Ancient and Modern Greek

Abstract

A question which occurs frequently to classical students and others concerns the relation between ancient and modern Greek. It is the purpose of the present article to indicate in as brief a fashion as possible the lines on which the question might be approached.Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and the modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably 99 per cent, of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French and two in Afrikaans. Thus the declension of φίλος is precisely the same now (except for the absence of the dual, which was obsolescent in Xenophon's day, and of the dative) as it was in the fifth century B.c. The conjugation of the present of ἒχω is identical with that of the classical verb, although the third plural ending -ουσι occurs mostly dialectically, e.g. in Cypriot, and has been largely replaced by -ουν.