Talk:Greek language

I can read all of the Greek down to the Lord's Prayer, but about half the characters therein don't show up in IE or in Firefox. Is there some way to change it so that I could? It's a safe bet that the majority of the readers of this article won't already have a Greek font installed, so....

This is not just plain Greek; it is polytonic Greek, a now deprecated mode of writing that requires a special font with a superset of the glyphs contained in a normal (monotonic) Greek font. You have a point there; if you still want to read this text try to download and install a font such as Athena or Gentium (look at the external links section).

I'd appreciate your feedback on this; which is your OS version, your browser version, and if you managed to read the text after downloading the font (if you eventually do it). Etz Haim 09:20, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Also, tell me if you can read it from here:

Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς·
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφελήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ρῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.
Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας·
ἀμήν.

I'm running WinMe, Firefox 0.9.3, and IE 6.0. I downloaded Athena; Firefox can now read the text on the main (Greek language) page and here, but IE can only read the text on the main page. Vivacissamamente 22:34, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)vivacissamamente

Thanks. Your help will eventually help us standarize the way polytonic Greek texts are integrated into Wikipedia. Etz Haim 14:18, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I also find I can't read all of the characters in the text above, but I can read the text in the main page, using IE. But the encoding seems to be the same in both cases. So why can I read the one but not the other - and why can I read polytonic Greek on some pages but not others?

Let's do a good job with this one--it is #1 (http://altavista.com/sites/search/web?q=greek+language&kl=XX&stq=80) on Alta Vista for "Greek language"!

Comment added July 27, 2001

Shouldn't Dorian be changed to Doric? Also, I have read that the Koine was derived mostly from the Attic dialect, a form of Ionian, spoken in Athens.

material moved from the main Greek language page:

What I was thinking is that, for instance, on Oligarchy there could be a little note saying (Gr oligos+archês) or whatever the derivation is.

Greek is written in its own special alphabet. It's a bit cumbersome to type in, though, so we may want to keep transliterating. That's what Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/) does, anyway. Epsilon = e, eta = ê, omicron = o, omega = ô; everything else obvious. That sort of thing might be useful to include anyway, for people who don't read the letters.

Well thanks to technology :-) it is now pretty easy to write in Greek. All you have to do is to add a Greek keyboard in your PC´s local settings (in Windows systems) and then switch to this keyboard. Then any letter you press produces greek letters like that

ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩ αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρστυφχψω

so please try not to use this ugly transliterations anymore...

If you want to use the tonos (stress) switch to greek keyboard and press the key next to the Letter L (in US keyboards that would be the ";" key) before the letter you want to get "stressed".

PS In Linux switching to a greek keyboard is even easier...

What do you do about the cicumflex over the "ou" and "ô" in the genitive? Perhaps, the answer is in Perseus. I don't have the time to check right now.

Hmm...doesn't look like they do anything. They have some other methods of transliteration listed, I just looked at the first one, which seemed the simplest. Well, the ancient Greeks didn't use accents anyway...since I don't know the tongue, I have no clue how important they are (you can get by without macrons in Latin most of the time). If they're crucial, then we could either mark them befind the letters (ô^) or give up until we have a real Greek alphabet.

Greek stress indicated a rise in pitch, originally, and later a normal stress (loudness, clarity, etc.). I guess I am so used to seeing it that Greek looks strange without it, but if Perseus can do it, I guess we can.

The major ASCII convention for transliterating Greek with diacritics is [Beta Code|http://www.tlg.uci.edu/BetaCode.html], which is also available at Perseus. I have come up with an alternative which is a variant of Perseus' transliteration (but changes the circumflex to a colon): http://www.tlg.uci.edu/help/AccTranslitTest.html. Some samples in the three schemes:

Mênin aeide thea Pêlêïadeô Achilêos
Mh=nin a)/eide qea Phlhi+a/dew *)Axilh=ws
Mê=nin áeide theà Pe=le=ï´deo= Achilê=os

Beta code is not a transliteration in the ordinary sense. It is an encoding so that ancient Greek texts could be entered on keypunch (!!!) machines (for the TLG) by people who do not read Greek at all (this is actually a good thing in data entry, because it prevents mis-corrections). Beta code even has a special convention for capital letters.... There is really no excuse as far as I can tell for using Beta code in the Wikipedia (or any other person-to-person communication). --Macrakis 23:40, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Modern Greek is transliterated in a variety of ad hoc schemes, motivated either by visual or by phonetic equivalence. According to some prevalent schemes, you would get:

Mhnin aeide qea Phlhiadew Axilhws
Mnvin aeide cea Pnlniadew Axilnws
Minin aeide thea Piliiadeo Ahilios

For pronunciation of the letters see Greek alphabet. Ancient and Modern Greek differ somewhat, especially in that aspirates have become spirants. For example:

Change of Greek pronunciation (Thucydides, First Book, Fifth Chapter)

hOi gar hElE:nEs tO palai kai tO:n barbarO:n hOi tE En tEi E:pErOi parat_halattiOi kai hOsOi nE:su:s Eik_hOn

2. Ct. AD

hu Gar hElE:nEs tO palE kE tO:n varvarOn hy tE En tE: E:pi:rO: paraTalasiy kE hosy nE:su:s ik_hOn

Modern Greek (Phonemic)

i Gar 'Elines to 'pale ke ton var'varon i te en ti i'piro paraTalasii ke 'osi 'nisus 'ixon

Can someone give a definite way to transliterate Greek? My native language is Greek but I still don't know how to write it with latin characters. Not to mention that I dread to think how people will pronounce it!

Should we post more information about the construction of Classical Greek here, or not? I've been toying with the idea of a basic resource of Classical Greek forms, but it would take a lot of time and would require the Greek_language article to become a meta-entry. Would it be worth our while to put the effort in, or would that be more information than is wanted? -asilvahalo

Go ahead and put more Classical Greek stuff in it! -- Stephen C. Carlson

I agree that some comments on transliteration conventions would help. Apparently convnetional ways of transliterating Modern Greek differ from conventional ways of transliterating Classical Greek; for example, the letter "H" is not used in transliterations from Modern Greek except in "ph", "th", "ch", "rh", and the like, and "B" sometimes changes to "V" in transliterating from Modern Greek, but not from Classical Greek. "Hagia Sophia" is Istanbul's most famous building, but "Ayion Oros" appeared in an article on Mount Athos (and I changed it to "Hagion Oros" --- was I right to do so?). Sometimes "f" is the transliteration of "υ" when used in Modern Greek, but never when used in Classical Greek ("Euclid" is "Euclid" and not "Efkildes"). "μπ" at the beginning of a word becomes "b" when transliterated from Modern Greek; I don't think anything like that happens with Classical Greek. The Wikipedia article on Greece refers to "Elliniki Dhimokratia"; if those words had appeared in Classical Greek, I think it would have said "Helleniki Demokratia". -- Mike Hardy

...and maybe some account of the vowel-shift that seems to have occurred in Greek could be added to this page. -- Mike Hardy

Shouldn't some mention be made of Homeric Greek, given the influence that Homer had on later Greek (and other) authors? If I remember correctly, it was an early Ionic dialect and is the earliest version of Greek for which there are any surviving extended writings. I'd need to check that up before adding to the article though. Magnus 15:14 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

I think if anyone's going to do any serious detail on grammar, pronunciation, or vocabulary, we need two more articles, Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. It would be far too confusing for a lay reader to have them combined, with the difficulties of sound change and transcription. Now Ancient Greek will be predominantly about Classical Greek, but can mention New Testament, Homeric, and even Mycenaean, because they're normally studied with it. Luckily the main phonetic transition from Ancient to Modern took place after the bulk of the literary period was over. The present article on 'Greek' can be used as it is now, as a more general survey of all periods. Gritchka 12:23 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

So I agreed with myself and did that. Thought I'd start the basics of an article on Ancient Greek then move on to Modern Greek. But when I came back to add more, a day or two later, no trace of it. No record in any logs I could see, no trace of it in my own user history. After a while I accepted it must have been very late at night, I'd had a skinful, and/or my connexion had timed out at the crucial moment. Now I notice a paragraph of my Ancient Greek has been moved in here. Well, this is all very sweet if all we're writing is brief, one-page summaries with no interest in making them valuable -- if Wikipedia is just a pastime like crosswords or sonnets -- but it rather defeats the purpose of constructing a serious encyclopaedia. Let me reiterate what I said above. We can't begin to adequately discuss anything about Greek if we keep it all in the one article. There are two separate languages with separate phonology, phonetics, syntax, and literature. At the moment there is virtually no serious discussion of language or linguistics on Wikipedia: it's of no use to anyone who actually wanted to find something out. Gritchka 14:39 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would love to do this (something like we already have for Latin). My main concern is that the current entry makes it easy to confuse ancient and modern greek; it's not often clear which they're talking about or whether it's both. So we could leave most of the information in the current Greek Language entry, then have a link pointing to an article on Classical Greek, and maybe someone would do one for Modern Greek. I for one would be willing to work on a page specific to Classical Greek with all then pedantic grammatical info people might want.

                                                   Athens, 15/oct/2003

People! It is my humble opinion being Greek and having done a little homework on the subject that the first thing that should be clarified is that there is NO such thing as an hindoeuropaic language-tribe-people or anything! This is for the simple fact that there is absolutely no historical or "hard" evidence to support such a theory. The greek language began it's course in history in the Aegean basin from inhabitants. The presence and evolution of humans in the Mediterranean and specificly in the areas today under the Greek state has been historically proved. Civilisation as we know it today-villages, agriculture etc-has been traced back 10.000 years to the people known as Pelasgi who began at that point speaking the language that evolved to the Greek we know today. At that point in time most of Europe was only recovering from the last ice age leading to the conclusion that good weather condition among others played a significant role in the evolution of civilisation in the Mediterranean.

The whole indo-europaic theory began at the end of the 19th century when scientists-in Germany-discovered the similarities between many languages in Europe and elsewhere. The reason being national policies at unstable times of ethnicism and fashism no one was willing to admitt that the roots might actually be the Greek language. Working in that direction they formed the theyory on non existing grounds and searched for archaiologic evidence afterwards. Of course no such evidence suggesting the transfer of civilisation from the Asian plains to the Meditteranean basin has been found. On the contrary following Alexander the Greats conquering trip in the depths of Asia up to India Greek elements can still be traced with various Alexandroupolis (city of Alexander with polis-city)existing etc.

In any case there is much evidence supporting if not proving that the Greek language was born and evolved to its present state from people who always lived around the Aegean sea, and clearly much more that can be posted here. If anyone is further interested on the matter or has his opinion to oppose it would be my sincere pleasure to start some kind of conversation and further enrich this online encyclopedia. Gerasimos

Your views are not supported by the scholarly community and have no place in Wikipedia, which is grounded in legitimate science. (p.s. Even the ancient Greeks suspected their ancestors had come from outside the Aegean). Kricxjo 10:14, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Filtate Gerasime,

You wrote:

"...In any case there is much evidence supporting if not proving that the Greek language was born and evolved to its present state from people who always lived around the Aegean sea, and clearly much more that can be posted here. If anyone is further interested on the matter or has his opinion to oppose it would be my sincere pleasure to start some kind of conversation and further enrich this online encyclopedia. Gerasimos"

Please show us some of this evidence you speak of, as the weight of linguistic evidence and scholarly consensus are indeed against the theory you espouse. I think you are making two mistakes here. One is to think that according to the generally accepted model, no pre-Indo-European elements remained in what became the Greek language. There is a significant non-Indo-European substrate in Greek, including such common Greek words like thalassa, doulos, and basileus which are productive to this day (with basileus slightly modified). Still, it is hard to deny cognates like fero -- having the exact same meaning as Latin fero -- or its ancient Macedonian counterpart "bero"(inferred from names like Berenikes), clearly related to the Germanic forms including English "bear" (to carry). So many of these cognates have been found as to preclude coincidence. It is very hard to present Greek as not a member of the Indo-European family when so much of its basic vocabulary is Indo-European. What makes it "Greek" and not something else is it's unique pre-Indo-European ("Pelasgian") lexical substrate and the unique phonological and grammatical rules formulated by the speakers of Proto-Greek and continually modified by their descendants. You and your fellow Hellenes are part of a process in Greek that began thousands of years ago whereby the language slowly changes due to the concscious and unconcsious behaviors of its speakers, as do all human languages. Whenever you choose to say "to diabaterio" instead of "to pasaporti" or without thinking about it say "to mpatera" for "ton patera" you are having a small effect on the direction Greek will take in the future. There is no need to believe that your language sprang from the brow of Zeus or that it has something to do with the same old shards of pottery being found at the same archaeological site for millenia to realize that your language is something of which to be proud and that it is possibly *the* most influential in terms of the literature and philosophy produced by Greek-speakers in Classical times.

Your second error is in thinking that only archaeological evidence can elucidate folk migrations and language spread. In Peru they speak Spanish, which was effected in a very short period by a relatively small number of people. Yet long after the conquest, even Spanish administrative buildings were built in the native masonry style that much resembles the Greek "cyclopean." There is little archaeological evidence that Pizzaro exacerbated the Inca civil war that was already taking place, leading to the assasination of King Huascar and was thus able to conquer the country for Spain with an astonishingly small number of troops -- but we know it happened.

Somebody must have introduced all these Indo-European words into Greece, even if they were a minority. And in fact this happens all the time. A small number of Norman French profoundly influenced English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Yet, but for a relatively few Norman castles and churches, the building styles and farming techniques of the average English peasant changed very little during the period that their language did.

Anyway, we know that the archaeology of the Greek world did change, including the introduction of new burial techniques, horses and new building styles such as apsidal houses all emerge about at about the same time the intrusion of Indo-European speakers is postulated to have taken place.

Are you an archaeology student? Archaeologists seem to be fond of explaining everything in terms of local archaeological developments, including some who think that humans evolved in different regions of the world. It's all rather silly to me, but I suspect such views will not be going away anytime soon.

Tsakonian

How about including a brief mention of Tsakonian, the moribund modern descendant of the Doric dialect? I'll do a brief write-up that can be linked to the Modern Greek page when it is finished.

Maybe this article should include the total number of people who speak modern greek, and the total who speek it as a first language.

Modern Greek masculine gentive article is wrong

The modern Greek genitive s. masculine article is wrong. It isn't "tu" but rather "tou".

So, either you are using some odd transcription system (which would well stand to be explained), or this is just a mistake?

PS: I came here to see if you document the rules for when the accent descends to penult and when to ultimate, in the genitive s. of neuters ending in iota. But, I don't see any such detail (and anyway, the fact that the genitive masc. s. article is wrong, doesn't inspire any confidence in anything more detailed).

Michael Ventris and Linear B - 1952

Michael Ventris, the architect and amateur classicist, deciphered Linear B in 1952 not 1953. He published his findings in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, together with John Chadwick of Cambridge University, in 1953.

"Debatable" interintelligibility?

Some scholars have overly stressed similarity to millennia-old Greek languages. Its interintelligibility with ancient Greek is a matter of debate.

I think that if its interintelligibility with ancient Greek is a matter of debate, then no one could have overstressed it. Michael Hardy 16:36, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why specify a font?

Etz Haim wants that all Greek text be displayed with Arial Unicode MS. This in a wrong approach. Wikipedia is not concerned with fonts, only with content. Try to use a good browser (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) instead.

Or, if you prefer MSIE, switch to ~~Standard~~ Classic skin in Wikipedia preferences, and then set standard font to Arial Unicode MS in MSIE preferences.

Again, don't try to impose you favorite font on everybody! — Monedula 10:22, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Monedula, please be reasonable. It's a known fact that Arial Unicode MS is really the only font on PC's that most people have and that allows to see all kind of rare Unicode symbols. Both my Paneuropean Win98 at home and Windows 2000 just display empty little rectangles instead of accented Greek characters if you use a default font, and if you use Arial Unicode MS I can see them properly. And I know that there are many people like me out there, who have exactly the same combination (W98+IE6 or W2K+IE6) and have exactly the same problem with proper Unicode support. --rydel 13:01, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is really a practical matter, not an aesthetic one, such as that I'm trying to "impose" my "favorite" font. Displaying Polytonic Greek script on the web is a rather complicated technical matter: The Unicode standard theoretically addresses this, but most practical implementations (typefaces and renderers) are problematic. I agree with you that the HTML "font" tag is an ugly hack, but this will be eventually resolved with Cascading Style Sheets and the help of Wikipedia developers. FYI, I use Linux and Firefox. Etz Haim 21:09, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's a known fact that Arial Unicode MS is really the only font on PC's that most people have and that allows to see all kind of rare Unicode symbols. — Wrong! What about Tahoma and Palatino Linotype? If you browser is not set up to display polytonic Greek, then most probably you are not interested in it at all.

Displaying Polytonic Greek script on the web is a rather complicated technical matter Nothing complicated here! Just put the correct characters on the page, and let the browser to deal with displaying it. Firefox displays polytonic Greek perfecty under Windows and Linux. And MSIE requires only changing the default font to Arial Unicode MS or Tahoma (with ~~Standard~~ Classic skin on Wikipedia). — Monedula 07:56, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Can you please explain what "If you browser is not set up to display polytonic Greek, then most probably you are not interested in it at all." means? How is a browser set up to display polytonic Greek specifically? This has given me some trouble and I'd really love some feedback from a technical user. Also, are you sure you understand in what way Polytonic Greek script differs from the standard monotonic (which is supported by the vast majority of typefaces)? Etz Haim 10:34, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Every browser has something like "Options" or "Preferences" in the menu. There you can select "Fonts" and then instruct you browser to use a specific typeface for a given script. In MSIE, the setup is somewhat tricky, because you must change settings for the "Western" script, even though there is a "Greek" section. Also, MSIE always uses Arial for "sans-serif", which gives problems for the current Monobook skin in Wikipedia. Mozilla is better in this respect, because it can detect which characters are missing from the current font and then find a suitable substitute font — so usually Mozilla requires no additional setup, provided you have the good fonts. — Monedula 11:00, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I thought you'd say so. The "Greek" section on the browser font preferences, or even the ISO-8859-7 and windows-1253 standards cover only the regular Monotonic Greek script. If we just had monotonic, we wouldn't have to specify a font in the first place. Polytonic is a superset of Monotonic and that's the really diffucult stuff.

Also, although I'm a Mozilla advocate myself, I strongly object to mandating the choice of the browser to the non-technical end user, or even excluding people from knowledge because the use something such as MSIE. I'm waiting to hear what others have to say on this. Etz Haim 11:49, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It does not matter what is written in that MSIE dialog box; just change font for Western script to Tahoma or to Arial Unicode MS, and it will work OK. (Remember to use the Classic skin on Wikipedia then.)

And I am in no way mandating the choice of browser. Still it is the reader's responsibility to make sure that his/her browser is able to display the characters he/she needs. The correct display of characters is a browser-side problem, not a server-side one (unless the server expressly prescribes an unsuitable font). And in the future, the Unicode support in browsers will be much better than now. So why add elements that will have to be removed anyway? — Monedula 13:02, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's why we'll use CSS to separate content from design. Etz Haim 13:22, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is this discussion dead? The font tags are still in the article, which makes the wikitext bloated and ugly. Are we really stuck with manually setting the font? grendel|khan 01:37, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)

Yes, we're stuck with it. Unfortunately. Etz Haim 03:28, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Surely Wikipeida is intended as an encyclopedic resource for anyone (not just wipediholics) to browse and obtian information from: to expect the ordinary user to adopt particular browser settings just to view this encylopedia would be like expecting them to wear special spectacles when reading a printed encyclopedia. Having pages displayed with a mass of rectangles where characters should be gives a very poor impression to the general reader. rossb 07:19, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What about the method used for articles like devanagari, Standard Mandarin or Swiss German language, all of which use nonstandard symbols in the "right" (that is, no FONT tags) way? There's a big blue notice explaining that wacky characters are going to be displayed, and that if they don't work, go here to see how to make it work. At the very least, the font nonsense should be put into a template, which has already been done: {{IPA|ɪg'zɑːmpəl}} displays . At least this moves the font specification to single template instead of having it smeared across the article proper. I still don't like it---I'm a bit of a stickler for doing things The Right Way and not kludging them. But, I think this is the best compromise we're going to get for now. (It also provides for non-Arial Unicode MS fonts, which the current system doesn't.) As such, I'vechanged the FONT tags over to the IPA template. (I still say that if someone's going to come her looking for polytonic Greek, they're going to want to have their system configured for the display of polytonic greek, and that this is all a bad, bad kludge.) I've filed a bug report about this here (http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1281).

One note: if I change the FONT tag in the language-box template to the IPA template form, it mungs up the language box. Any idea how to work around that? Is this a MediaWiki bug? I'm confused. grendel|khan 22:37, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)

Yes, this is a good idea; polytonic rendering through a template is a less ugly hack. However, I disagree with using the {{IPA}} template for polytonic Greek texts; I've made a {{polytonic}} template instead. This is a form of primitive semantic markup that will help us weed out the polytonic tags when technology standards are updated to solve this once and for all. The template in action: {{polytonic|Πιστεύω εἰς ἕνα Θεόν}} renders Template:Polytonic. Etz Haim 00:06, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Why are the IPA examples showing up as squares now? Why were the FONT tags removed? Out of laziness, you couldn’t be bothered to add them at every example? The page looks extremely ugly now and very hard to read. I insist that all examples which include odd symbols be in the ARIAL UNICODE MS font. Wikipedia is about pleasing the reader, not the author, as all encyclopaedias should. How is the article supposed to be read if half the examples don't show up? REX 13:05, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

disagree

I think Xenophon Zolotas example is relevant and interesting. I think you shouldbn't have removed that. --rydel 00:48, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I agree with rydel. I also believe that Hao2lian should have posted a notice here before removing the section on the speech. REX 10:25, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Dhimotike Vs Katharevousa

hey guys, i wanna add a couple of sentences in the language dispute section: i wanna say that yes, it was the greek goverment's fault for bringing upon the greek people a literary dispute that lasted almost 100 years, and fuxored up a lot of things in the process... but it was also, in smaller extend, the fault of western intelectuals, such as Lord Byron, that attributed the characteristics of the ancient greeks to the greeks of 1821, who, racially, were a lot more diversified than anciet greeks... I'm taking suggestions how to write that (I can hear the Golden Dawn people cursing me already

Might i suggest the book "Apology of an Anti-Greek" by Nikos Dimos. good read. finished it last sunday

Project2501a 20:58, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

May I suggest that the whole section on the Dhimotikí and the Katharévusa be moved to a separate article (for example the Modern Greek article) where we could add even more facts to it (i.e. Project2501a's changes). There where it is now it does not do anyone much good, as it is in too much detail and I believe that it may be a little irrelevant to the subject of the article (Εκτός Θέματος). The purpose of the article is to describe the language as it is today, therefore if that section must be kept it should be moved in less detail (for example that bit about the noted representatives should be removed) to the History section and not kept at the header. Please tell me what you think and MERRY CHRISTMAS (ΚΑΛΑ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥΓΕΝΝΑ)! REX 13:55, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

yeah, moving it into the Modern Greek article sounds like a good idea. But i think there should be a line or two about the dispute in the history section of the Greek language article, because it may help people understand why there are still University professors that teach in Pantio University of athens and STILL write in Katharevousa... OK, οκ, i'm not gonna get pissed today about the current state of afairs in greece :)

ok, my wishes, now: Χρόνια πολλά, παίδες. και του χρόνου, με περισσότερα λεφτά στις τσέπες μας, με λιγότερο ποσοστό του ΑΕΠ στους εξοπλισμούς, περισσότερο στην παιδία, να πέσει το μονοπόλιο του ΟΤΕ, να δούμε και εμείς 4Μμπιτ στο σπίτι μας με 100 ευρά, να απαγκυστρωθεί το ίντερνετ απο την σταθερή τηλεφωνία, να βάλουνε κανα διαπλεκόμενο μέσα, να πέσει κανα ψιλό στην αγορά, να καταργηθεί το ΔΙΚΑΤΣΑ και γενικώς η ελληνική γραφειοκρατία... (χεχεχε, όλα για υλικά αγαθά ;)

Όσο για τα φαντάρια, ΠΟΣΟ ΑΚΟΜΑ ΜΑΓΚΕΣ; ΠΟΣΟ ΑΚΟΜΑ ΜΩΡΕ; άντε καλή σκοπία, και να είσαστε ζεστά, μην φοβάστε, θα σταματήσει αυτό το βάσανο σε 5 χρόνια, το δουλεύουμε, υπομονή... (Θητεία του παραλόγου ΤΕΛΟΣ ρε!) Έχω κάνει Πρωτοχρονιά μέσα παίδες, μαμήστε τα...

Project2501a 23:23, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have just made these changes. I have not yet made any changes to the Modern Greek page, but they will follow in due course. REX 21:49, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

REX, the history paragraph in article should mention that the whole turn to the katharevousa dialect was politically motivated and not something spontenious, as if the Byzantine culture had been kept intact after 400 years of occupation, and one fine morning Kolokotronis came around and thought'd be nice to display these family hairlooms once more... know what i'm saying? :)

Greeklish:(Den mporw na parw ta podia mou shmea... ti kwdikas kai maura aloga... pw pw, 8a balw adeia kai gia aurio...) Project2501a 10:19, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Modern language

I'd like to propose the merge of Modern Greek into Greek language. Modern Greek, as is right now, has no merit. Comments?

Project2501a 16:47, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the current Modern Greek has not much merit. But the main Greek language article already comes up with a warning when you edit it that it's too long. Surely a better solution is to move most of the stuff specifically related to Modern Greek into Modern Greek and perhaps similar for Ancient Greek. And reduce the size of the main article. rossb 11:44, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Consonant & Vowel Tables

May I suggest that the vowel and consonant tables for Ancient Greek be removed. It has not been proved that Ancient Greek was pronounced that way and anyway, in modern times, Ancient Greek is not spoken, but written. REX 13:05, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think it's extremely useful in an encyclopedic treatment of a language with a long history such as Greek to show the comparison between ancient and modern phonology. And while nothing can be proved about pronunciation in earlier times, classical Greek is one of the best documented of languages, and there can't be much doubt about the main features of its pronunciation. It might perhaps be helpful to put in a brief statement about the evidence, and the precise dialect and period it's intended to represent. rossb 14:38, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm now reinstating the Ancient Greek consonant and vowel tables, with some corrections and a little more explanation.

Very well, however I think that there may be some omissions. Specifically, you don't mention which dialect uses those sounds, Attic, Doric, Ionian etc. Also, the glottal stop isn't included (the pronunciation of the PSILI).REX 11:55, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The text under the "Sounds" heading is intended to clarify the dialect as being Attic. Yo may be right on the glottal stop. although I don't recall having seen this mentioned in the literature - the psili is generally decribed as just indicating the absence of an H sound. Do you have a reference for this? rossb 12:11, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I am not sure about the glottal stop. Something is mentioned about it at Psili. Also how do we not know that there were no palatal consonants in Attic Greek as in Modern Greek? REX 11:04, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've checked this out in Allen (Reference in the article). On the smooth breathing he says that the terminology of πνευμα ψιλον "does not justify the assumption sometimes made that the 'smooth breathing' was something more than the absence of the 'rough' breathing, more specifically a glottal stop ... Indeed such an assumption is almost certainly ruled out by the fact that unaspirated initial vowels in Greek permit elision and crasis, which would be highly improbable if they were preceded by a stop articulation." On palatalisation he says "There is no evidence in ancient times for the 'palatalised' pronunication of k ... before front vowels which is normal in modern Greek."

Fonts again

The latest edit by Delirium has removed the font markup, making much of the article unreadable on many browsers. I agree that mandating specfic fonts is a bad idea, but there is now a pretty good alternative which is to use the polytonic template for Greek passages using polytonic characters and the IPA font for IPA characters. I think this was done on this article some time ago, but someone for some reason changed it back to fonts.

I propose to reinstate the templates when I have time, unless someone else wouid like to do so in the mean time. rossb

I've now started doing this, but the rest of the article will have to wait till I have more time. rossb 11:04, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is an issue to bring up with the MediaWiki developers: Fonts should be specified at the skin level, not in individual articles. I've had no problems with either polytonic Greek or IPA using the default font, in Firefox 1.0 on Debian (Linux), and in fact it was almost unreadable with the font tags here (very small font and completely different looking than the rest of the text). Those for whom MediaWiki's default font doesn't work might want to bring up the issue on Wikipedia:Village Pump. It seems likely to be a bug in IE not properly loading the right fonts for the relevant Unicode code points? --Delirium 09:07, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

I would just like to say that most readers will want to be able to see all the characters. Therefore we are obliged to set the page up in such a way that all characters can be read. Any way will do! REX 12:19, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

i've now completed (I hope) reinstating the IPA and polytonic templates. rossb 21:39, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Looks fine to me now. The version with the templates looks identical on my machine to the version without them, so I don't really care either way. =] --Delirium 03:55, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid the IPA templates don't work. Which Browser do you use? I use IE and I can still see a mass of squares as opposed to when the FONT tags were used. Couldn't a template be made which displays IPA symbols in a different font? REX 11:45, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I use IE (Version 6.0) and the text with the template looks fine for me. As I understand it, the template is actually calling up a selection of fonts, one of which is the Arial Unicode MS, so it should logically work for anyone who could read it with the FONT explicitly specified, while not limiting this to Microsoft fonts only. Is there perhaps something unusual about your IE settings? Mine are straight out of the box.rossb 12:00, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Splitting this article

A while back I suggested splitting this article to move the Modern Greek stuff into a separate Modern Greek article (there is one, but it's currently not in a good state).

Having thought about it a bit more, I now wonder whether it wouldn't be better to move the detailed history to a new article History of the Greek Language. This would incidentally give a structure more like that used for English language. I'd be prepared to do the work if people generally think it's a good idea. rossb 21:52, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That sounds pretty good. It should be possible to fairly cleanly separate the parts talking about the language from a linguistic perspective (phonology, orthography, grammar, etc.), and those talking about it from a historical perspective (origins, geographic range, movement, political implications, major dialects, etc.). There's a little overlap, as the e.g. Dhimotiki/Katharevousa issue has linguistic aspects, but I think for the msot part they can be separated, and it'd make it easier for people to find the information they want (I'd imagine most people looking for a historical overview don't actually want to learn how to speak or read/write it). -Delirium 03:58, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

I've now made the split. The main History part of this article is now the new article History of the Greek language. I've renamed the opening part of this article "History", with a cross-reference to the new article. This is fairly crude at present, and probably both articles could do with tidying up. rossb 07:19, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Repetition

This text is fairly good but it needs a repetition clean up meaning that statistics and comments on the two kinds of greek should be put together so the readers don't reread stuff they already did. 132.204.227.175 17:12, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I've removed the duplication (I hope!) It seems to be a feature of Wikipedia at times that stuff gets inadvertantly duplicated. rossb 23:27, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A million words?

An anonymous user has amended the number of words in Greek to more than a million. What is the source for this? Such a number would be considerably more than the current estimates of the number of words in English, and it seems unlikely that Modertn Greek, being much less widely distributed than English, could have surpassed English in this respect. Perhaps the number is intended to include Ancient Greek as well, but this raises the question as to how many Ancient Greek words can realistically be included in a count for Greek today. Even so, it seems unlikely that Ancient Greek could put the number up tha t significantly. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (the most substantial English-language dictionary for Ancient Greek) has only about 40,000 headings (although admittedly there may be several words per heading). To conclude, I think the figure of a million can hardly be correct, and should be replaced by a phrase such as "[such and such an authority] claims that there are more than a million words in Modern Greek" (with perhaps some discussion as to what it meant by a word). If no-one can come up with the authority in question I would propose to revert to the previous figure of 600,000, although even this seems suspiciously high. rossb 07:27, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

ross, i agree. bet ya that the anon user is greek ^^ . i wonder where can i find a reference. hmmm. I don' know if you are familiar with the Mpampiniotis lexicon. it's supposed to be THE authorative greek lexicon. it was put together by Professor Mpampiniotis, i think he's the chair of the philosophy department in the university of athens... let me look it up and i'll hola. Project2501a 09:43, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"and, probably, the richest surviving languages today, with more than 600,000 words. " Is this NPOV? Also, it doesn't really make sense when taking a closer glance... Maybe this should be removed or edited away...

Comparing languages by counting words like that is unlinguistic and silly. Languages vary so much that what 'word' means will vary too. This figure should be outright removed. Morwen - Talk 13:57, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There isn't a very good word count in any case, because what a "word in modern Greek" is is highly subjective. In many cases, ancient Greek words are still technically considered correct modern Greek words (sometimes with appropriate modification of the endings), but they might be seen only infrequently, or when the writer is being purposely archaic (perhaps similar to using Shakespearian words in modern English writing). Less of a stretch, most Katharevousa words are considered part of modern Greek, because the abandonment of Katharevousa was recently enough that most people are still familiar with the words, and many still see some use. In addition, for many loanwords (e.g. from French, Turkish, or English) there are also Greek-origin equivalents, which raises the total word count still further. Oh, and there are some words borrowed from other Greek dialects, like Pontiaka, which are occasionally used. --Delirium 03:49, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)

Arabic alphabet?

I have read somewhere that under Ottoman Empire, Greek-speeking Muslims used to write Greek with Arabic letters. Conversely, Turkish-speaking Christians used to write Turkish with Greek letters. Has anybody more info about this? — Monedula 07:16, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The Coptic Language was an Egyptian language written with Greek characters.

Strictly the Coptic language was/is written in the Coptic alphabet which is based on Greek but with some additional characters. rossb 17:34, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Fix the IPA template!

Anyone who's interested in permanently fixing the stylesheet to display international characters, see Bugzilla:1281. It's been updated. grendel|khan 21:36, 2005 Mar 18 (UTC)

Lord's Prayer transliteration

see also Lord's Prayer and its talk page

The previous transliteration attempted to capture the polytonic accents, which I admire, but its use of the roman circumflex for both long vowels (to distinguish ε/η and ο/ω] and for the Greek circumflex/περισπωμένη was confusing, and the use of apostrophes to indicate smooth breathing/ψιλή even more so (since the characters in question appeared as 'straight quotes' rather than ‘smart quotes’ on my display). Since i'm not aware of an elegant way to "stack" diacritical marks, I decided that a standardized letter/letter correspondence was more important than preserving the pitch accents. Comments? -leigh (φθόγγος) 06:30, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

For some reason, the actual text of the Lord's Prayer no longer displays correctly in MSIE, despite the continued use of the polytonic template. I think you must have done something to upset it!

As far as your general question is concerned, I think I agree with your approach: I've recently tackled list of Greek phrases in a similar way, although it's difficult to achieve consistency with transliterating Greek. rossb 09:49, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi

documented history of some 3,000 years. ? i think it would be better to say 3500 years. (Mycenean is proved to be Greek by Ventris, of course there are even older documents that most propable are also greek but have not been decoded yet

article titles

are all separate articles. especially the different focus of the 'language' and the 'languages' articles is not so nice. Afaics, this article is mainly about Modern Greek. How about we merge Greek languages and Greek dialects, and place the result here, on Greek language? This present article would then be at Modern Greek, and not deal with historical issues. As it is, we are duplicating too much information in too many articles. dab (ᛏ) 16:51, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think this is such a good idea. A single article will get huge, especially after the additions I'm about to make. I had a different proposal which I described in detail on User_talk:Ross_Burgess#On_the_Greek_language. I do agree that articles such as Greek dialects and Greek languages should be included within others. Miskin 08:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Maybe what's been proposed is not a good idea, but I agree that this set of articles looks incredibly confused - and I say this simply because I made a lot of confusion when first looking at them. Just type "Greek" in the search tool and browse around pretending you've never seen the articles before. You'll probably realize it's anything but straight-forward. LjL 11:09, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Maybe I don't describe it that well. Basically it's pretty simple and it aims to make things more organised. For example I didn't even know that articles Greek dialects and Greek languages existed. The former IMO should be either ditched or partially merged with Ancient Greek, while the latter seems completely meaningless. Now that I linked the periods of the Greek language to the main article, it's almost done. All that remains is a)complete the articles Ancient Greek, Hellenistic Greek, Medieval Greek, b) take off pieces from Greek language and move them to Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, c) get rid of Greek dialects and Greek languages. Someone might want to deal with b) and c) while I'm taking care of a) (otherwise I'll deal with them later). Articles Ancient Greek and Hellenistic Greek can get quite big even without the imports from the Greek language, therefore to keep everything on a single article is just impossible. Miskin 11:46, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

sigh, did you even read my proposal? I was not suggesting a "single article". I am precisely suggesting that the description of Modern Greek should be in Modern Greek, and that Greek language should be Wikipedia:Summary style, i.e. the tables now here will go to Modern Greek. But I'll leave it to you, as long as you're not trying to "get rid of" Greek dialects. dab (ᛏ) 13:39, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't see how we can co-operate efficiently with this "sight" attitude of yours. So I misunderstood. To move the tables to Modern Greek and create a summary-style article out of Greek language was something I already had in mind. I don't want to completely get rid of Greek dialects, I only suggested to merge it with Ancient Greek (the name is misleading since it solely talks about the dialects of Ancient Greek anyway). Besides, the list of dialects for each period of the Greek language is already provided in the corresponding article (see modern or ancient Greek). I don't see a reason to abstractly keep them in one article. Miskin 15:59, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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