151-455: Florina ( Greek : Φλώρινα , Flórina ; known also by some alternative names ) is a town and municipality in the mountainous northwestern Macedonia , Greece . Its motto is, 'Where Greece begins'. The town of Florina is the capital of the Florina regional unit and also the seat of the eponymous municipality. It belongs to the administrative region of Western Macedonia . The town's population
302-561: 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 . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered
453-668: A World War I battleground of the Macedonian front and was occupied by Bulgaria and later retaken by the French army . Many pro–Bulgarian people or Muslims of Florina and in nearby areas were shot by Greek irregular troops of the Entente following the French capture of the town. Florina continued to be a multiethnic town following the Greek–Turkish population exchange , and as a consequence became
604-570: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
755-505: A collection of heroic sagas from the 12th century that was later collated in a verse epic , was the first literary work completely written in the vernacular. The Greek vernacular verse epic appeared in the 12th century, around the time of the French romance novel, almost as a backlash to the Attic renaissance during the dynasty of the Komnenoi in works like Psellos 's Chronography (in the middle of
906-523: A day earlier in Florina, while the same station continuously recorded minimum temperatures below -20 °C from 16 January 2012 until 19 January 2012, with the average maximum temperature for January just -0.6 °C, and the prevalence for 13 consecutive days of temperatures below 0 °C 24 hours a day. The above situation resulted in the Greek General Secretariat of Civil Protection to declare
1057-467: A documentary film and a scholarly lecture. Some of these initiatives have also attempted to highlight past practices of censorship and received various responses with some local support or opposition. Under Ottoman rule, Florina's population included Muslims, Greeks, Jews, Slavophones and Romani. Austrian diplomat Johann Georg von Hahn visited the city in 1861 and wrote about it in his travel log From Belgrade to Salonica . In it he writes that "[a]bout
1208-508: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
1359-676: A few hundred were Bulgarian supporters and the Ottoman administration in the area was pro–Bulgarian. Journalist H. N. Brailsford was in Macedonia in the aftermath of the Ilinden Uprising (1903). He wrote Florina's Greek bishop spoke in Turkish to the church congregation as they were "Bulgarians", while the town was viewed as Greek because it remained attached to the Patriarch. A Jewish Sephardi community
1510-475: A fortification tower built either in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century was part of a larger residential complex demolished in 1985, the tower remained but became dilapidated. Throughout the twentieth century, most Muslim monuments were destroyed and in the post 1960s reconstruction of Florina nearly all traces of the Muslim presence disappeared. Surviving Ottoman landmarks in a good state of preservation are
1661-573: A lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and
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#17328478740081812-400: A limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in the nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by
1963-482: A major imperial residence like other cities such as Trier , Milan and Sirmium , was not officially a capital until 359. Nonetheless, the imperial court resided there and the city was the political centre of the eastern parts of the Roman Empire where Greek was the dominant language. At first, Latin remained the language of both the court and the army. It was used for official documents, but its influence waned. From
2114-638: A mass grave located in south-eastern Florina. When the Communists were defeated on 12 February 1949 by the Greek army thousands of communists and Slav Macedonians were evacuated or fled to Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc. The city is served by Florina station on the Thessaloniki–Bitola line , with local trains to Thessaloniki . Florina is a market town with an economy dominated by agriculture, forestry, summer and winter tourism, cross-border trading and
2265-453: A mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes ,
2416-476: A new section of the A27 motorway was opened from Florina to the border with North Macedonia. The Muslim community existed for five centuries in Florina and they constructed various public and religious buildings. The Ottoman architectural landscape of several mosques, two bathhouses, a clock tower and some Ottoman mansions persisted until the 1923 population exchange. There were seven mosques and all were demolished during
2567-623: A place with strict surveillance by the Greek state with cooperation from the local government and the Orthodox Church. In November 1925, known as the "Dynamite Attempt", Komitadjis attacked a coffee shop in Florina with a grenade injuring 2 children. Some perpetrators escaped to Albania, others were captured by Greek authorities and some locals allegedly involved were also arrested. During the Axis Occupation of Greece in World War II , Florina
2718-676: A regional committee based in Florina. When the NOF merged with the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), many Slav Macedonians in the region enlisted as volunteers in the DSE. In early February 1949, the Greek National Army and the Gendarmerie defeated an attempted takeover of Florina by the Greek communist Democratic Army of Greece. Communist casualties numbered 750-850 individuals and were all buried in
2869-470: A rule of Medieval Greek phonotactics that would persist into Early Modern Greek . When dialects started deleting unstressed /i/ and /u/ between two consonants (such as when Myzithras became Mystras ), new clusters were formed and similarly assimilated by sandhi; on the other hand it is arguable that the dissimilation of voiceless obstruents occurred before the loss of close vowels, as the clusters resulting from this development do not necessarily undergo
3020-505: A slate pencil. This cursive script already showed descenders and ascenders, as well as combinations of letters. In the third century, the Greek uncial developed under the influence of the Latin script because of the need to write on papyrus with a reed pen. In the Middle Ages, uncial became the main script for the Greek language. A common feature of the medieval majuscule script like the uncial
3171-456: A state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century that
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#17328478740083322-449: A strong Greek faction. In 1916, Greek diplomat Nikolaos Politis wrote Florina had a total population of 10,392 composed of 6,227 Muslims, 3,576 Greeks and 589 former Exharchists. Philologist André Mazon was in Florina and the wider area doing research in 1917-1918 and 1920. Florina had a total of 10,000 people. Mazon wrote Florina was populated by Turkicized Albanians and Christian Slavs, split almost evenly between 9000 inhabitants, with
3473-527: Is synizesis ("merging" of vowels). In many words with the combinations [ˈea] , [ˈeo] , [ˈia] and [ˈio] , the stress shifted to the second vowel, and the first became a glide [j] . Thus: Ῥωμαῖος [ro'meos] → Ῥωμιός [ro'mɲos] ('Roman'), ἐννέα [e'nea] → ἐννιά [e'ɲa] ('nine'), ποῖος ['pios] → ποιός ['pços] ('which'), τα παιδία [ta pe'ðia] → τα παιδιά [ta pe'ðʝa] ('the children'). This accentual shift
3624-469: Is 17,188 people (2021 census). It is in a wooded valley about 13 km (8 mi) south of the international border of Greece with North Macedonia . Florina is the gateway to the Prespa Lakes and, until the modernisation of the road system, of the old town of Kastoria . It is located west of Edessa , northwest of Kozani , and northeast of Ioannina and Kastoria cities. Outside the Greek borders it
3775-497: Is a striking reduction of inflectional categories inherited from Indo-European , especially in the verbal system, and a complementary tendency of developing new analytical formations and periphrastic constructions. In morphology , the inflectional paradigms of declension , conjugation and comparison were regularised through analogy. Thus, in nouns, the Ancient Greek third declension, which showed an unequal number of syllables in
3926-475: Is already reflected in the metre of the 6th century hymns of Romanos the Melodist . In many cases, the vowel o disappeared in the endings -ιον [-ion] and -ιος [-ios] ( σακκίον [sa'cion] → σακκίν [sa'cin] , χαρτίον [xar'tion] → χαρτίν [xar'tin] , κύριος ['cyrios] → κύρις ['cyris] ). This phenomenon
4077-540: Is an abundance of abbreviations (e.g. ΧϹ for "Christos") and ligatures. Several letters of the uncial ( ϵ for Ε , Ϲ for Σ , Ѡ for Ω ) were also used as majuscules especially in a sacral context. The lunate sigma was adopted in this form as " С " in the Cyrillic script. The Greek uncial used the interpunct in order to separate sentences for the first time, but there were still no spaces between words. The Greek minuscule script, which probably emerged from
4228-480: Is assumed that most of the developments leading to the phonology of Modern Greek had either already taken place in Medieval Greek and its Hellenistic period predecessor Koine Greek , or were continuing to develop during this period. Above all, these developments included the establishment of dynamic stress , which had already replaced the tonal system of Ancient Greek during the Hellenistic period. In addition,
4379-939: Is attested to have begun earlier, in the Hellenistic Koine Greek papyri. The shift in the consonant system from voiced plosives /b/ ( β ), /d/ ( δ ), /ɡ/ ( γ ) and aspirated voiceless plosives /pʰ/ ( φ ), /tʰ/ ( θ ), /kʰ/ ( χ ) to corresponding fricatives ( /v, ð, ɣ/ and /f, θ, x/ , respectively) was already completed during Late Antiquity . However, the original voiced plosives remained as such after nasal consonants, with [mb] ( μβ ), [nd] ( νδ ), [ŋɡ] ( γγ ). The velar sounds /k, x, ɣ, ŋk, ŋɡ/ ( κ , χ , γ , γκ , γγ ) were realised as palatal allophones ( [c, ç, ʝ, ɲc, ɲɟ] ) before front vowels. The fricative /h/ , which had been present in Classical Greek, had been lost early on, although it continued to be reflected in spelling through
4530-412: Is grouped together with ε /e̞/ ; ει and η together with ι /i/ ; ο with ω /o̞/ , and οι with υ /y/ . At least in educated speech, the vowel /y/ , which had also merged with υι , likely did not lose lip-rounding and become /i/ until the 10th/11th centuries. Up to this point, transliterations into Georgian continue using a different letter for υ/οι than for ι/ει/η , and in
4681-630: Is in proximity to Korçë in Albania and Bitola in North Macedonia. The nearest airports are situated to the east and the south (in Kozani ). The mountains of Verno lie to the southwest and Varnous to the northwest. Winters bring heavy snow and long periods of temperature below freezing point. Furthermore, the town and the surrounding valley is usually covered in thick fog during the winter months that may last even for weeks under specific conditions. During
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4832-633: Is linked to the Byzantine Chloron. It is first mentioned in 1334, when the Serbian king Stefan Dušan established a certain Sphrantzes Palaeologus as commander of the fortress of Chlerenon . By 1385, the place had fallen to the Ottomans . An Ottoman defter (cadastral tax census) for the year 1481 records a settlement of 243 households. Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through Florina in
4983-561: Is more an assumption of political, as opposed to cultural and linguistic, developments. Indeed, by this time the spoken language, particularly pronunciation, had already shifted towards modern forms. The conquests of Alexander the Great , and the ensuing Hellenistic period , had caused Greek to spread to peoples throughout Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, altering the spoken language's pronunciation and structure. Medieval Greek
5134-403: Is reduced to the forms λαμβ- [lamb-] ( imperfective or present system) and λαβ- [lav-] ( perfective or aorist system). One of the numerous forms that disappeared was the dative . It was replaced in the 10th century by the genitive and the prepositional construction of εἰς [is] ('in, to') + accusative . In addition, nearly all the participles and
5285-513: Is situated to the east. Florina is one of the coldest towns in Greece, because of its elevation and geographic position. Snowfalls, sometimes heavy, thick fog and below-freezing temperatures are common during the winter months, while the summers are warm to hot. Under the Köppen climate classification , Florina has a humid subtropical climate ( Cfa ), bordering on a humid continental climate ( Dfa ). In
5436-511: Is some dispute as to when exactly this development took place but apparently it began during the Byzantine period. The graphemes μπ , ντ and γκ for /b/ , /d/ and /ɡ/ can already be found in transcriptions from neighboring languages in Byzantine sources, like in ντερβίσης [der'visis] , from Turkish : derviş (' dervish '). On the other hand, some scholars contend that post-nasal voicing of voiceless plosives began already in
5587-852: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Medieval Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek , Byzantine Greek , or Romaic )
5738-758: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
5889-429: Is strictly differentiated from ἔρως [ˈeros] , ('physical love'). In everyday usage, some old Greek stems were replaced, for example, the expression for "wine" where the word κρασίον [kraˈsion] ('mixture') replaced the old Greek οἶνος [oînos] . The word ὄψον [ˈopson] (meaning 'something you eat with bread') combined with the suffix -αριον [-arion] , which
6040-483: Is the almost complete loss of the infinitive , which has been replaced by subordinate clauses with the particle να. Possibly transmitted through Greek, this phenomenon can also be found in the adjacent languages and dialects of the Balkans. Bulgarian and Romanian , for example, are in many respects typologically similar to medieval and present day Greek, although genealogically they are not closely related. Besides
6191-669: Is the link between this vernacular , known as Koine Greek , and Modern Greek . Though Byzantine Greek literature was still strongly influenced by Attic Greek , it was also influenced by vernacular Koine Greek, which is the language of the New Testament and the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church . Constantine (the Great) moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) in 330. The city, though
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6342-564: 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. From the 7th century onwards, Greek was the only language of administration and government in the Byzantine Empire . This stage of language is thus described as Byzantine Greek. The study of
6493-562: Is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border. 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
6644-508: The Attic literary language and the constantly developing vernacular Koine . By late antiquity, the gap had become impossible to ignore. In the Byzantine era, written Greek manifested itself in a whole spectrum of divergent registers , all of which were consciously archaic in comparison with the contemporary spoken vernacular, but in different degrees. They ranged from a moderately archaic style employed for most every-day writing and based mostly on
6795-544: The British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in
6946-637: The European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek
7097-629: The Florina region . Florina and its inhabitants greatly contributed to the Macedonian Struggle . Prominent leaders included Nikolaos Pyrzas , and Petros Chatzitasis . In the late Ottoman period the area surrounding Florina supported the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) who fought against the Ottomans. During the Macedonian Struggle the Greek makedonomachoi gained significant advantage towards
7248-577: The Greek–Turkish population exchange (1923) based on religious criteria were sent to Turkey, and mainly resettled in Bursa . Following the Greek–Turkish population exchange, Greek refugee families in Florina were from East Thrace (79), Asia Minor (54), Pontus (7) and the Caucasus (44) in 1926. The 1928 Greek census recorded 10,585 town inhabitants. In 1928, the refugee families numbered 178 (750 people) and
7399-510: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
7550-461: The Latin flora , "vegetation") in the later Byzantine period, and in early Ottoman documents the forms Chlerina and Florina are both used, with the latter becoming standard after the 17th century. The form with [f] (φλωρός) is a local dialect form of χλωρός in Greek. The local Slavic name for the city is Lerin (Лерин), which is a borrowing of the Byzantine Greek name, but with the loss of
7701-747: The United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to
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#17328478740087852-456: The comparative of adjectives ending in -ων , -ιον , [-oːn, -ion] which was partly irregular, was gradually replaced by the formation using the more regular suffix -τερος , -τέρα (-τερη) , -τερο(ν) , [-teros, -tera (-teri), -tero(n)] : µείζων [méːzdoːn] → µειζότερος [mi'zoteros] ('the bigger'). The enclitic genitive forms of the first and second person personal pronoun , as well as
8003-441: The contracted verbs ending in -άω [-aoː] , -έω [-eoː] etc., which earlier showed a complex set of vowel alternations, readopted the endings of the regular forms: ἀγαπᾷ [aɡapâːi] → ἀγαπάει [aɣaˈpai] ('he loves'). The use of the past tense prefix, known as augment , was gradually limited to regular forms in which the augment was required to carry word stress. Reduplication in
8154-468: The genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in
8305-418: The particles να and θενά , the negation particle δέν [ðen] ('not') was derived from Ancient Greek : oὐδέν [uːdén] ('nothing'). Lexicographic changes in Medieval Greek influenced by Christianity can be found for instance in words like ἄγγελος [ˈaɲɟelos] ('messenger') → heavenly messenger → angel) or ἀγάπη [aˈɣapi] 'love' → 'altruistic love', which
8456-412: The rough breathing , a diacritic mark added to vowels. Changes in the phonological system mainly affect consonant clusters that show sandhi processes. In clusters of two different plosives or two different fricatives , there is a tendency for dissimilation such that the first consonant becomes a fricative and/or the second becomes a plosive ultimately favoring a fricative-plosive cluster. But if
8607-417: The syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow the noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However,
8758-636: The 11th century) or the Alexiad , the biography of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos written by his daughter Anna Komnena about a century later. In fifteen-syllable blank verse (versus politicus), the Digenes Akritas deals with both ancient and medieval heroic sagas, but also with stories of animals and plants. The Chronicle of the Morea , a verse chronicle from the 14th century, is unique. It has also been preserved in French, Italian and Aragonese versions, and covers
8909-410: The 13th century, examples of texts written in vernacular Greek are very rare. They are restricted to isolated passages of popular acclamations , sayings, and particularly common or untranslatable formulations which occasionally made their way into Greek literature. Since the end of the 11th century, vernacular Greek poems from the literary realm of Constantinople are documented. The Digenes Akritas ,
9060-566: The 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
9211-547: The Arabs in the course of the Muslim conquests a few years later. Alexandria , a centre of Greek culture and language, fell to the Arabs in 642. During the seventh and eighth centuries, Greek was gradually replaced by Arabic as an official language in conquered territories such as Egypt, as more people learned Arabic. Thus, the use of Greek declined early on in Syria and Egypt. The invasion of
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#17328478740089362-436: The Aristotle University, reinforced its potential. Florina has 8 radio stations, 2 daily political newspapers, 4 weekly ones, one women's press and two newspapers on sports. During the 1950s and 1960s, the area lost much of its population to emigration, both to Athens and Thessaloniki as well as US, Canada, Australia and Germany. Following Greece's EU membership and the economic upturn, many from Germany returned. In 2016
9513-461: The Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, and Cappadocian , spoken in central Asia Minor, began to diverge. In Griko , a language spoken in the southern Italian exclaves , and in Tsakonian , which is spoken on the Peloponnese, dialects of older origin continue to be used today. Cypriot 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 . It
9664-416: The Bulgarian Exarchists within 10 months in 1905 and extended their zone of control in various regions of western Macedonia including the plains north and south of Florina. The Balkan Wars (1912-1913) brought an end to Ottoman rule when Florina and the surrounding area was taken by Greece during November 1912. Annexed by Greece, Florina became part of the Greek province of Macedonia. In 1916, Florina became
9815-429: The Byzantine emperors were active writers themselves and wrote chronicles or works on the running of the Byzantine state and strategic or philological works. Furthermore, letters, legal texts, and numerous registers and lists in Medieval Greek exist. Concessions to spoken Greek can be found, for example, in John Malalas's Chronography from the 6th century, the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor (9th century) and
9966-437: The Germans first to the Hirsch ghetto in Thessaloniki and later in May sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were gassed. In 1945, the Florina Jewish community numbered 64 people, a reduction of 84 percent due to the Holocaust . The Jewish population declined and by 1959 there were 7 Jews in Florina, 1 in 1973 and 0 in 1983. The Romani of Florina are sedentary and in 1968 they converted from Islam to Orthodoxy. In
10117-434: The Greek Italian War (1940-1941). Florina has a military cemetery for fallen Greek soldiers from the Greek Civil War. In the mid 2000s, two attempts to erect a memorial to communist fighters who died during the 1949 attempted takeover of Florina were vandalised and destroyed by unidentified individuals. The Greek Communist Party bought the site in 2009 and erected a memorial in 2016 encompassing several sculpted individuals on
10268-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
10419-442: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
10570-554: The Greek language, for example ὁσπίτιον [oˈspition] ( Latin : hospitium , 'hostel', therefore "house", σπίτι [ˈspiti] in Modern Greek ), σέλλα [ˈsela] ('saddle'), ταβέρνα [taˈverna] ('tavern'), κανδήλιον [kanˈdilion] ( Latin : candela , 'candle'), φούρνος [ˈfurnos] ( Latin : furnus , 'oven') and φλάσκα [ˈflaska] ( Latin : flasco , 'wine bottle'). Other influences on Medieval Greek arose from contact with neighboring languages and
10721-484: The Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek
10872-503: The Jewish cemetery in Florina. The Cathedral of St.Panteleimon was constructed in 1870 and Slavic architectural forms featured on its windows, three domes and an iconastasis with Slavic writing, later replaced with Greek writing. Over time modifications were made to the altar and windows. In 1971, the Cathedral was declared a hazard to public safety and demolished. In Florina, a Bulgarian school
11023-482: The Jewish community numbered 500 people. The town remained multiethnic and continued to have Slavophones, Jews and Romani after the population exchange. Local Jews were involved in the textile, agricultural and raw material sectors of Florina's economy. Florina was occupied in World War Two and Jews came under German rule. The Jewish community numbered 400 people in 1940. During April 1943, 372 Florina Jews were sent by
11174-527: The Koine , as interchanges with β , δ , and γ in this position are found in the papyri. The prenasalized voiced spirants μβ , νδ and γγ were still plosives by this time, causing a merger between μβ/μπ , νδ/ντ and γγ/γκ , which would remain except within educated varieties, where spelling pronunciations did make for segments such as [ɱv, n̪ð, ŋɣ] Many decisive changes between Ancient and Modern Greek were completed by c. 1100 AD. There
11325-480: The Medieval Greek language and literature is a branch of Byzantine studies , the study of the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire. The beginning of Medieval Greek is occasionally dated back to as early as the 4th century, either to 330 AD, when the political centre of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople , or to 395 AD, the division of the empire. However, this approach is rather arbitrary as it
11476-472: The Modern Greek future particle θα Medieval Greek : [θa] , which replaced the old future forms. Ancient formations like the genitive absolute , the accusative and infinitive and nearly all common participle constructions were gradually substituted by the constructions of subordinate clauses and the newly emerged gerund . The most noticeable grammatical change in comparison to ancient Greek
11627-510: The National Army during the Civil War with a display of cannons taken from the Communists, the losing side in the conflict. These monuments were erected in an era when their visual presence and symbolism were used by the government as a way to assimilate the local multicultural inhabitants. Other town square monuments are the statue symbolising freedom and a memorial to Greek military casualties of
11778-619: The Peloponnese in 1459 or 1460, the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, Athens in 1465, and two centuries later the Duchy of Candia in 1669, the Greek language lost its status as a national language until the emergence of modern Greece in the year 1821. Language varieties after 1453 are referred to as Modern Greek. As early as in the Hellenistic period , there was a tendency towards a state of diglossia between
11929-692: The Slavs into the Balkan Peninsula reduced the area where Greek and Latin was spoken (roughly north of a line from Montenegro to Varna on the Black Sea in Bulgaria ). Sicily and parts of Magna Graecia , Cyprus, Asia Minor and more generally Anatolia, parts of the Crimean Peninsula remained Greek-speaking. The southern Balkans which would henceforth be contested between Byzantium and various Slavic kingdoms or empires. The Greek language spoken by one-third of
12080-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
12231-474: The arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from
12382-538: The beginning of the 6th century, amendments to the law were mostly written in Greek. Furthermore, parts of the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis were gradually translated into Greek. Under the rule of Emperor Heraclius (610–641 AD), who also assumed the Greek title Basileus ( Greek : βασιλεύς , 'monarch') in 610, Greek became the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire . This was in spite of
12533-805: The change to [fricative + stop], e.g. κ(ου)τί as [kti] not [xti] . The resulting clusters were: For plosives: For fricatives where the second was not /s/ : For fricatives where the second was /s/ : The disappearance of /n/ in word-final position, which had begun sporadically in Late Antiquity, became more widespread, excluding certain dialects such as South Italian and Cypriot. The nasals /m/ and /n/ also disappeared before voiceless fricatives, for example νύμφη ['nyɱfi] → νύφη ['nifi] , ἄνθος ['an̪θos] → ἄθος ['aθos] . A new set of voiced plosives [(m)b] , [(n)d] and [(ŋ)ɡ] developed through voicing of voiceless plosives after nasals . There
12684-715: The country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine ,
12835-554: The cursive writing in Syria , appears more and more frequently from the 9th century onwards. It is the first script that regularly uses accents and spiritus, which had already been developed in the 3rd century BC. This very fluent script, with ascenders and descenders and many possible combinations of letters, is the first to use gaps between words. The last forms which developed in the 12th century were Iota subscript and word-final sigma ( ς ). The type for Greek majuscules and minuscules that
12986-441: The dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before
13137-472: The days preceding the early 2012 European cold wave , more specifically on 18 January 2012, a temperature of -25.1 °C was recorded by the HNMS 's station with several reports, however, in the local press for temperatures in villages of the municipality that reached -32 °C, but there was no official record of such temperature. The National Observatory of Athens ' station reported a temperature of -22.2 °C
13288-407: The different cases, was adjusted to the regular first and second declension by forming a new nominative form out of the oblique case forms: Ancient Greek ὁ πατήρ [ho patɛ́ːr] → Modern Greek ὁ πατέρας [o pa'teras] , in analogy to the accusative form τὸν πατέρα [tom ba'tera] . Feminine nouns ending in -ις [-is] and -ας [-as] formed
13439-528: The earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of
13590-474: The east, had become extinct and replaced by Greek by the 5th century. In any case, all cities of the Eastern Roman Empire were strongly influenced by the Greek language. In the period between 603 and 619, the southern and eastern parts of the empire ( Syria , Egypt , North Africa ) were occupied by Persian Sassanids and, after being recaptured by Heraclius in the years 622 to 628, were conquered by
13741-412: The extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English
13892-399: The fact that the inhabitants of the empire still considered themselves Rhomaioi ('Romans') until its end in 1453, as they saw their State as the perpetuation of Roman rule. Latin continued to be used on the coinage until the ninth century and in certain court ceremonies for even longer. Despite the absence of reliable demographic figures, it has been estimated that less than one third of
14043-509: The field commemorating the fighters. In 2005, three marble reproductions of funerary monuments were placed in the town centre, the ancient Greek originals dating from Classical and Roman antiquity are displayed in the Florina Archaeological Museum. There have been some efforts by local people to showcase Florina's heritage from the Ottoman period and other less highlighted or neglected parts of the town's past through an exhibition,
14194-431: The first consonant was a fricative and the second consonant was /s/ , the first consonant instead became a plosive, favoring a plosive- /s/ cluster. Medieval Greek also 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. This process of assimilation and sandhi was highly regular and predictable, forming
14345-543: The former Soviet Union , Aromanians and Hellenised Aromanians from Bitola who went to Florina in 1913, Romani, Albanians, and a small number of foreigners. In fieldwork done by Riki Van Boeschoten in late 1993, the population of Florina is mixed and Greek is often the language used for communication. Minority languages are used in the town, especially on market days when farmers from the villages arrive in Florina to sell their produce. The Romani community of Florina speak Romani and are multilingual in all other languages used in
14496-403: The genitive forms of the third person demonstrative pronoun , developed into unstressed enclitic possessive pronouns that were attached to nouns: µου [mu] , σου [su] , του [tu] , της [tis] , µας [mas] , σας [sas] , των [ton] . Irregularities in verb inflection were also reduced through analogy. Thus,
14647-511: The government, the two-storey building was proposed to house the future Art Museum of Florina. Instead the school was demolished in late 1978 by the local municipal authority with support from Florina's Archbishop Kantiotis who opposed the building's Bulgarian Church origins. The site was rebuilt as a high school. In early twenty first Florina, over 40 monuments exist in the town and include sculptures, statues, headstones, busts and other objects depicting or in reference to its history, in particular
14798-723: The history of Frankish feudalism on the Peloponnese during the Latinokratia of the Principality of Achaea , a crusader state set up after the Fourth Crusade and the 13th century fall of Constantinople . The earliest evidence of prose vernacular Greek exists in some documents from southern Italy written in the tenth century. Later prose literature consists of statute books, chronicles and fragments of religious, historical and medical works. The dualism of literary language and vernacular
14949-613: The houses in Florina, we should indicate that there are at most 3,000, with half of the population Albanian and Turkish Muslims and the other half Christian Bulgarians ." According to an 1878 French ethnographic book Florina was a town of 1,500 households, inhabited by 2,800 Muslims and 1,800 Bulgarians. In 1896 traveller Victor Bérard visited Florina and stated it had 1,500 houses composed of Albanians and "converted Slavs", with 100 "Turkish" families and 500 Christian families. Bérard wrote "these Slavs nonetheless call themselves Greek and speak Greek—with us at least", while in Florina
15100-513: The imperative forms of the 3rd person were lost. The subjunctive was replaced by the construction of subordinate clauses with the conjunctions ὅτι [ˈoti] ('that') and ἵνα [ˈina] ('so that'). ἵνα first became ἱνά [iˈna] and was later shortened to να [na] . By the end of the Byzantine era, the construction θέλω να [ˈθelo na] ('I want that…') + subordinate clause developed into θενά [θeˈna] . Eventually, θενά became
15251-426: The imperial court's life like Αὔγουστος [ˈavɣustos] ('Augustus'), πρίγκιψ [ˈpriɲɟips] ( Latin : princeps , 'Prince'), μάγιστρος [ˈmaʝistros] ( Latin : magister , 'Master'), κοιαίστωρ [cyˈestor] ( Latin : quaestor , 'Quaestor'), ὀφφικιάλος [ofiˈcalos] ( Latin : officialis , 'official'). In addition, Latin words from everyday life entered
15402-510: The inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, around eight million people, were native speakers of Greek. The number of those who were able to communicate in Greek may have been far higher. The native Greek speakers consisted of many of the inhabitants of the southern Balkan Peninsula , south of the Jireček Line , and all of the inhabitants of Asia Minor , where the native tongues ( Phrygian , Lycian , Lydian , Carian etc.), except Armenian in
15553-445: The initial [x] characteristic of the local dialect. The Albanian name for the city is Follorinë . In Aromanian , it is Florina , while in both Bulgarian and Macedonian , it is Лерин ( Lerin ). The current municipality of Florina was formed at the 2011 local government reform by the merger of the following 4 former municipalities, that since 2011 became municipal units: The municipality has an area of 819.698 km, and
15704-449: The language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows
15855-461: The languages of Venetian, Frankish and Arab conquerors. Some of the loanwords from these languages have been permanently retained in Greek or in its dialects: Middle Greek used the 24 letters of the 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. The first Greek script, a cursive script, developed from quick carving into wax tablets with
16006-463: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
16157-448: The many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is
16308-582: The modern period, Florina Romani have distanced themselves from their relatives in Elbasan and Korçë, over concerns that links with Muslim Romani could negatively impact their local standing in the area they reside. During the late twentieth century, Florina numbered some 15,000 inhabitants. Its population was composed of Slavophone Dopii , the Greek Anatolian refugees from the Greek–Turkish population exchange and their descendants, Greeks who had recently left
16459-465: The morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of
16610-409: The municipal unit 150.634 km. The municipal unit of Florina is further divided into the following communities: The ancient settlement of Melitonus was located in the area of Florina. Within the boundaries of the present-day city lie the remains of a Hellenistic era settlement on the hill of Agios Panteleimon. Archaeologists excavated on the site in 1930–1934, but a hotel was later built over
16761-417: The municipality of Florina in a state of emergency on 16 January 2012, at the request of the mayor of Florina, due to the polar temperatures and the intense snowfall that prevailed for days. The city's original Byzantine name, Χλέρινον ( Chlérinon , "full of green vegetation"), derives from the Greek word χλωρός ( chlōrós , "fresh" or "green vegetation"). The name was sometimes Latinized as Florinon (from
16912-561: The nominative according to the accusative -ιδα [-iða] -αδα [-aða] , as in ἐλπίς [elpís] → ἐλπίδα [elˈpiða] ('hope'), πατρίς [patrís] → πατρίδα [paˈtriða] ('homeland'), and in Ἑλλάς [hellás] → Ἑλλάδα [eˈlaða] ('Greece'). Only a few nouns remained unaffected by this simplification, such as τὸ φῶς [to fos] (both nominative and accusative ), τοῦ φωτός [tu fo'tos] ( genitive ). The Ancient Greek formation of
17063-455: The population of Sicily at the time of the Norman conquest 1060–1090 remained vibrant for more than a century, but slowly died out (as did Arabic) to a deliberate policy of Latinization in language and religion from the mid-1160s. From the late 11th century onwards, the interior of Anatolia was invaded by Seljuq Turks, who advanced westwards. With the Ottoman conquests of Constantinople in 1453,
17214-468: The present site of the Papastefa house. The Muslim Cemetery was destroyed, as the early Greek administration implemented a new urban plan and later the large Muslim cemetery was expropriated in the north of Florina for the project. Another Hamman still exists, built at either the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, it was in use until 1958 and in a poor state of preservation during the 2010s. The Koula,
17365-494: The prison, built in the early twentieth century; and the administration building built in 1904 and later repurposed for Florina's courts following Ottoman rule. After Florina became part of Greece, a new urban plan was undertaken by the government to modernise and Hellenise the town. Florina underwent change and sites or buildings associated with diverse past cultures and peoples such as mosques, synagogues and cemeteries disappeared. Post World War Two, there are no remaining traces of
17516-473: The region. During the First World War, 60 Jewish families resettled in Florina after they left Monastir in 1916 to avoid the shelling of the city, later some other Monastirli Jewish families also went to live in Florina after the war. The 1920 Greek census recorded 12,513 people in the town, and 4,650 inhabitants (1,076 families) were Muslim in 1923. Muslim Albanians from Florina and the wider region during
17667-590: The region. Van Boeschoten estimated the Romani numbered some 3000 in Florina, living in a neighbourhood on the town's environs. The Centre for the Macedonian Language in Greece is based in Florina. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within
17818-622: The regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of
17969-544: The remainder composed of 30 Aromanian families and 89 Greek refugee families from Thrace and Asia Minor. Florina Christians supported the Greek cause and the Bulgarians were aware that more than half were " Grecomans ". Efthymios Boudonas, a Public Education Office director and former school general inspector for Macedonia wrote (1914) Florina was a non–Greek speaking town incapable of linguistically hellenising its inhabitants or any non–Greek speaking newcomers, although it had
18120-638: The remainder consisting of Greeks, Aromanians and Jews who had recently arrived from Bitola after its 1917 destruction. Much of the Christian population remained Patriarchists, even during the period of the Exarchate, with some becoming Hellenised and apart from a few exceptions they spoke (Macedonian) Bulgarian in their homes. Following the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), the large Aromanian community in Monastir (modern Bitola)
18271-494: The ruins. Excavations began again in the 1980s and the total excavated area is now around 8,000 metres square. The buildings uncovered are mostly residential blocks, and the range of finds suggests that the site was continuously inhabited from the 4th century BC until its destruction by fire in the 1st century BC. Many of these finds are now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Florina . The town with its present name
18422-597: The sale of local produce such as grain , grapes , and vegetables including Florina peppers . It also has textile mills and is known for locally manufactured leather handicrafts. The most notable industrial activity is the very large Ptolemaia-Florina lignite mine . Its university changed in 2002 from being a branch of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , to a part of the University of Western Macedonia . After 2004, four departments that previously belonged to
18573-579: The same class, adopted a new set of endings modelled on the passive of regular verbs, as in the following examples: In most cases, the numerous stem variants that appeared in the Ancient Greek system of aspect inflection were reduced to only two basic stem forms, sometimes only one. Thus, in Ancient Greek the stem of the verb λαμβάνειν [lambáneːn] ('to take') appears in the variants λαμβ- [lamb-] , λαβ- [lab-] , ληψ- [lɛːps-] , ληφ- [lɛːpʰ-] and λημ- [lɛːm-] . In Medieval Greek, it
18724-641: The same original phoneme had merged with /i/ in mainstream varieties at roughly the same time (the same documents also transcribe υ/οι with ი /i/ very sporadically). In the original closing diphthongs αυ , ευ and ηυ , the offglide [u] had developed into a consonantal [v] or [f] early on (possibly through an intermediate stage of [β] and [ɸ] ). Before [n] , υ turned to [m] ( εὔνοστος ['evnostos] → ἔμνοστος ['emnostos] , χαύνος ['xavnos] → χάμνος ['xamnos] , ἐλαύνω [e'lavno] → λάμνω ['lamno] ), and before [m] it
18875-481: The seventeenth century. He wrote Florina consisted of six neighbourhoods and had 1500 homes, one tekke, several mosques, madrasas and mektebs , two bathhouses and two inns. Under Ottoman rule, Florina was a regional economic and administrative centre, the seat of a kaza and belonged to a sanjak within the Vilayet of Monastir. Members of Filiki Eteria were the brothers Loukas Nedelkos and Nikolaos Nedelkos, who were born in
19026-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
19177-582: The struggle over Macedonia, the Second World War and the Civil War in Greece. There are twelve monuments of fighters such as Kapetan Kottas and politicians involved in the Macedonian Struggle placed mainly after 1960 in Florina to mark the success of Greek efforts over the Bulgarians. In the town square named George Modis, there are busts of Macedonian Struggle figure L. Pyrzas and the General I. Pappous of
19328-455: The summer months it becomes a busy market town with an economy boosted by summer and, mostly, winter tourism due to the heavy snowfalls and the nearby ski resorts. Even though Florina was the site of the first rail line built in the southern Ottoman provinces in the late 19th century, its rail system remains undeveloped. Today, Florina is linked by a single track standard gauge line to Thessaloniki and Bitola, and to Kozani (meter gauge) where it
19479-450: The turn of the first millennium AD. Written literature reflecting this Demotic Greek begins to appear around 1100. Among the preserved literature in the Attic literary language, various forms of historiography take a prominent place. They comprise chronicles as well as classicist, contemporary works of historiography , theological documents, and saints' lives . Poetry can be found in the form of hymns and ecclesiastical poetry. Many of
19630-557: The twentieth century. The first five mosques were demolished in 1926 by an order from the General Administration of Macedonia, the prefect of Florina and by the decision of the Municipal Council. The mosques of Florina were: Minare de Kapit mosque (destroyed), Minare Zantial mosque (demolished in 1928), Kursumli mosque or Minare Oso (destroyed), Minare Ouest mosque (destroyed) and another mosque (destroyed). In 1952, one mosque
19781-419: The verb stem, which was a feature of the old perfect forms, was gradually abandoned and only retained in antiquated forms. The small ancient Greek class of irregular verbs in -μι [-mi] disappeared in favour of regular forms ending in -ω [-oː] ; χώννυμι [kʰóːnnymi] → χώνω ['xono] ('push'). The auxiliary εἰμί [eːmí] ('be'), originally part of
19932-494: The vowel system was gradually reduced to five phonemes without any differentiation in vowel length, a process also well begun during the Hellenistic period. Furthermore, Ancient Greek diphthongs became monophthongs . The Suda , an encyclopedia from the late 10th century, gives some indication of the vowel inventory. Following the antistoichic system, it lists terms alphabetically but arranges similarly pronounced letters side by side. In this way, for indicating homophony , αι
20083-495: The works of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (mid-10th century). These are influenced by the vernacular language of their time in choice of words and idiom , but largely follow the models of written Koine in their morphology and syntax . The spoken form of Greek was called γλῶσσα δημώδης ( glōssa dēmōdēs 'vernacular language'), ἁπλοελληνική ( haploellēnikē 'basic Greek'), καθωμιλημένη ( kathōmilēmenē 'spoken') or Ῥωμαιϊκή ( Rhōmaiïkē 'Roman language'). Before
20234-526: The written Koine of the Bible and early Christian literature, to a highly artificial learned style, employed by authors with higher literary ambitions and closely imitating the model of classical Attic, in continuation of the movement of Atticism in late antiquity. At the same time, the spoken vernacular language developed on the basis of earlier spoken Koine, and reached a stage that in many ways resembles present-day Modern Greek in terms of grammar and phonology by
20385-476: The year 1030, Michael the Grammarian could still make fun of the bishop of Philomelion for confusing ι for υ . In the 10th century, Georgian transliterations begin using the letter representing /u/ ( უ ) for υ/οι , in line with the alternative development in certain dialects like Tsakonian , Megaran and South Italian Greek where /y/ reverted to /u/ . This phenomenon perhaps indirectly indicates that
20536-568: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
20687-442: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
20838-558: Was borrowed from the Latin -arium , became 'fish' ( ὀψάριον [oˈpsarion] ), which after apheresis, synizesis and the loss of final ν [n] became the new Greek ψάρι [ˈpsari] and eliminated the Old Greek ἰχθύς [ikʰtʰýs] , which became an acrostic for Jesus Christ and a symbol for Christianity. Especially at the beginning of the Byzantine Empire , Medieval Greek borrowed numerous words from Latin , among them mainly titles and other terms of
20989-483: Was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and
21140-540: Was constructed between 1905-1908 by townspeople who were part of the Bulgarian Exarchate and it operated till 1913. Repurposed several times, it became a Greek high school twice and used in a military capacity by the French (WWI), Germans (WWII) and the Greek National Army (Greek Civil War). Later, it served as a Commercial School and the Economic High School (1961-1977). Earmarked for possible preservation by
21291-409: Was disappointed that the city became part of Serbia and they migrated to Greece. Many went to Thessaloniki and others settled in Florina, where in the late 1920s a new neighbourhood was established named Agia Paraskevi with a population of 600 refugee Aromanian families. The arrival of many hellenised Aromanians from Monastir to Florina resulted in the establishment of a large Greek speaking population in
21442-456: Was dropped ( θαῦμα ['θavma] → θάμα ['θama] ). Before [s] , it occasionally turned to [p] ( ἀνάπαυση [a'napafsi] → ἀνάπαψη [a'napapsi] ). Words with initial vowels were often affected by apheresis : ἡ ἡμέρα [i i'mera] → ἡ μέρα [i 'mera] ('the day'), ἐρωτῶ [ero'to] → ρωτῶ [ro'to] ('(I) ask'). A regular phenomenon in most dialects
21593-498: Was intended to continue south and link up with the terminal in Kalambaka , in Thessaly but this did not proceed due to the 1930s financial crisis. Florina is passed by GR-2 ( Lake Prespa – Edessa ) and GR-3 / E65 (Kozani – Florina – Niki – Bitola). The new A27 motorway will run east of Florina with its Florina-Niki segment already operational since 2015. The historic Via Egnatia
21744-600: Was present in Florina during the 17th century. Under Ottoman rule, the Jews of Florina had close ties with the Jewish community of Monastir (modern Bitola). Romani people migrated from Anatolia to Florina. In the mid to late 1910s, some Florina Romani migrated to Elbasan and Korçë and compose most of their urban modern Romani populations. According to historian Tasos Kostopoulos, after Florina became part of Greece, its population numbered 10,000 with two thirds being Muslim. Many Christian inhabitants of Florina were Slavic speakers with
21895-581: Was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in
22046-525: Was still open in Florina. Carsi i Yakosu Bey mosque was built in the eighteenth century, the building and most of the minaret, excluding its base, were demolished between 1953-1954. Another destroyed building was the Tekke, where the site is the present location of the town's bank. Other Ottoman era landmarks were the clock, located in the town centre and demolished in 1927; the Hamman (bathhouse), demolished in 1925 and
22197-545: Was to persist until well into the 20th century, when the Greek language question was decided in favor of the vernacular in 1976. The persistence until the Middle Ages of a single Greek speaking state, the Byzantine Empire, meant that, unlike Vulgar Latin , 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 Greek , spoken in Crimea, Pontic Greek , spoken along
22348-552: Was under German control and the town became a centre of Slavic separatism. For part of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) the mountains of the Florina area were under communist control. The Slavic-Macedonian National Liberation Front , later simply the National Liberation Front or NOF, had a significant presence in the area: by 1946, seven Slav Macedonian partisan units were operating in the Florina area, and NOF had
22499-566: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
22650-637: Was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to
22801-653: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . 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 same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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