Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 09.djvu/260

* GBEEK KALENDS. 226 GREEK LANGUAGE. ment of a promise that was intended never to be fulfilled. The expression is referred by Suetonius to the Emperor Augustus, who is said to have first employed it. GREEK LANGUAGE. The Greek belongs to the lnduEurcpi>c';in family of languages, and is closely relatfd to the Italic dialects — Latin. Oscan, Umbrian, etc. Greek, however, has pre- scre(l a far greater number of forms from the so-called parent language than any of the Italic dialects. This variety of forms, and a great power to form new words, combined to render Greek the most flexible and beautiful language of the whole Indo-European family. Alpii.het axd Prokinciatiox. The age of writing in Greece is unknown, although recent dis- coveries have made it ap])ear probable that some system of writing existed long before B.C. 1000. The earliest Greek inscriptions cannot be dated earlier than the seventh century B.C. The alpha- bet in which these inscriptions are written, and which is the parent of all modern European al- phabets, was derived from that of the Phteni- cians. The Phrenician alphabet consisted of 22 signs, which the Greeks adapted to their own phonetic system, adding to them four new signs, T, *, X, ^, although the value of the last two was not the same in all alphabets, the Eastern Greeks using the former with the value of (hard) ch. the latter with the value ps, while the Western Greeks gave to X the value of English x, and to 'I' the value of ch. One of the Piicenician signs for s was very early drop])ed. and in the Eastern group of alphabets f and 9 fell into disuse, in consequence of the gradual loss in the spoken language of the sounds (if and hard 7o respectively) which these symbols represented. Further than this, the lonians. as early as B.C. 550, began to u.se the symbol H to represent the sound of long e, and invented a new letter fi to represent the sound of long o. The Attic alphabet at first occupied a middle ground between the Eastern and West- ern groups. It did not use f and rarely 9. It had T, <!', and X with the values given them in the Eastern alphabets, but not S or ^, for which it used X2 and #2. It retained H for h, and used E for both long and short e, as well as for the spurious diphthong EI (vide infra), and O for long and short o, and the spurious diphthong OT. This old Attic alphabet was used in official documents at Athens until the archonship of Euclides (B.C. 40.3), when the Ionic alphabet, which had long been in use in private life, was adopted for the public records, and rapidly drove out the old local alphabets. The 24 signs of the Greek alphabet, as finally developed, with the corresponding English letters, are as follows: Greek English Greek Eng:li.<0 ph Kk k Xx ch AX 1 ■i'lp ps Mm m Uio o The 'rough breathing* ( ') is placed over an initial vowel and over p to signify that the word begins with an aspirate (7i) ; so, a/jfia, pronounced hunna. The 'smooth breathing' (') means that the initial vowel is without the h sound. Jlost of the consonants were pronounced in the fifth century B.C. like the correspond- ing English letters, except that y was al- ^vays hard (as in c/o) and before k, y, % ''"'^ I had the sound of n (as in sing) ; f was pro- nounced like (fe in ad:e ; d was always pro- nounced like th in thin; and x '^^"■** hard, as in German uch. The vowels were pronounced: a like (I in father, e like e in met, t) like e in prey, I like i in waehine, o like o in obey, v like French «, German •», u like o, in totw. The sounds of the diphthongs at, ci, oi, av, and vi are those of the diphthongs in aisle, eight, oil, our, ive, re- spectively; ov early became a simple sound as in group ; ev and iju were pronounced eh-oo and eh-oo. In f, t;. and cfi the i subscript was at first distinctly pronounced, but later its sound was lost, and these diphthongs came to have the sound of simple o, -q, and u. Accent. The Greek accent, imlike that of the English, was an accent of pitch, not of stress. Three sorts are distinguished — the acute (marked '), or high tone, extending to the end of the vowel or diplithong u])on which it falls : the circumflex (marked — I, or high tone followed by a lowering of pitch, used only on long vowels and diphthongs; and the grave (marked^), indicating a lowering of pitch. The grave accent is used only as a substitute for the acute on the last syllable of a woid wlien it precedes another word. The circumflex may stand upon either of the last two syllables, but on the penult only when the last syllable is short. The acute stands on any of the last three syllables, but on the antepenult only when the last syllable is short. With these limitations, the accent of most words is recessive, but never stands further from the end than the antepenult. A numlier of short words, called pro- clitics and enclitics, have no accent, but lean upon the words which they immediately precede or follow. Dialects. Long before the dawn of history Greek comprised a number of dialects, which maintained their individual peculiarities until comparatively late times, although these differ- ences were never so great as to prevent easy com- munication between the inhabitants of diflferent districts. The study of the Greek dialects has been greatly advanced in recent years by the dis- covery and publication of inscriptions. In gen- eral, the dialects fall into the two groups of Ionic and non-Ionic, distinguished by a tendency on the part of the Ionic dialects to change orig- inal n to e. Further than this we can distin- guish, inside the non-Ionic group, two families of dialects, the .-Eolic and the Doric, although recent investigation has shown that this twofold division cannot be carried out as strictly as was formerh' supposed. The principal characteristics of the Ionic, Doric, and ,^olic dialects are as fol- lows : Ionic. — The Ionic dialect Is characterized by (1) a wholesale change of original a to e; (2) the early loss of /r ; (31 the use of Sk = ica. w. Two forms must be distinguished: ( 1 ) The Ionic of the .siatie coast and many of the -I'^gean islands, frequently named simply Ionic. This displays a marked aversion to con-