Attic Greek


Attic Greek is the Greek dialect of the ancient city-state of Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek and is the standard form of the language that is studied in ancient Greek language courses. Attic Greek is sometimes included in the Ionic dialect. Together, Attic and Ionic are the primary influences on Modern Greek.

Origin and range

is the primary member of the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. In ancient times, Greek had already come to exist in several dialects, one of which was Attic. The earliest attestations of Greek, dating from the 16th to 11th centuries BC, are written in Linear B, an archaic writing system used by the Mycenaean Greeks in writing their language; the distinction between Eastern and Western Greek is believed to have arisen by Mycenaean times or before. Mycenaean Greek represents an early form of Eastern Greek, the group to which Attic also belongs. Later Greek literature wrote about three main dialects: Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic; Attic was part of the Ionic dialect group. "Old Attic" is used in reference to the dialect of Thucydides and the dramatists of 5th-century Athens whereas "New Attic" is used for the language of later writers following conventionally the accession in 285 BC of Greek-speaking Ptolemy II to the throne of the Kingdom of Egypt. Ruling from Alexandria, Ptolemy launched the Alexandrian period, during which the city of Alexandria and its expatriate Greek-medium scholars flourished.
The original range of the spoken Attic dialect included Attica and a number of the central Cyclades islands; the closely related Ionic was also spoken along the western and northwestern coasts of Asia Minor in modern Turkey, in Chalcidice, Thrace, Euboea, and in some colonies of Magna Graecia. Eventually, the texts of literary Attic were widely studied far beyond their homeland: first in the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, including in Ancient Rome and the larger Hellenistic world, and later in the Muslim world, Europe, and other parts of the world touched by those civilizations.

Literature

The earliest Greek literature, which is attributed to Homer and is dated to the 8th or 7th centuries BC, is written in "Old Ionic" rather than Attic. Athens and its dialect remained relatively obscure until the establishment of its democracy following the reforms of Solon in the 6th century BC: so began the classical period, one of great Athenian influence both in Greece and throughout the Mediterranean.
The first extensive works of literature in Attic are the plays of the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes dating from the 5th century BC. The military exploits of the Athenians led to some universally read and admired history, as found in the works of Thucydides and Xenophon. Slightly less known because they are more technical and legal are the orations by Antiphon, Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, and many others. The Attic Greek of the philosophers Plato and his student Aristotle dates to the period of transition between Classical Attic and Koine.
Students who learn Ancient Greek usually begin with the Attic dialect and continue, depending upon their interests, to the later Koine of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, to the earlier Homeric Greek of Homer and Hesiod, or to the contemporaneous Ionic Greek of Herodotus and Hippocrates.

Alphabet

Attic Greek, like other dialects, was originally written in a local variant of the Greek alphabet. According to the classification of archaic Greek alphabets, which was introduced by Adolf Kirchhoff, the old-Attic system belongs to the "eastern" or "blue" type, as it uses the letters Ψ and Χ with their classical values, unlike "western" or "red" alphabets, which used Χ for and expressed with Ψ. In other respects, Old Attic shares many features with the neighbouring Euboean alphabet. Like the latter, it used an L-shaped variant of lambda and an S-shaped variant of sigma. It lacked the consonant symbols xi for and psi for, expressing these sound combinations with ΧΣ and ΦΣ respectively. Moreover, like most other mainland Greek dialects, Attic did not yet use omega and eta for the long vowels and. Instead, it expressed the vowel phonemes with the letter Ο and with the letter Ε. Moreover, the letter Η was used as heta, with the consonantal value of rather than the vocalic value of.
In the 5th century, Athenian writing gradually switched from this local system to the more widely used Ionic alphabet, native to the eastern Aegean islands and Asia Minor. By the late 5th century, the concurrent use of elements of the Ionic system with the traditional local alphabet had become common in private writing, and in 403 BC, it was decreed that public writing would switch to the new Ionic orthography, as part of the reform following the Thirty Tyrants. This new system, also called the "Eucleidian" alphabet, after the name of the archon Eucleides, who oversaw the decision, was to become the Classical Greek alphabet throughout the Greek-speaking world. The classical works of Attic literature were subsequently handed down to posterity in the new Ionic spelling, and it is the classical orthography in which they are read today.

Phonology

Vowels

Long a

long ā → Attic long ē, but ā after e, i, r. ⁓ Ionic ē in all positions. ⁓ Doric and Aeolic ā in all positions.
However, Proto-Greek ā → Attic ē after w, deleted by the Classical Period.
Proto-Greek ă → Attic ě. ⁓ Doric: ă remains.
of vowel before cluster of sonorant and s, after deletion of s. ⁓ Aeolic: compensatory lengthening of sonorant.
Proto-Greek and other dialects' became Attic and represented by y in Latin transliteration of Greek names.
In the diphthongs eu and au, upsilon continued to be pronounced.

Contraction

Attic contracts more than Ionic does.
a + e → long ā.
e + e → ē
e + o → ō
Attic ē is sometimes shortened to e:
  1. when it is followed by a short vowel, with lengthening of the short vowel : ēo → eō
  2. when it is followed by a long vowel: ēō → eō
  3. when it is followed by u and s: ēus → eus :
Attic deletes one of two vowels in a row, called hyphaeresis.

Palatalization

PIE *ky or *chy → Proto-Greek ts → Attic tt. — Ionic and Koine ss.
Sometimes, Proto-Greek *ty and *tw → Attic tt. — Ionic and Koine ss.
Proto-Greek and Doric t before i or y → Attic-Ionic s.
Doric, Aeolian, early Attic-Ionic ss → Classical Attic s.
Proto-Greek w was lost in Attic before historical times.
Attic retained Proto-Greek h-, but some other dialects lost it.
Attic-Ionic places an n at the end of some words that would ordinarily end in a vowel, if the next word starts with a vowel, to prevent hiatus.
Attic uses rr in words, when Ionic uses rs:
Attic Greek grammar is to a large extent Ancient Greek grammar or at least when the latter topic is presented it is with the peculiarities of the Attic dialect. This section mentions only some of the Attic peculiarities.

Number

In addition to singular and plural numbers, Attic Greek had the dual number. This was used to refer to two of something and was present as an inflection in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs. Attic Greek was the last dialect to retain it from older forms of Greek, and the dual number had died out by the end of the 5th century BC. In addition to this, in Attic Greek, any plural neuter subjects will only ever take singular conjugation verbs.

Declension

With regard to declension, the stem is the part of the declined word to which case endings are suffixed. In the alpha or first declension feminines, the stem ends in long a, which is parallel to the Latin first declension. In Attic-Ionic the stem vowel has changed to ē in the singular, except after e, i or r. For example, the respective nominative, genitive, dative and accusative singular forms are gnome, gnomes, gnome, gnomen, "opinion" but thea, theas, thea, thean, "goddess".
The plural is the same in both cases, gnomai and theai, but other sound changes were more important in its formation. For example, original -as in the nominative plural was replaced by the diphthong -ai, which did not change from a to e. In the few a-stem masculines, the genitive singular follows the second declension: stratiotēs, stratiotou, stratiotēi, etc.
In the omicron or second declension, mainly masculines, the stem ends in o or e, which is composed in turn of a root plus the thematic vowel, an o or e in Indo-European ablaut series parallel to similar formations of the verb. It is the equivalent of the Latin second declension. The alternation of Greek -os and Latin -us in the nominative singular is familiar to readers of Greek and Latin.
In Attic Greek, an original genitive singular ending *-osyo after losing the s lengthens the stem o to the spurious diphthong -ou : logos "the word" logou from *logosyo "of the word". The dative plural of Attic-Ionic had -oisi, which appears in early Attic but later simplifies to -ois: anthropois "to or for the men".

Classical Attic

Classical Attic may refer either to the varieties of Attic Greek spoken and written in Greek majuscule in the 5th and 4th centuries BC or to the Hellenistic and Roman era standardized Attic Greek, mainly on the language of Attic orators and written in Greek uncial.
Attic replaces the Ionic -σσ with -ττ :