Ancient Greek

It is often roughly divided into the Archaic period (9th to 6th centuries BC), Classical period (5th and 4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic period (Koine Greek, 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD).

The Ancient Greek word Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Ellás) is the original word for Greece, from which the word Hellenistic was derived.

Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects.

Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.

The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.

Ionic Greek was a subdialect of the Attic–Ionic or Eastern dialect group of Ancient Greek.

Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.

Ancient Greek literature refers to literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire.

The ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD.

What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki, the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa, meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek, which was developed in the early 19th century and was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state.

Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors.

The Iliad (, in Classical Attic; sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer.

It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance.

Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West.

Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence.

Pamphylian is a little-attested and isolated dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor.

It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek and succeeded by Medieval Greek.

Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Greek features not present in later Ancient Greek.

Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors.

The English word epic comes from the Latin epicus, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός (epikos), from ἔπος (epos), "word, story, poem".

Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language.

The surviving public and private inscriptions found in Macedonia indicate that there was no other written language in ancient Macedonia but Ancient Greek, and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet, suggest that ancient Macedonian might have been a variety of North Western Ancient Greek.

Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes.

Ancient Greek had long and short vowels; many diphthongs; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops; and a pitch accent.

A diphthong ( or ; from Greek: δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "double sound" or "double tone"), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable.

Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek.

Demotic refers particularly to the form of the language that evolved naturally from Ancient Greek, in opposition to the artificially archaic (or as such regarded by part of the Greek linguistic community since it first appeared in 1830) Katharevousa, which was the official standard until 1976.

It is often roughly divided into the Archaic period (9th to 6th centuries BC), Classical period (5th and 4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic period (Koine Greek, 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD).

The first scholars who studied Koine, both in Alexandrian and contemporary times, were classicists whose prototype had been the literary Attic Greek of the Classical period and frowned upon any other variety of Ancient Greek.

Ancient Greek had long and short vowels; many diphthongs; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops; and a pitch accent.

Languages that have been described as pitch-accent languages include most dialects of Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Baltic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Turkish, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Western Basque, Yaqui, certain dialects of Korean, and Shanghainese.

Ancient Greek had long and short vowels; many diphthongs; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops; and a pitch accent.

However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words in which long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the same type: Japanese hōō "phoenix" or Ancient Greek ἀάατος "inviolable".

Ancient Greek had long and short vowels; many diphthongs; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops; and a pitch accent.

In Ancient Greek, the term for stop was ἄφωνον (áphōnon), which means "unpronounceable", "voiceless", or "silent", because stops could not be pronounced without a vowel.

In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many of its descendants, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, which have dual forms across nouns, verbs, and adjectives, Gothic, which used dual forms in pronouns and verbs, and Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which used dual forms in pronouns.

Macedonian could also be related to Thracian and Phrygian languages to some extent.

The proposed Thracian words in the Ancient Greek lexicon are not numerous.

In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

In Ancient Greek, the vocative case is usually identical to the nominative case, with the exception of masculine second-declension nouns (ending in -ος) and third-declension nouns.

In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

Nominative comes from Latin cāsus nominātīvus "case for naming", which was translated from Ancient Greek ὀνομαστικὴ πτῶσις, onomastikḗ ptôsis "inflection for naming", from onomázō "call by name", from ónoma "name".

In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

In Ancient Greek, the dative has the functions of the Proto-Indo-European locative and instrumental as well as those of the original dative.

Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative) and three voices (active, middle, and passive), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms.

Examples of languages with a morphological optative mood are Ancient Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Georgian, Friulian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Navajo, Old Prussian, Old Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish, and Yup'ik.

In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma, referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC).