Hellenic languages explained

Hellenic
Also Known As:	Greek
Region:	Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Anatolia and the Black Sea region
Familycolor:	Indo-European
Fam2:	(?) Graeco-Phrygian
Protoname:	Proto-Greek
Child1:	Greek
Child2:	(?) Ancient Macedonian
Iso5:	grk
Lingua:	56= (phylozone)
Glotto:	gree1276
Glottorefname:	Greek

Hellenic is the branch of the Indo-European language family whose principal member is Greek.^[1] In most classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone,^{[2] [3]} but some linguists use the term Hellenic to refer to a group consisting of Greek proper and other varieties thought to be related but different enough to be separate languages, either among ancient neighboring languages^[4] or among modern varieties of Greek.^[5]

Greek and ancient Macedonian

While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek (and later in Koine Greek),^{[6] [7]} fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet.^{[8] [9] [10]} This local variety is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek, and occasionally as an Aeolic Greek dialect or a distinct sister language of Greek; due to the latter classification, a family under the name "Hellenic" has been suggested to group together Greek proper and the ancient Macedonian language.^[11]

Modern Hellenic languages

In addition, some linguists use the term "Hellenic" to refer to modern Greek in a narrow sense together with certain other, divergent modern varieties deemed separate languages on the basis of a lack of mutual intelligibility.^[12] Separate language status is most often posited for Tsakonian,^[12] which is thought to be uniquely a descendant of Doric rather than Attic Greek, followed by Pontic and Cappadocian Greek of Anatolia.^[13] The Griko or Italiot varieties of southern Italy are also not readily intelligible to speakers of standard Greek.^[14] Separate status is sometimes also argued for Cypriot, though this is not as easily justified. In contrast, Yevanic (Jewish Greek) is mutually intelligible with standard Greek but is sometimes considered a separate language for ethnic and cultural reasons.^[15] Greek linguistics traditionally treats all of these as dialects of a single language.^{[2] [16] [17]}

Classification

Hellenic constitutes a branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient languages that might have been most closely related to it, ancient Macedonian^{[18] [19]} (either an ancient Greek dialect or a separate Hellenic language) and Phrygian,^[20] are not documented well enough to permit detailed comparison. Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian^[21] (see also Graeco-Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).^{[22] [23]}

See also

• Ancient Greek dialects
• Varieties of Modern Greek

Notes and References

1. In other contexts, "Hellenic" and "Greek" are generally synonyms.
2. Browning (1983), Medieval and Modern Greek, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Joseph, Brian D. and Irene Philippaki-Warburton (1987): Modern Greek. London: Routledge, p. 1.
4. Book: Joseph, Brian D. . Garry . Jane . Rubino . Carl . Bodomo . Adams B. . Faber . Alice . French . Robert . Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present . Ancient Greek . https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/joseph.1/articles/gancient.htm . 256 . 2001 . . 9780824209704 . en . Adams Bodomo.
5. David Dalby. The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities (1999/2000, Linguasphere Press). Pp. 449-450.
6. Book: Joseph Roisman. Ian Worthington. A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. 7 July 2011. John Wiley & Sons. 978-1-4443-5163-7. 94. Many surviving public and private inscriptions indicate that in the Macedonian kingdom there was no dominant written language but standard Attic and later on koine Greek..
7. Book: The Cambridge ancient history, 3rd edition, Volume VI. Cambridge University Press. 2000. 730. D. M. . Lewis . John . Boardman . 978-0-521-23348-4.
8. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.289
9. Book: Crespo, Emilio . The Softening of Obstruent Consonants in the Macedonian Dialect . Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects: From Central Greece to the Black Sea . Giannakis . Georgios K. . Crespo . Emilio . Filos . Panagiotis . 2017 . Walter de Gruyter . 329 . 978-3-11-053081-0 .
10. Book: Hornblower, Simon . Macedon, Thessaly and Boiotia . The Greek World, 479-323 BC . Routledge . 2002 . Third . 90 . 0-415-16326-9 .
11. Web site: Ancient Macedonian . https://archive.today/20131122022719/http://multitree.org/codes/xmk . dead . November 22, 2013 . MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships.
12. Book: Salminen, Tapani . 2007 . Europe and North Asia . Moseley . Christopher . Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages . London . Routledge . 211–284.
13. [Ethnologue]
14. N. Nicholas (1999), The Story of Pu: The Grammaticalisation in Space and Time of a Modern Greek Complementiser. PhD Dissertation, University of Melbourne. p. 482f. (PDF)
15. Book: Brian. Joseph. Georgios. Tserdanelis. Modern Greek. Thorsten. Roelcke. 2003. Variationstypologie: Ein sprachtypologisches Handbuch der europäischen Sprachen. Berlin. de Gruyter. 836.
16. G. Horrocks (1997), Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. London: Longman.
17. P. Trudgill (2002), Ausbau Sociolinguistics and Identity in Greece, in: P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
18. Roger D. Woodard. "Introduction", The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–18), pp. 12–14.
19. Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 405.
20. Johannes Friedrich. Extinct Languages. Philosophical Library, 1957, pp. 146–147.
    Claude Brixhe. "Phrygian," The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, ed. Roger D. Woodard, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 777–788), p. 780.
    Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 403.
21. James Clackson. Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 11–12.
22. Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 181.
23. Henry M. Hoenigswald, "Greek," The Indo-European Languages, ed. Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paolo Ramat (Routledge, 1998 pp. 228–260), p. 228.
    BBC: Languages across Europe: Greek