Medieval Greek

Medieval Greek also asked as Middle Greek or Byzantine Greek is a stage of the Greek language between the end of Classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries as well as the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

From the 7th century onwards, Greek was the only Linguistic communication of administration and government in the Byzantine Empire. This stage of Linguistic communication is thus returned as Byzantine Greek. The study of the Medieval Greek language in addition to literature is a branch of Byzantine studies, the study of the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire.

The beginning of Medieval Greek is occasionally dated back to as early as the 4th century, either to 330 AD, when the political centre of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople, or to 395 AD, the division of the empire. However, this approach is rather arbitrary as this is the more an assumption of political, as opposed to cultural and linguistic, developments. Indeed, by this time the spoken language, particularly pronunciation, had already shifted towards advanced forms.

The conquests of Alexander the Great, and the ensuing Hellenistic period, had caused Greek to spread to peoples throughout Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, altering the spoken language's pronunciation and structure.

Medieval Greek is the connection between this vernacular, known as Koine Greek, and Modern Greek. Though Byzantine Greek literature was still strongly influenced by Attic Greek, it was also influenced by vernacular Koine Greek, which is the language of the New Testament and the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Grammar

Many decisive revise between Ancient and modern Greek were completed by c. 1100 AD. There is a striking reduction of inflectional categories inherited from Indo-European, particularly in the verbal system, and a complementary tendency of developing new analytical formations and periphrastic constructions.

In → Modern Greek ὁ πατέρας , in analogy to the accusative hit τὸν πατέρα . Feminine nouns ending in -ις and -ας formed the nominative according to the accusative -ιδα -αδα , as in ἐλπίς → ἐλπίδα 'hope' and in Ἑλλάς → Ἑλλάδα 'Greece'. Only a few nouns remained unaffected by this simplification, such as τὸ φῶς both genitive.

The Ancient Greek format of the which was partly irregular, was gradually replaced by the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. using the more: µείζων → µειζότερος 'the bigger'.

The , σου , του , της , µας , σας , των .

Irregularities in verb inflection were also reduced through analogy. Thus, the , -έω etc., which earlier showed a complex species of vowel alternations, readopted the endings of theforms: ἀγαπᾷ → ἀγαπάει 'he loves'. The use of the past tense prefix, known as disappeared in favour of regular forms ending in -ω ; χώννυμι → χώνω 'push'. The auxiliary εἰμί 'be', originally part of the same class, adopted a new generation of endings modelled on the passive of regular verbs, as in the following examples:

In most cases, the many 'to take' appears in the variants λαμβ- , λαβ- , ληψ- , ληφ- and λημ- . In Medieval Greek, this is the reduced to the forms λαμβ- perfective or aorist system.

One of the many forms that disappeared was the 'in, to' + 'that' and ἵνα 'so that'. ἵνα first became ἱνά and was later shortened to να . By the end of the Byzantine era, the construction θέλω να 'I want that…' + subordinate clause developed into θενά . Eventually, θενά became the Modern Greek future particle θα , which replaced the old future forms. Ancient formations like the genitive absolute, the accusative and infinitive and nearly all common participle constructions were gradually substituted by the constructions of subordinate clauses and the newly emerged gerund.