LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Greek: Modern Greek
built 479 days ago
Greek has a continuous history of over 3,500 years. This is longer than any other modern Indo-European language. Today, over 15 million people speak Greek. These speakers mostly live in Greece and Cyprus. There are ... people in other countries around the world who speak the language.
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The development from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek has affected phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodisations, relatively arbitrary, especially since at all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.
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Modern Greek stems directly from the Attic koinē and dates from the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The official language of Greece and one of the official languages of Cyprus, Modern Greek is spoken today by about 12 million people, chiefly in Greece and the Greek islands (10 million speakers), Turkey (600,000), Cyprus (550,000), and the United States (390,000). The Greek language has not changed much in its long history. The differences are largely in pronunciation and vocabulary, but they ... include divergences in grammar. Modern Greek, for example, has absorbed a number of loan words from Turkish and Italian, although its vocabulary is essentially that of Ancient Greek.
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Between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Mycenaeans, an early tribe of Greeks, has adapted the Minoan syllabary as Linear B to write an early form of Greek. However, the syllabary was not well suited to write Greek, and leaves many modern scholars scratching their heads trying to figure out the exact pronunciation of Mycenaean words. The alphabet, on the other hand, allowed more precise record of the sounds in the language.
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Both the nouns and verbs of Ancient Greek were highly inflected. Verbs had active, middle, and passive voices; indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative moods; singular, dual, and plural numbers; and many tenses. Nouns had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative). Unlike Latin, Greek had a word for the definite article. Three accent marks are used in Greek, the acute (´), the grave (ˋ), and the circumflex (ˆ). In Ancient Greek they denoted a pitch accent related to the length of vowels, but in Modern Greek they serve as a stress accent.
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Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected. For example nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs have four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), three voices (active, middle and passive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and various other forms. Modern Greek is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive.
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Modern Greek