14 Facts About Medieval Greek

Medieval Greek is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The study of the Medieval Greek language and literature is a branch of Byzantine studies, the study of the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire.

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

Medieval Greek is the link between this vernacular, known as Koine Greek, and Modern Greek.

Concessions to spoken Medieval Greek can be found, for example, in John Malalas's Chronography from the 6th century, the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor and the works of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

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Persistence until the Middle Ages of a single Medieval Greek speaking state, the Byzantine Empire, meant that, unlike Vulgar Latin, Medieval Greek did not split into separate languages.

However, with the fracturing of the Byzantine state after the turn of the first millennium, newly isolated dialects such as Mariupol Medieval Greek, spoken in Crimea, Pontic Medieval Greek, spoken along the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, and Cappadocian, spoken in central Asia Minor, began to diverge.

Cypriot Medieval Greek was already in a literary form in the late Middle Ages, being used in the Assizes of Cyprus and the chronicles of Leontios Makhairas and Georgios Boustronios.

Medieval Greek had cluster voicing harmony favoring the voice of the final plosive or fricative; when the resulting clusters became voiceless, the aforementioned sandhi would further apply.

Middle Medieval Greek used the 24 letters of the Medieval Greek alphabet which, until the end of antiquity, were predominantly used as lapidary and majuscule letters and without a space between words and with diacritics.

Medieval Greek uncial used the interpunct in order to separate sentences for the first time, but there were still no spaces between words.

Some words in Germanic languages, mainly from the religious context, have been borrowed from Medieval Greek and have found their way into languages like German or English through the Gothic language.

Renaissance Italian and Medieval Greek humanists set up important collections in Rome, Florence and Venice.

Medieval Greek tradition was taken to Western and Middle Europe in the 16th century by scholars who had studied at Italian universities.