The development of the Greek language

The development of the Greek language through its history involves a separation into geographical and chronological entities. The earliest evidence for the Greek language comes from Crete, evidenced with Linear B script found on clay tablets from Cnossos around 1400. This script is also found on the mainland. An earlier as-yet-undeciphered script is Linear A from about 1700, which was probably associated with the original Minoan civilization and was then incorporated with the mainland language of the conquering Mycenaean group to produce a hybrid script, Linear B.

The Mycenaean language was probably present on the mainland since the intrusion of Indo-European tribes around 1900. The language developed so that by 1450, with the conquest of Crete by the mainland tribes producing the earliest form of Greek seen in the Linear B script. It is not necessarily possible to call the Mycenaean script Greek; rather, it displays elements of later Greek. The destruction of the Mycenaean civilization occurred during the general upheavals of the late Bronze Age throughout the eastern Mediterranean, seen, for example, with the Hyksos in Egypt, leading to the establishment of the New Kingdom.

The invasion of the late thirteenth century brought about a new set of dialects. It is difficult to ascertain if there was truly an invasion, a term that usually meant a sudden eruption of the tribes into an area. Rather, it probably was a series of migrations from the north by groups with similar ethnic and linguistic identities. There is evidence that a major threat from the north occurred with the building of a wall at the Isthmus of Corinth at this time, as well as the contemporary destruction of Troy.

At the same time, the population of the Peloponnese did not increase, implying there was no great migration. During the Dark Ages that followed the destruction of Mycenae, the various regions of Greece splintered into the pre-Classical geographic regions. The end result is that the Dorian invasion, as it has been called, at this time produced a separation of various tribes in Greece based upon a series of dialects, with the Dorian, Ionian, and Aeolic being the main but not the only dialects.

These dialects during the Classical Age are seen in epigraphic (inscriptions) and literary records. The differences among the dialects were slight, but sufficient for each city-state to recognize persons from other city-states. These dialects were understandable by other Greeks and reflected the migration patterns that existed during the post-Mycenaean period, not only on the mainland, but also on the islands and the west coast of Asia Minor. It appears that the dialects stabilized into regional areas quickly once the migrations came to an end.

There were two major divisions, West and East Greek, each with subdivisions. West Greek was divided into the North-West Greek dialect spoken in areas such as Aetolia, Elis, Locris, and Phocis, while Doric was spoken in the Peloponnese and their colonized areas of Crete, Rhodes, southern Asia Minor, and their colonies in Sicily and southern Italy. The North-West or Northern Greek has some similarities to Doric, and some believe that the two dialects are related. It is possible that they came from the same ancestor tongue in Epirus and farther north.

There are some linguistic differences between North-West Greek and Doric. For example, the Northwest used en with the accusative instead of eis with the accusative; or used ar instead of er. The Doric in the south was further subdivided into Laconian, spoken at Sparta; Argolic, spoken in the old Mycenaean region of Argos, Mycenae, Epidaurus, and even Aegina; and Corinthian, spoken on the Isthmus of Corinth, in Sicyon, and in the colonies of Corinth, such as Corcyra, Syracuse, and Ancona. The distinction between Doric and Ionic can be seen in the use of a long a in Doric to a long e in Ionic (Attic). Another example is the contraction of a and e from the proto-Greek ae to the Doric e to the Ionic (Attic) a.

East Greek was subdivided into Ionic, spoken in Ionia or the western coast of Asia Minor, Euboea, and islands in the Aegean colonized by them; and Attica, where Attic, a further subdivision of Ionic, was spoken by the Athenians. Ionic became the major language of literary Greece, with early writers such as Herodotus being the most noted. Homeric Greek, a form of Old Ionic, and Herodotus as New Ionic, are famous examples of Ionic. The Athenians reformed their alphabet in 403, replacing their Attic script with the Ionic script. This became the standard Greek alphabet and was used by succeeding generations.

A second subdivision of East Greek was Aeolic, spoken on the island of Lesbos and on the opposite shore of Asia Minor. The major authors in this language were the poet Sappho and Alcaeus of Mytilene. Some differences with Ionic included a lengthening of consonant clusters such as the Aeolic emmi instead of the Ionic emi (for “I am”); or a loss of h, as in aelios instead of the Ionic helios (meaning “sun”).

In addition, Aeolic and West Greek formed another subdialect spoken in Thessaly and Boeotia. Yet another dialect was spoken in the interior of the Peloponnese in Arcadia, and also on Cyprus. This has led some modern scholars to suggest that there was another subdivision of East Greek into an Arcado-Cyprian dialect based on the premigration Greek of the mainland, used by the Mycenaean peoples. The Mycenaean Greeks spoke an early form of Greek before the migrations, and it is conceivable that some of their successors in isolated regions retained their native speech.

A peculiar attribute of the language that survived into the Classical period is that the form of Greek for a particular piece of literature remained in the dialect from which that genre of literature originated rather than where the author was from or what dialect the author may have used. For example, choral lyric and pastoral poetry came from the Doric region of the south, and all forms of choral lyric poetry were written in Doric, even though Pindar, one of the greatest choral poets, was from Boeotia; or when it is part of Attic tragedy, it was still composed in Doric and not Attic. Pastoral poetry was written in an artificial Doric form, with some local words, some imported from Aeolic, and others made up.

Homeric Greek was not spoken, as it was a combination of Ionic and Aeolic. It appears that this language type, epic poetry, came from an Aeolic-speaking region joined to an Ionic-speaking region. For example, Hesiod, also from Boeotia, wrote in the meter of Homer from Ionia, in hexameters, so that the two are identical. This remained the same even in the Argonautica, written by Apollonius Rhodius in the third century some 500 years later.

The Athenians developed comedy and tragedy so that both genres were in the Attic tongue except when the choral lyric was added in Doric. Histories were created in the Ionic region of Western Asia Minor, as shown and used by Herodotus. When Thucydides wrote his work, he did not write solely in Attic, but also continued to use some of the Ionic dialect.

At the end of the Classical Age, when Greeks were serving across the Mediterranean, a new dialect emerged, the koine (or common tongue). The work of the Athenian writer Xenophon is the earliest example of the dialect being used, and koine soon became the common dialect after Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great established the Macedonian Empire and the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms. Attic was the foundation of koine, which Philip adopted in preference to his native Macedonian dialect, which may have been related to Aeolic. Koine became the standard within two centuries, and it was the language in which the Septuagint and Greek New Testament were written. The Greek dialects were distinctive enough to show where individuals came from, but common enough to be understood by most people.

Unlike Latin in the west, which became the progenitor of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), Greek did not formulate different languages, just the precursor to Modern Greek. Instead, Greek became the medium through which the Bible was spread, and ultimately, it became the foundation for the Cyrillic alphabet used by Russian and other Slavic languages.