greek pottery and sculpture have inspired artists for millennia, and Greek epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry is still read around the world. However, ancient Greek colonists established cities all around the Mediterranean and along the coast of the Black Sea. The Greeks had cultural traits, a religion, and a language in common, though they spoke many dialects. By the early 20th century, over half of the overall Greek-speaking population was settled in Asia Minor (now Turkey), while later that century a huge wave of migration to the United States, Australia, Canada and elsewhere created the modern Greek diaspora.

Periods

• Most Greeks speak the Greek language, an independent branch of the Indo-European languages, with its closest relations possibly being Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).
• The Diafotismos is credited with revitalizing Greek culture and giving birth to the synthesis of ancient and medieval elements that characterize it today.
• Greek demonstrates several linguistic features that are shared with other Balkan languages, such as Albanian, Bulgarian and Eastern Romance languages (see Balkan sprachbund), and has absorbed many foreign words, primarily of Western European and Turkish origin.
• Morphological criteria must, of course, be taken into account in defining the position of a language.
• The language plays an essential role in the Orthodox Church and features prominently in Greek diaspora communities worldwide.

It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms, for most of their history. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. According to one estimation, "Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English". The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasised. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek, used today for all official purposes and in education.

Under the Roman Empire, easier movement of people spread Greeks across the Empire and in the eastern territories, Greek became the lingua franca rather than Latin. The Hellenistic period is characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization that established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa. Under Alexander the Great's empire and successor states, Greek and Hellenizing ruling classes were established in the Middle East, India and in Egypt. Integration, intermarriage, and loss of the Greek language influence the self-identification of the Greek diaspora (omogenia). The English names Greece and Greek are derived, via the Latin Graecia and Graecus, from the name of the Graeci (Γραικοί, Graikoí; singular Γραικός, Graikós), who were among the first ancient Greek tribes to settle southern Italy (the so-called "Magna Graecia").

Hebrew alphabet

During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, areas such as Ionia and Constantinople experienced a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy, and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship. The large Greek diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western romantic nationalism and philhellenism, which together with the conception of Hellenism, formulated during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, formed the basis of the Diafotismos and the current conception of Hellenism. Before the establishment of the modern Greek nation-state, the link between ancient and modern Greeks was emphasized by the scholars of Greek Enlightenment especially by Rigas Feraios.

Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. In its modern form, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. The difficulty is to know just how exceptional Lefkandi was, but in any view it has revised former ideas about what was and what was not possible at the beginning of the 1st millennium bce. Thus, that find and those made in a set of nearby cemeteries in the years before 1980 attesting further contacts between Egypt and Cyprus between 1000 and 800 bce are important evidence. The grave, which dates to about 1000 bce, contains the (probably cremated) remains of a man and a woman.

Modern Usage and Cultural Importance

Ancient Greek civilization flourished from the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 BCE, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. Ancient Greek civilization was concentrated in what is today Greece and along the western coast of Turkey. The ancestry of the Mycenaeans could be explained via a 2-way admixture model of such MBA individuals in northern Greece, and either an EBA Aegean or MBA Minoan population; the difference between the two time periods could be explained by the general decline of the Mycenaean civilization. The results of the study support the idea of genetic continuity between these civilizations and modern Greeks, but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet, with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. Another similar system used to write the Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek, is the earliest known form of Greek. It is basically a syllabary, which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A, has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word.

The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world.