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Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name of beta, ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciation vita).
e. 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.
The charts below show how the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents the Ancient Greek (AG) and Modern Greek (MG) pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. The Ancient Greek pronunciation shown here is a reconstruction of the Attic dialect in the 5th century BC.
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. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.
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.
Monotonic orthography for Modern Greek uses only two diacritics, the tonos and diaeresis (sometimes used in combination) that have significance in pronunciation, similar to vowels in Spanish. Initial /h/ is no longer pronounced, and so the rough and smooth breathings are no longer necessary.
Greek (Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká, pronounced; Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent branch of it, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The conventions for writingand romanizingAncient Greekand Modern Greekdiffer markedly. The sound of the English letterB(/b/) was written as βin ancient Greek but is now written as the digraphμπ, while the modern βsounds like the English letter V(/v/) instead. The Greek nameἸωάννηςbecame Johannesin Latinand then Johnin English, but ...