Greek language
Greek is one of the continuously written languages since antiquity. It dates as a written language from 800 BC as the language of Homer and continues continuously to the present day, as four to five different language forms through time. It is an Indo-European language.
Homeric Greek, or simply Homeric is the earliest literary language, a form of Attic-Ionic. There is late Archaic Greek, which follows Homeric, and culminates in Classical Greek, with Aeschylus and Sophocles, and then later Classical Greek, with Plato and Aristotle, into the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes.
The Greek spread by Alexander the Great was literary. By the 1st century AD it was koine, 'common' Greek, the sort of Greek that can be compared to well-spoken illegal immigrants from Central American in the United States. Accented, using slang, etc. This was the Greek in use in Palestine at the time of Jesus and was the language of the New Testament. Greek was the common trade language of the Roman Empire.
Some centuries before, the Jews of Alexandria rendered a version of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint (LXX), ('the seventy' or 'seventy-two' based on the number of translators). This version of the Old Testament differs from that used by most Protestants who use the Masoretic Hebrew text, but continues to be used by the Catholics (in Latin) and by the Greek Orthodox (untranslated).
The Greek language is divided up into three moods and three voices; the three moods being the indicative, subjunctive and optative, and the three voices being the active, passive and middle. Greek syntax and linguistic structure is similar to Latin, with several words sharing intrinsically profound links with one another (for example, the word "pater"). Ancient Greek is notorious for having a large proportion of irregular verbs; the scholar LA Wilding has calculated that most verbs show some degree of inconsistency.
The early Greek language no longer exists in a spoken form today, modern Greek being as different from Classical Greek as Old English is from current English.
Modern Greek is the modern variety of the Greek language, but separate from ancient Greek. It is the primary language of Greece and Cyprus.
