![]() ![]() It still has three genders, five cases, and movable ν. Greek has changed less in the last two thousand years than English has in the last five hundred. For instance, in a rare case of someone actually returning a word he borrowed, κινημα ( kinema, motion) was borrowed into Latin as cinema, which in French acquired the meaning "movie", and was returned to Greek as σινεμα ( sinema). The changes Greek words underwent in Latin are different from those they underwent in Greek. Originally they were borrowed into Latin, which became the Romance languages. Many Greek words have been borrowed into other languages, so you will find a lot of these words familiar, such as τραυμα ( trauma, "injury") and σοφία ( sofia "wisdom, knowledge"). Greek is the official language of both Greece and Cyprus, but is only spoken in the south of the latter. Thus it is not related closely to any other Indo-European language. Greek forms its own isolated branch within the Indo-European language family. The 24-letter alphabet used in Classical Greek is the same one used today. The present alphabet was introduced by a Phoenician called Qadmu (Καδμος) about 800 BCE and has been in use continuously since then, with a few letters added and removed along the way. Greek (ελληνικά) is one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, known from 1400 BCE in inscriptions in a syllabary of Minoan origin. ![]()
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