15 Facts About Greek language

1.

Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world.

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2.

Greek language has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier.

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3.

Greek language is spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek language diaspora which has notable communities in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and throughout the European Union, especially in Germany.

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4.

Phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of the Greek language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the Greek language from the ancient to the modern period.

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5.

The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek language has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it.

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6.

Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek language has varied little: Greek language shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas.

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7.

Inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression.

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8.

Many aspects of the syntax of Greek language have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact, articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow the noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial.

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9.

Ancient Greek language made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely and uses participles more restrictively.

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10.

Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO.

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11.

Greek language has been written in the Greek language alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC.

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12.

The lower-case Greek language letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit a faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill.

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13.

Since then, Greek language has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography, which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis.

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14.

Greek language has occasionally been written in the Latin script, especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek language Catholics.

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15.

Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications.

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