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Hellenic languages

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Hellenic
Greek
Geographic
distribution		Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Anatolia and the Black Sea region
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Proto-languageProto-Greek
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-5grk
Glottologgree1276
Linguasphere(phylozone) 56= (phylozone)
Hypothetical Proto-Greek area of settlement (2200/2100–1900 BC) suggested by Katona (2000), Sakellariou (2016, 1980, 1975) and Phylaktopoulos (1975)

Hellenic is the branch of the Indo-European language family whose principal member is Greek.[2] In most classifications, the Hellenic branch consists of Greek alone,[3][4] but some linguists use Hellenic to refer to a group consisting of Greek proper and other varieties thought to be closely related but different enough to be separate languages within the same branch, either among ancient neighboring languages[5] or among modern varieties of Greek.[6]

Classification

Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian[7] (see also Graeco-Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).[8][9]

Graeco-Phrygian

Phrygian's classification as a centum language, and the high frequency of phonetic, morphological, and lexical isoglosses shared with Greek, have led to a current consensus which regards Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian.[10][11][12]

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),[13][14] 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.[15][16][17] This local variety is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek,[note 1] and occasionally as an Aeolic Greek dialect[note 2] or a distinct sister language of Greek;[note 3] due to the latter classification, a family under the name Hellenic[5] (also called Greek-Macedonian[27][29] or Helleno-Macedonian[28]) has been suggested to group together Greek proper and ancient Macedonian.[5] Nonetheless, there has been some recent scholarly agreement, often expressed as cautious or tentative, that ancient Macedonian is a dialect of the Northwest Greek group.[30][31][32]

Language tree

The following tree is based on the work of Lucien van Beek:[33]

Modern Hellenic languages

In addition, some linguists use 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.[35] Separate language status is most often posited for Tsakonian,[35] which is thought to be uniquely a descendant of Doric rather than Attic Greek, followed by Pontic and Cappadocian Greek of Anatolia.[36] The Griko or Italiot varieties of southern Italy are also not readily intelligible to speakers of standard Greek.[37] Separate status is sometimes also argued for Cypriot, though this is not as easily justified.[38] In contrast, Yevanic (Jewish Greek) is mutually intelligible with standard Greek but is sometimes considered a separate language for ethnic and cultural reasons.[38] Greek linguistics traditionally treat all of these as dialects of a single language.[3][39][40]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Pioneered by Friedrich Wilhelm Sturz (1808),[18] and subsequently supported by Olivier Masson (1996),[19] Michael Meier-Brügger (2003),[20] Johannes Engels (2010),[21] J. Méndez Dosuna (2012),[22] Joachim Matzinger (2016),[23] Emilio Crespo (2017),[16] Claude Brixhe (2018)[24] and M. B. Hatzopoulos (2020).[18]
  2. ↑ Suggested by August Fick (1874),[19] Otto Hoffmann (1906),[19] N. G. L. Hammond (1997)[25] and Ian Worthington (2012).[26]
  3. ↑ Suggested by Georgiev (1966),[27] Joseph (2001)[5] and Hamp (2013).[28]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Graeco-Phrygian". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. ↑ In other contexts, Hellenic and Greek are generally synonyms.
  3. 1 2 Browning (1983), Medieval and Modern Greek, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  4. ↑ Joseph, Brian D. and Irene Philippaki-Warburton (1987): Modern Greek. London: Routledge, p. 1.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Joseph, Brian D. (2001). "Ancient Greek". In Garry, Jane; Rubino, Carl; Bodomo, Adams B.; Faber, Alice; French, Robert (eds.). Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present. H. W. Wilson Company. p. 256. ISBN 9780824209704. Archived from the original on 2016-10-01. Retrieved 2022-06-06.
  6. ↑ David Dalby. The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities (1999/2000, Linguasphere Press). pp. 449–450.
  7. ↑ James Clackson. Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 11–12.
  8. ↑ Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 181.
  9. ↑ 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
  10. ↑ Brixhe, Claude (2008). "Phrygian". In Woodard, Roger D (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. Cambridge University Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 978-0-521-68496-5. "Unquestionably, however, Phrygian is most closely linked with Greek." (p. 72).
  11. ↑ Woodhouse 2009, p. 171: "A turning point in this debate was Kortlandt's (1988) demonstration on the basis of shared sound changes that Thraco-Armenian had separated from Phrygian and other originally Balkan languages at an early stage. The consensus has now returned to regarding Greek as the closest relative."
  12. ↑ Obrador-Cursach 2018, p. 101: "Brixhe (1968), Neumann (1988) and, through an accurate analysis, Matzinger (2005) showed the inconsistency of the Phrygo-Armenian assumption and argued that Phrygian was a language closely related to Greek."
  13. ↑ Joseph Roisman; Ian Worthington (7 July 2011). A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. John Wiley & Sons. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-4443-5163-7. 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.
  14. ↑ Lewis, D. M.; Boardman, John (2000). The Cambridge ancient history, 3rd edition, Volume VI. Cambridge University Press. p. 730. ISBN 978-0-521-23348-4.
  15. ↑ 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
  16. 1 2 Crespo, Emilio (2017). "The Softening of Obstruent Consonants in the Macedonian Dialect". In Giannakis, Georgios K.; Crespo, Emilio; Filos, Panagiotis (eds.). Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects: From Central Greece to the Black Sea. Walter de Gruyter. p. 329. ISBN 978-3-11-053081-0.
  17. ↑ Hornblower, Simon (2002). "Macedon, Thessaly and Boiotia". The Greek World, 479–323 BC (Third ed.). Routledge. p. 90. ISBN 0-415-16326-9.
  18. 1 2 Hatzopoulos, Miltiades B. (2020). "The speech of the ancient Macedonians". Ancient Macedonia. De Gruyter. pp. 64, 77. ISBN 978-3-11-071876-8.
  19. 1 2 3 Masson, Olivier (2003). "[Ancient] Macedonian language". In Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Antony (eds.). The Oxford Classical Dictionary (revised 3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 905–906. ISBN 978-0-19-860641-3.
  20. ↑ Michael Meier-Brügger, Indo-European linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p.28,on Google books
  21. ↑ Roisman, Worthington, 2010, "A Companion to Ancient Macedonia", Chapter 5: Johannes Engels, "Macedonians and Greeks", p. 95
  22. ↑ Dosuna, J. Méndez (2012). "Ancient Macedonian as a Greek dialect: A critical survey on recent work (Greek, English, French, German text)". In Giannakis, Georgios K. (ed.). Ancient Macedonia: Language, History, Culture. Centre for Greek Language. p. 145. ISBN 978-960-7779-52-6.
  23. ↑ Matzinger, Joachim (2016). Die Altbalkanischen Sprachen (PDF) (Speech) (in German). Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-10-15. Retrieved 2022-06-06.
  24. ↑ Brixhe, Claude (2018). "Macedonian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. De Gruyter. pp. 1862–1867. ISBN 978-3-11-054243-1.
  25. ↑ Hammond, N.G.L (1997). Collected Studies: Further studies on various topics. A.M. Hakkert. p. 79.
  26. ↑ Worthington, Ian (2012). Alexander the Great: A Reader. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-136-64003-2.
  27. 1 2 Vladimir Georgiev, "The Genesis of the Balkan Peoples", The Slavonic and East European Review 44:103:285–297 (July 1966)
  28. 1 2 Eric P. Hamp & Douglas Q. Adams (2013), "The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages", Sino-Platonic Papers, vol 239.
  29. ↑ "Ancient Macedonian". MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  30. ↑ Giannakis, Georgios (2017). "From Central Greece to the Black Sea: Introductory Remarks". In Giannakis, Georgios; Crespo, Emilio; Filos, Panagiotis (eds.). Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects. Emilio Crespo, Panagiotis Filos. De Gruyter. p. 18. doi:10.1515/9783110532135. ISBN 978-3-11-053213-5. Recent scholarship has established the position of (ancient) Macedonian within the dialect map of North-West Greek (see, among others, Méndez Dosuna 2012, 2014, 2015; Crespo 2012, 2015). Here belongs the study by M. Hatzopoulos, who offers a critical review of recent research on the Macedonian dialect, arguing that all available evidence points to the conclusion that this is a Greek dialect of the North-West group.
  31. ↑ van Beek 2022, pp. 190–191.
  32. ↑ Crespo, Emilio (2023). "Dialects in Contact in the Ancient Kingdom of Macedon". In Cassio, Albio Cesare; Kaczko, Sara (eds.). Alloglōssoi: Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-077968-4.
  33. ↑ van Beek 2022, p. 190.
  34. ↑ van Beek 2022, pp. 185–188, 190.
  35. 1 2 Salminen, Tapani (2007). "Europe and North Asia". In Moseley, Christopher (ed.). Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 211–284.
  36. ↑ Ethnologue: Family tree for Greek.
  37. ↑ 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)
  38. 1 2 Joseph, Brian; Tserdanelis, Georgios (2003). "Modern Greek". In Roelcke, Thorsten (ed.). Variationstypologie: Ein sprachtypologisches Handbuch der europäischen Sprachen. Berlin: de Gruyter. p. 836.
  39. ↑ G. Horrocks (1997), Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. London: Longman.
  40. ↑ P. Trudgill (2002), Ausbau Sociolinguistics and Identity in Greece, in: P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

References

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