Ancient
Ancient Greek refers to the second stage in the history of the Greek language, which normally applies on two ancient periods of Greek history: Archaic (9th - 6th centuries BC) and Classical (5th - 4th centuries BC) Greece. more...
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The Ancient era of Greek history normally includes also the Hellenistic (post-Classic) age, however that period formally composes its own stage in the Greek Language known as Hellenistic Greek.
It is the language of the Homeric poems, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the great works of literature and philosophy of the Athenian Golden Age, which came to be the foundations of our modern mathematics and sciences.
For information on the Hellenic language family prior to 1100 BC, see articles Mycenaean Greek and Proto-Greek.
Dialects of Ancient Greek
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The origins, early forms, and early development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood, due to the lack of contemporaneous evidence. There are several theories about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Indo-European language (not later than 2000 BC), and about 1200 BC. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form.
The major dialect groups of the Ancient Greek period can be assumed to have developed not later than 1100 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasion(s), and they first appear precisely documented in alphabetic writing beginning in the 8th Century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians; moreover, the invasion is known to have displaced population to the the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians.
The ancient Greeks themselves considered there to be three major divisions of the Greek people, into Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cyprian, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation.
One standard formulation for the dialects is:
West Group
Northwest Greek;
Doric;
;
Aeolic Group
Aegean/Asiatic Aeolic;
Thessalian;
Boeotian;
;
Ionic-Attic Group
Attica;
Euboea and colonies in Italy;
Cyclades;
Asiatic Ionia;
;
Arcado-Cypriot
Arcadian;
Cypriot;
Pamphylian;
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