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Ancient Greek (Ἑλληνῐκή, Hellēnikḗ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː]) [1] includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Homeric ...
Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.. Most of these varieties are known only from inscriptions, but a few of them, principally Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic, are also represented in the literary canon alongside the dominant Attic form of literary Greek.
Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek.This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier.
Greek verbs can be found in any of three voices: active, passive, and middle. Active verbs in Greek are those whose 1st person singular in the present tense ends in -ω (-ō) or -μι (-mi), such as κελεύω (keleúō) "I order" or εἰμί (eimí) "I am".
Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, [18] or possibly earlier. [19] The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, [20] making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. [21]
The Proto-Greek language was the most recent common ancestor of all Greek dialects. Proto-Greek split off from its nearest Indo-European relatives sometime during the European Bronze Age (c. 3rd millennium BC) and possibly even earlier, though it is unknown whether the characteristic Greek sound-changes occurred within the Greek peninsula or if Proto-Greek speakers themselves migrated into Greece.
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Attic Greek is the Greek dialect of the ancient region of Attica, including the polis of Athens. Often called classical Greek , it was the prestige dialect of the Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is taught to students of ancient Greek.