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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.
v. t. e. Ancient Greek verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). In the indicative mood there are seven tenses: present, imperfect, future, aorist (the equivalent of past ...
Unlike Ancient Greek, which had a pitch accent system, Modern Greek has variable (phonologically unpredictable) stress. Every multisyllabic word carries stress on one of its three final syllables. Enclitics form a single phonological word together with the host word to which they attach, and count towards the three-syllable rule.
Modern Greek verbs additionally have three non-finite forms. There is a form traditionally called "απαρέμφατο" (i.e. 'infinitive', literally the 'invariant form'), which is historically derived from the perfective (aorist) infinitive, but has today lost all syntactical functions typically associated with that category.
Ancient Greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European morphology. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, numerals and especially verbs are all highly inflected. A complication of Greek grammar is that different Greek authors wrote in different dialects, all of which have slightly different ...
Koine Greek [a] (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinḕ diálektos, lit. ' the common dialect '), [b] also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire.
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in French secondary schools is based on Erasmian pronunciation, but it is modified to match the phonetics and even, in the case of αυ and ευ, the orthography of French. Vowel length distinction, geminate consonants and pitch accent are discarded completely, which matches the current phonology of Standard French.
Thus, words from Greek begin with hy-, never with y-. The smooth breathing (ψιλὸν πνεῦμα, psīlòn pneûma; Latin spīritus lēnis)—' ἀ '—marked the absence of /h/. A double rho in the middle of a word was originally written with smooth breathing on the first rho and rough breathing on the second one (διάῤῥοια).