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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.
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects.The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.
The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed.
A complication of Greek grammar is that different Greek authors wrote in different dialects, all of which have slightly different grammatical forms (see Ancient Greek dialects). For example, the history of Herodotus and medical works of Hippocrates are written in Ionic, the poems of Sappho in Aeolic, and the odes of Pindar in Doric; the poems ...
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet , [ 4 ] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for consonants as well as vowels . [ 5 ]
Like poetry, Greek prose had its origins in the archaic period, and the earliest writers of Greek philosophy, history, and medical literature all date to the sixth century BC. [102] Prose first emerged as the writing style adopted by the presocratic philosophers Anaximander and Anaximenes —though Thales of Miletus , considered the first Greek ...
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The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age , centuries after the loss of Linear B , the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the ...