Greek
Greek is a member of the Indo-European language family and the only member
of the Hellenic subgroup of this family. Today it is spoken on the Greek
peninsula and on the Greek islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, on Cyprus
and in a few small regions in Albania, Italy and Turkey, but it was once
spoken throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. It remained an important
language after the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, and eventually it
became the second language of the Roman Empire.
After the fall of the Byzantine Empire Turkish became the language of the
state in Greece and remained so until Greece became an independant state in
the early 19th century. After independance a more or less artificial form
of Greek, the so-called Katharevousa, based on Classic Greek became
the official language of Greece, but nowadays Demotic, the spoken
language of the ordinary people, has largely replaced Katharevousa (although
Katharevousa words and expressions are still occasionally used).
The Greek language has been very important for Western civilization, and most
Western languages have borrowed many Greek words, mainly in the field of
science. After the Renaissance Greek replaced Latin as the number one source
for new scientific terms. Biology, astronomy,
kleptomania, paedophilia and cybernetica are just a few
words of the many that were created from Greek elements and are now used in
most European languages in only slightly modified forms (e.g. French
biologie, Portuguese biologia, Swedish biologi, Russian
biologija, Hungarian biológia). Even non-European languages
have in some cases borrowed Greek words, either directly from Classical Greek,
or through the medium of other European languages. Examples of such words are
Turkish bioloji (from French biologie), Malay biokimia
(biochemistry) and Tagalog heolohiya (from Spanish geologia).
Greek is written it the Greek alphabet. In texts
written in Classical Greek you will notice that usually each word has a vowel
with an accent mark on it. These show the pitch or tone associated with that
vowel. There were originally three different tones in Greek, and the accent
marks were invented by a grammarian called Aristophanus of Byzantium in 260
B.C. as an aid for readers of the works of Homer. In the 7th century these
accent marks started to appear in other texts, and this practice was
continued until a spelling reform in 1985. It is unknown how these tones were
pronounced; they were replaced by a stress accent like the one existing in
English, many centuries ago. Nowadays only this stress accent is indicated in
Greek words (unless the word consists of only one syllable, in which case an
accent would obviously be redundant). Undoubtedly Greek schoolchildren and
foreigners who are trying to learn Greek have reason to be thankful for this
spelling reform!
Another feature abolished by the spelling reform was the use of the signs
psili and dasia over vowels or over the letter rho when
they started a word. A dasia indicated that the vowel used to be preceded by
an aitch sound (or followed by one in the case of rho), and a psili indicated
no aitch sound. Like the tone accents the aitch sound disappeared a long time
ago from the Greek language. But in Greek borrowings in European languages
(which were after all usually borrowed from Classical Greek) the letter
h is not uncommon (e.g. helium and rheumatism).
The spelling of Greek is fairly regular. Some vowels and vowel combinations
have the same pronunciation, and sometimes a consonant letter can be
pronounced in more than one way, but always in a predictical way. On the
whole the modern Greek orthography is not difficult once the Greek script is
mastered. However, people who already know Classical Greek and now try to
learn Modern Greek may have some trouble in getting accustomed to the modern
pronounciation of the letters. For example, the letter beta is
pronounced more or less as "veeta" in Modern Greek!