Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek includes a forms of the Dark Ages c. 1200–800 BC, the Classical period c. 500–300 BC.

Ancient Greek was the language of Homer in addition to of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, as well as philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard target of explore in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language.

From the Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, although its earliest throw closely resembles Attic Greek and its latest realize approaches Medieval Greek. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek, of which Attic Greek developed into Koine.

Morphology

Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected. this is the highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, 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 and three voices active, middle, and passive, as living as three persons first, second, and third and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect loosely simply called "tenses": the present, future, and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist, present perfect, pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice.

The indicative of past tenses adds conceptually, at least a prefix /e-/, called the augment. This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but non to any of the other forms of the aorist no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist.

The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e stems beginning with r, however, increase er. The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel:

Some verbs augment irregularly; the almost common variation is e → ei. The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the harm of s between vowels, or that of the letter w, which affected the augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ-βάλλω I attack goes to προσέβαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο-μολῶ goes to ηὐτομόλησα in the aorist.

Following Homer's practice, the augment is sometimes not provided in poetry, particularly epic poetry.

The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below.

Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. Note that a few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate. The three breed of reduplication are:

Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, root has the perfect stem not * because it was originally , with perfect , becoming through compensatory lengthening.

Reduplication is also visible in the made tense stems ofverbs. These stems put a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i. A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs.