How many kinds of ancient Greek are there to learn? What kind did Socrates or Plato write?
Friday, November 20th, 2009 at
2:15 pm
I know there is Homeric, Attic, but what other kinds oh yes, there is Koiné or the spoken trade Greek used by the writers of the Gospel and Paul in his books and letters.
What other kinds of Greek are there that are considered ancient?
Is there a medieval or Byzantine Greek?
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Tagged with: homeric • what other kinds
Filed under: Greek - Written and Spoken
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" – Mycenaean Greek: the language of the Mycenaean civilization. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th or 14th century BC onwards."
" – Medieval Greek: The continuation of Hellenistic Greek during medieval Greek history as the official and vernacular language of the Byzantine Empire, and continued to be used until, and after the fall of that Empire in the 15th century. Also known as Byzantine Greek."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language#History
"In the archaic and classical periods, there were three main dialects of the Greek language: Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric, corresponding to the three main tribes of the Greeks, the Aeolians (chiefly living in the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor north of Smyrna), the Ionians (mostly settled in the west coast of Asia Minor, including Smyrna and the area to the south of it), and the Dorians (primarily the Greeks of the coast of the Pelopennesus, for example, of Sparta, Crete and the southernmost parts of the west coast of Asia Minor). Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were written in a kind of literary Ionic with some loan words from the other dialects. Ionic, therefore, became the primary literary language of ancient Greece until the ascendancy of Athens in the late fifth century. Doric was standard for Greek lyric poetry, such as Pindar and the choral odes of the Greek tragedians."
"After the establishment of Greece as an independent state in 1829, the Katharévusa (Καθαρεύουσα) form—Greek for "purified language"—was sanctioned as the official language of the state and the only acceptable form of Greek in Greece. Katharévusa was a form of the language used by the Greek Orthodox Church since the Byzantine era (the Byzantine Empire used also two different Greek dialects), an attempt at language purification. The attempt was politically motivated, as the government was trying to capitalize on the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and the sympathy many Western intellectuals of the time had for the Greek fight for independence (such as Lord Byron). The whole attempt led to a linguistic war and the creation of literary factions: the Dhimotikistés (Δημοτικιστές), who supported the common (Demotic) dialect, and the Lóyii (Λόγιοι), or Katharevusyáni (Καθαρευουσιάνοι), who supported the "purified dialect". Up to that point, use of Dhimotikí in state affairs was generally frowned upon. The state doctrine stated that use of Katharévusa exaggerated the idea that there was a linear continuation in the speech and thought of the ancient Greeks, all the way from Pericles’s ancient Athens to today’s modern Athens. Use of the Demotic dialect in state speech and paperwork was forbidden."
"The fall of the Junta of 1974 and the end of the era of Metapolítefsi 1974–76 brought the acceptance of the Demotic dialect as both the de facto and de jure forms of the language for use by the Greek government."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Greek_language#Medieval_and_Modern_Greek