Hellenic languages

Branch of Indo-European language family From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hellenic is the branch of the Indo-European language family whose principal member is Greek.^[2] In most classifications, Hellenic consists of Greek alone,^[3]^[4] but some linguists use Hellenic to refer to a group consisting of Greek proper and other varieties thought to be related but different enough to be separate languages, either among ancient neighboring languages^[5] or among modern varieties of Greek.^[6]

Geographic
distributionGreece, Cyprus, Italy, Anatolia and the Black Sea region

Linguistic classificationIndo-European

Graeco-Phrygian?^[1]
- Hellenic

Proto-languageProto-Greek

Subdivisions

Greek
Ancient Macedonian? †

Quick facts Geographic distribution, Linguistic classification ...

Hellenic
Greek
Geographic distribution	Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Anatolia and the Black Sea region
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Graeco-Phrygian?^[1] Hellenic
Proto-language	Proto-Greek
Subdivisions	Greek Ancient Macedonian? †
Language codes
ISO 639-5	`grk`
Linguasphere	`56= (phylozone)`
Glottolog	`gree1276`

Greek and ancient Macedonian

While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek (and later in Koine Greek),^[7]^[8] fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet.^[9]^[10]^[11] This local variety is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek,^{[note 1]} and occasionally as an Aeolic Greek dialect^{[note 2]} or a distinct sister language of Greek;^{[note 3]} due to the latter classification, a family under the name Hellenic^[23] (also called Greek-Macedonian^[21] or Helleno-Macedonian^[22]) has been suggested to group together Greek proper and the ancient Macedonian language.^[5]^[24] Nonetheless, there has been some recent scholarly agreement, often expressed as cautious or tentative, that ancient Macedonian is a dialect of the Northwest Greek group.^[25]^[26]^[27]

Modern Hellenic languages

In addition, some linguists use Hellenic to refer to modern Greek in a narrow sense together with certain other, divergent modern varieties deemed separate languages on the basis of a lack of mutual intelligibility.^[28] Separate language status is most often posited for Tsakonian,^[28] which is thought to be uniquely a descendant of Doric rather than Attic Greek, followed by Pontic and Cappadocian Greek of Anatolia.^[29] The Griko or Italiot varieties of southern Italy are also not readily intelligible to speakers of standard Greek.^[30] Separate status is sometimes also argued for Cypriot, though this is not as easily justified.^[31] In contrast, Yevanic (Jewish Greek) is mutually intelligible with standard Greek but is sometimes considered a separate language for ethnic and cultural reasons.^[31] Greek linguistics traditionally treats all of these as dialects of a single language.^[3]^[32]^[33]

Classification

Hellenic constitutes a branch of the Indo-European language family. Phrygian's classification as a centum language, and the high frequency of phonetic, morphological, and lexical isoglosses shared with Greek, have led to a current consensus which regards Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian.^[34]^[35]^[36] Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian^[37] (see also Graeco-Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan).^[38]^[39]

Language tree

The following tree is based on the work of Lucien van Beek:^[40]

(?) Graeco-Phrygian
- Hellenic
  - South Greek
    - Achaean
      - Mycenaean
      - Arcadocypriot
    - Attic–Ionic
      - Attic
      - Western Ionic
      - Central Ionic
      - Eastern Ionic
  - North Greek
    - Aeolic^[41]
      - Boeotian (it also has West Greek features; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and West Greek)
      - Lesbian (it also has at least one archaic South Greek innovation; precursor was possibly a bridge dialect between Aeolic and South Greek)
      - Thessalian
    - West Greek
      - Doric
      - Northwest Greek
    - (?) Ancient Macedonian (either an ancient Greek dialect – possibly Northwest Greek^[26] – or a separate Hellenic language)
- Phrygian

Notes

[1]
Pioneered by Friedrich Wilhelm Sturz (1808),^[12] and subsequently supported by Olivier Masson (1996),^[13] Michael Meier-Brügger (2003),^[14] Johannes Engels (2010),^[15] J. Méndez Dosuna (2012),^[16] Joachim Matzinger (2016),^[17] Emilio Crespo (2017),^[10] Claude Brixhe (2018)^[18] and M. B. Hatzopoulos (2020).^[12]
[2]
Suggested by August Fick (1874),^[13] Otto Hoffmann (1906),^[13] N. G. L. Hammond (1997)^[19] and Ian Worthington (2012).^[20]
[3]
Suggested by Georgiev (1966),^[21] Joseph (2001)^[5] and Hamp (2013).^[22]

Footnotes

[1]
Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Graeco-Phrygian". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
[2]
In other contexts, Hellenic and Greek are generally synonyms.
[3]
Browning (1983), Medieval and Modern Greek, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[4]
Joseph, Brian D. and Irene Philippaki-Warburton (1987): Modern Greek. London: Routledge, p. 1.
[5]
Joseph, Brian D. (2001). "Ancient Greek". In Garry, Jane; Rubino, Carl; Bodomo, Adams B.; Faber, Alice; French, Robert (eds.). Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present. H. W. Wilson Company. p. 256. ISBN 9780824209704. Archived from the original on 2016-10-01. Retrieved 2022-06-06.
[6]
David Dalby. The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities (1999/2000, Linguasphere Press). pp. 449–450.
[7]
Joseph Roisman; Ian Worthington (7 July 2011). A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. John Wiley & Sons. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-4443-5163-7. Many surviving public and private inscriptions indicate that in the Macedonian kingdom there was no dominant written language but standard Attic and later on koine Greek.
[8]
Lewis, D. M.; Boardman, John (2000). The Cambridge ancient history, 3rd edition, Volume VI. Cambridge University Press. p. 730. ISBN 978-0-521-23348-4.
[9]
Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.289
[10]
Crespo, Emilio (2017). "The Softening of Obstruent Consonants in the Macedonian Dialect". In Giannakis, Georgios K.; Crespo, Emilio; Filos, Panagiotis (eds.). Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects: From Central Greece to the Black Sea. Walter de Gruyter. p. 329. ISBN 978-3-11-053081-0.
[11]
Hornblower, Simon (2002). "Macedon, Thessaly and Boiotia". The Greek World, 479–323 BC (Third ed.). Routledge. p. 90. ISBN 0-415-16326-9.
[12]
Hatzopoulos, Miltiades B. (2020). "The speech of the ancient Macedonians". Ancient Macedonia. De Gruyter. pp. 64, 77. ISBN 978-3-11-071876-8.
[13]
Masson, Olivier (2003). "[Ancient] Macedonian language". In Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Antony (eds.). The Oxford Classical Dictionary (revised 3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 905–906. ISBN 978-0-19-860641-3.
[14]
Michael Meier-Brügger, Indo-European linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p.28,on Google books
[15]
Roisman, Worthington, 2010, "A Companion to Ancient Macedonia", Chapter 5: Johannes Engels, "Macedonians and Greeks", p. 95
[16]
Dosuna, J. Méndez (2012). "Ancient Macedonian as a Greek dialect: A critical survey on recent work (Greek, English, French, German text)". In Giannakis, Georgios K. (ed.). Ancient Macedonia: Language, History, Culture. Centre for Greek Language. p. 145. ISBN 978-960-7779-52-6.
[17]
Matzinger, Joachim (2016). Die Altbalkanischen Sprachen (PDF) (Speech) (in German). Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-10-15. Retrieved 2022-06-06.
[18]
Brixhe, Claude (2018). "Macedonian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. De Gruyter. pp. 1862–1867. ISBN 978-3-11-054243-1.
[19]
Hammond, N.G.L (1997). Collected Studies: Further studies on various topics. A.M. Hakkert. p. 79.
[20]
Worthington, Ian (2012). Alexander the Great: A Reader. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-136-64003-2.
[21]
Vladimir Georgiev, "The Genesis of the Balkan Peoples", The Slavonic and East European Review 44:103:285–297 (July 1966)
[22]
Eric P. Hamp & Douglas Q. Adams (2013), "The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages", Sino-Platonic Papers, vol 239.
[23]
W. B. Lockwood, "A Panorama of Indo-European Languages", (1972), Hutchinson University Library London, Hellenic, Macedonian, p. 6: "It is generally held that the evidence suggests rather an aberrant form of Greek than an independent language."
[24]
"Ancient Macedonian". MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
[25]
Giannakis, Georgios (2017). "From Central Greece to the Black Sea: Introductory Remarks". In Giannakis, Georgios; Crespo, Emilio; Filos, Panagiotis (eds.). Studies in Ancient Greek Dialects. Emilio Crespo, Panagiotis Filos. De Gruyter. p. 18. doi:10.1515/9783110532135. ISBN 978-3-11-053213-5. Recent scholarship has established the position of (ancient) Macedonian within the dialect map of North-West Greek (see, among others, Méndez Dosuna 2012, 2014, 2015; Crespo 2012, 2015). Here belongs the study by M. Hatzopoulos, who offers a critical review of recent research on the Macedonian dialect, arguing that all available evidence points to the conclusion that this is a Greek dialect of the North-West group.
[26]
van Beek 2022, pp. 190–191.
[27]
Crespo, Emilio (2023). "Dialects in Contact in the Ancient Kingdom of Macedon". In Cassio, Albio Cesare; Kaczko, Sara (eds.). Alloglōssoi: Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-077968-4.
[28]
Salminen, Tapani (2007). "Europe and North Asia". In Moseley, Christopher (ed.). Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 211–284.
[29]
Ethnologue: Family tree for Greek.
[30]
N. Nicholas (1999), The Story of Pu: The Grammaticalisation in Space and Time of a Modern Greek Complementiser. PhD Dissertation, University of Melbourne. p. 482f. (PDF)
[31]
Joseph, Brian; Tserdanelis, Georgios (2003). "Modern Greek". In Roelcke, Thorsten (ed.). Variationstypologie: Ein sprachtypologisches Handbuch der europäischen Sprachen. Berlin: de Gruyter. p. 836.
[32]
G. Horrocks (1997), Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. London: Longman.
[33]
P. Trudgill (2002), Ausbau Sociolinguistics and Identity in Greece, in: P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[34]
Brixhe, Claude (2008). "Phrygian". In Woodard, Roger D (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. Cambridge University Press. pp. 69–80. ISBN 978-0-521-68496-5. "Unquestionably, however, Phrygian is most closely linked with Greek." (p. 72).
[35]
Woodhouse 2009, p. 171: "A turning point in this debate was Kortlandt's (1988) demonstration on the basis of shared sound changes that Thraco-Armenian had separated from Phrygian and other originally Balkan languages at an early stage. The consensus has now returned to regarding Greek as the closest relative."
[36]
Obrador-Cursach 2018, p. 101: "Brixhe (1968), Neumann (1988) and, through an accurate analysis, Matzinger (2005) showed the inconsistency of the Phrygo-Armenian assumption and argued that Phrygian was a language closely related to Greek."
[37]
James Clackson. Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 11–12.
[38]
Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2004, p. 181.
[39]
Henry M. Hoenigswald, "Greek," The Indo-European Languages, ed. Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paolo Ramat (Routledge, 1998 pp. 228–260), p. 228.
BBC: Languages across Europe: Greek
[40]
van Beek 2022, p. 190.
[41]
van Beek 2022, pp. 185–188, 190.