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Among the most significant modern-era architects are Stamatios Kleanthis, Lysandros Kaftanzoglou, Anastasios Metaxas, Panagis Kalkos, Anastasios Orlandos, the naturalized Greek Ernst Ziller, Dimitris Pikionis and urban planners Stamatis Voulgaris and George Candilis. Byzantine Greek art, which grew from the Hellenistic classical art and adapted the pagan motifs in the service of Christianity, provided a stimulus to the art of many nations. Well into the 19th century, the classical tradition derived from Greece played an important role in the art of the Western world. During the first centuries after Jesus Christ, the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, which remains the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church, and most of the early Christians and Church Fathers were Greek-speaking.
Notable modern Greek politicians include Ioannis Kapodistrias, founder of the First Hellenic Republic, reformist Charilaos Trikoupis, Eleftherios Venizelos, who marked the shape of modern Greece, social democrats Georgios Papandreou and Alexandros Papanastasiou, Konstantinos Karamanlis, founder of the Third Hellenic Republic, and socialist Andreas Papandreou. The European enlightenment and the democratic, liberal and nationalistic ideas of the French Revolution was a crucial factor to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the modern Greek state. It is not part of the modern Greek flag or coat-of-arms, although it is officially the insignia of the Greek Army and the flag of the Church of Greece. Hundreds of thousands of Greek students attend western universities every year while the faculty lists of leading Western universities contain a striking number of Greek names. The scholarly tradition of the Greek academies was maintained during Roman times with several academic institutions in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and other centers of Greek learning, while Byzantine science was essentially a continuation of classical science. The Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic eras made seminal contributions to science and philosophy, laying the foundations of several western scientific traditions, such as astronomy, geography, historiography, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and political science.
- The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world’s oldest recorded living language.
- It is the first writing system using a separate symbol for each vowel and consonant and the oldest alphabetic system that is still in use.
- The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasised.
- In ancient and medieval times and to some extent today the Greek term was genos, which also indicates a common ancestry.
- In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado, some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet.
- A significant percentage of Albania’s population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and ’90s and the Greek community in the country.
Culture
The major source of Linear B inscriptions are some 4,500 unbaked clay tablets found at Knossos (1400–1350 bce—this date has been questioned) and at Thebes, Tiryns, Mycenae, Pylos, and Chania (1250–1200 bce). This extension of gyro king jacksonville photos the linguistic area of Greek lasted only a few centuries; in the Roman period, Latin, more or less rapidly, took the place of Greek in most of these ancient colonies. In the second quarter of the 1st millennium bce, a vast “colonial” movement took place, resulting in establishments founded by various Greek cities all around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Later, Greek-speaking people occupied most of the islands of the Aegean and, about 1000 bce, the west coast of Anatolia.
Relationship of Greek to Indo-European
The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age. Ancient Greek civilization, the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 bce, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 bce. The most obvious link between modern and ancient Greeks is their language, which has a documented tradition from at least the 14th century BC to the present day, albeit with a break during the Greek Dark Ages from which written records are absent (11th–8th cent. BC, though the Cypriot syllabary was in use during this period).
Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian, Ottoman Turkish and Semitic languages. Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is verb–subject–object or subject–verb–object. Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages.
Some differences in transliteration result from changes in pronunciation of the Greek language; others reflect convention, as for example the χ (chi or khi), which was transliterated by the Romans as ch (because they lacked the letter k in their usual alphabet). The greek alphabet has been used since 900 BC to write the Greek Language. In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado, some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet.
The Greek Polyglot Who Speaks 32 Languages
The Greek philosopher Aristotle names ancient Hellas as an area in Epirus between Dodona and the Achelous river, the location of the Great Deluge of Deucalion, a land occupied by the Selloi and the "Greeks" who later came to be known as "Hellenes". In the historical period, Herodotus identified the Achaeans of the northern Peloponnese as descendants of the earlier, Homeric Achaeans. The term Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί) is one of the collective names for the Greeks in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (the Homeric "long-haired Achaeans" would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from c. 1600 BC until 1100 BC). In ancient and medieval times and to some extent today the Greek term was genos, which also indicates a common ancestry.
In turn, Greek art was influenced by eastern civilizations (i.e. Egypt, Persia, etc.) during various periods of its history. In addition to Greek, many Greek citizens in Greece and the diaspora are bilingual in other languages such as English, Arvanitika/Albanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Macedonian Slavic, Russian and Turkish. Because of the movements of Philhellenism and the Diafotismos in the 19th century, which emphasized the modern Greeks' ancient heritage, these foreign influences were excluded from official use via the creation of Katharevousa, a somewhat artificial form of Greek purged of all foreign influence and words, as the official language of the Greek state. Greek culture has evolved over thousands of years, with its beginning in the Mycenaean civilization, continuing through the classical era, the Hellenistic period, the Roman and Byzantine periods and was profoundly affected by Christianity, which it in turn influenced and shaped. The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time spanning from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC (some authors prefer to split this period into "Classical", from the end of the Greco-Persian Wars to the end of the Peloponnesian War, and "Fourth Century", up to the death of Alexander). From the 11th to the 3rd century bce it was used to record a native language of the island (Eteocypriot) as well as Greek.
The language features a variety of tenses, including present, past, and future, each with its own set of conjugation rules. The language has a relatively simple vowel system but a more intricate set of consonants, which include voiced and voiceless stops, fricatives, and nasals. It serves as the basis for the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, and other alphabets. The Greek alphabet has been used since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE and is the oldest continuously used alphabet.
Yevanic is the language of the Romaniotes, and survives in small communities in Greece, New York and Israel. Modern Greek has, in addition to Standard Modern Greek or Dimotiki, a wide variety of dialects of varying levels of mutual intelligibility, including Cypriot, Pontic, Cappadocian, Griko and Tsakonian (the only surviving representative of ancient Doric Greek). In 1976, however, the Hellenic Parliament voted to make the spoken Dimotiki the official language, making Katharevousa obsolete.
A grave, rich by the standards of any period, was uncovered at a site called Lefkandi on Euboea, the island along the eastern flank of Attica (the territory controlled by Athens). In 1981 archaeology pulled back the curtain on the “darkest” phase of all, the Protogeometric Period (c. 1075–900 bce), which takes its name from the geometric shapes painted on pottery. The political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievements of ancient Greek civilization formed a legacy with unparalleled influence on Western civilization.
The Greek alphabet derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and in turn became the parent alphabet of the Latin, Cyrillic, and several other alphabets. Following the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent, the Greek alphabet appears in the 9th–8th century BC. It has the longest documented history of any living language and Greek literature has a continuous history of over 2,500 years. The Diafotismos is credited with revitalizing Greek culture and giving birth to the synthesis of ancient and medieval elements that characterize it today.