Modern Greek
Spoken in	Greece , Cyprus , Albania , Italy , Turkey and other countries
Region	Europe
Number of speakers	15 million of which 10.7 Greece
Typology	SVO
Classification by family
- Indo-European - Hellenic languages - Group Ionian-Attic - Modern Greek
Official status
Official language of	Greece Cyprus European Union
Language codes
ISO 639-1	el
ISO 639-2	ell, gre
ISO 639-3	ell
IETF	el
Sample
Article I of the Declaration of Human Rights ( see text in French ) 1 ' . , .
change

Modern Greek (Greek: () / "Greek (Modern), or simply () / is the language native to 15 million speakers, including 10 7 million in Greece where he is an official language , as in Cyprus. There are also Greek minorities in Albania and Turkey.

Modern Greek is also called Romaic (). This designation was in force until the nineteenth ^century , tends to disappear.

It is part of the Greek branch of the Indo-European languages.

Modern Greek derives from the Koine , itself the direct heir of ancient Greek , but has undergone many transformations phonetic (like iotacisme the sprue , the disappearance of opposition in vowel quantity , the spirantisation sucked the former, the passage of a pitch accent with a stress intensity or the amussement some phonemes , like

The current language is a variant called "Greek mixed" or " "it is actually the popular language, the meaning of" demotic ", enriched with some grammatical and lexical borrowing in Katharevousa the language known as "purified." The latter, created in part on the model of the penthouse to revive the glorious past of ancient Greece by erasing the stigma that is to say the mass of borrowing from various languages, including Turkish and the Italian , the new masters of Greek ecumenism since the fall of Constantinople , and secondly to say modernity, which the demotic , the language of peasants and fishermen, could not do was an official language since the proclamation of the new state-rumped, just freed from Ottoman rule, the until 1975. The Katharevousa turned out to be the material needed to make the modern vernacular language-rich sediments of different lexical each era ( ancient , Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire , Ottoman Empire and the Italian maritime republics, Venice and Genoa especially) left a legacy. Since 1982 , the official language knows only the monotonic system.

Pronunciation and Writing

Road signs in modern Greek with transcription in Latin script in Naxos.

Modern Greek is written with an alphabet of twenty-four letters , inherited from the early archaic period ( ^eighth century BC. ). Each letter corresponded to the origin to a different sound (with ambiguities, mainly concerning the vowels), but in modern Greek pronunciation has evolved considerably, and several letters or groups of letters are pronounced the same way, which makes spelling as difficult as that of French (hear a word is often not sufficient to write: for example, there are six spellings for the sound "i" because of the iotacisme occurred between the ^fifth and ^third century BCE .) The table below gives the pronunciation of letters. The acute accent over a letter marks the tonic accent of the word.

Modern Greek follows the rules of sandhi both internal and external, consisting assimilations progressive and regressive. For example, a / n / final sees its pivot point to adjust the initial consonant of the word that follows (changes to Simple Letters

Leave a Reply

Frequently Asked Questions