90-462: The Kyrenia Mountains ( Greek : Κερύνειο Όρος ; Turkish : Girne Dağları ) is a long, narrow mountain range that runs for approximately 160 km (100 mi) along the northern coast of the island of Cyprus . It is primarily made of hard crystalline limestone , with some marble . Its highest peak is Mount Selvili , at 1,024 m (3,360 ft). Pentadaktylos (also spelt Pentadactylos ; Greek : Πενταδάκτυλος ; Turkish : Beşparmak )
180-561: 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
270-570: 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,
360-508: 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
450-674: A hill which therefore took the name of Mount Saraceno on the Gargano . From there they often came down to plunder and burn towns, villages and cities, to desecrate temples and commit all sorts of cruelties and atrocities. Defeated numerous times by different peoples, the Saracens, who fled from the Gargano in 967, fortified themselves in Bari. The campaign against Bari was long and between various negotiations, alliances and treaties it took place from 855 to 871, with
540-573: 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
630-400: 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
720-453: 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 ,
810-556: A nest at the mouth of the Garigliano (Traetto), from which they also held Rome at gunpoint: they were finally expelled only in 915, when the Byzantine empress Zoe Porphyrogenita managed to get the Italian lords to agree on the need to expel the Saracens from the Italian peninsula and began a campaign against them which - thanks to the commitment of Berengar I of Italy , of Pope John X , and of
900-657: A region in the northern Sinai Peninsula . Ptolemy also mentions a people called the Sarakēnoí ( Ancient Greek : οἱ Σαρακηνοί ) living in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula (near neighbor to the Sinai). Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical history narrates an account wherein Pope Dionysius of Alexandria mentions Saracens in a letter while describing the persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Decius : "Many were, in
990-456: 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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#17330854508941080-633: A swift reaction against the Saracens. A first attempt to expel the Saracens from southern Italy was made in 866-871 by the emperor and king Louis II , who, having descended into Italy with an army of Franks , Burgundians and Provencals , in addition to the allied troops of Pope Sergius II , of the Doge of Venice , the Duke of Spoleto and that of Naples, he took back Benevento, Capua, Salerno, Bari, destroying Matera and Venosa . Now uncontrollable Saracen troops had been hired by Adelchis , Duke of Benevento: he forced
1170-450: A territory of Byzantine prerogative for centuries: Basil allied himself with Sawdan and he fomented a revolt of the Lombards of Benevento, who took the emperor prisoner for about two months, while a new Saracen army of twenty thousand men, sent by Kairouan, devastated Calabria and Campania . In 873 Ludovico returned to Campania and defeated the Saracens, but died two years later. Therefore,
1260-735: Is srq "to steal, rob, thief", more specifically from the noun sāriq ( Arabic : سارق ), pl. sāriqīn ( سارقين ), which means "thief, marauder". In his Levantine Diary , covering the years 1699–1740, the Damascene writer Hamad bin Kanan al-Salhi ( Arabic : محمد بن كَنّان الصالحي ) used the term sarkan to mean "travel on a military mission" from the Near East to parts of Southern Europe which were under Ottoman Empire rule, particularly Cyprus and Rhodes . Ptolemy 's 2nd-century work, Geography , describes Sarakēnḗ ( Ancient Greek : Σαρακηνή ) as
1350-584: Is another name for the Kyrenia Mountains, though Britannica refers to Pentadaktylos as the "western portion" of the latter, or the part west of Melounta . Pentadaktylos ( lit. "five-fingered") is so-named after one of its most distinguishing features, a peak that resembles five fingers. The Kyrenian mountains are named after the Kyrenian mountains in Achaia, Greece, which are well known from mythology because of
1440-562: Is in The King of Tars , a medieval romance. The Song of Roland , an Old French 11th-century heroic poem, refers to the black skin of Saracens as their only exotic feature. The term Saracen remained in use in the West as a synonym for "Muslim" until the 18th century. When the Age of Discovery commenced, it gradually lost popularity to the newer term Mohammedan , which came into usage from at least
1530-659: 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
1620-515: Is of the Byzantine hero Digenis Akritas . Tradition has it that Digenis Akritas's hand gripped the mountain to get out of the sea when he came to free Cyprus from its Saracen invaders, and this is his handprint. He also threw a large rock across Cyprus to get at the Saracen ships. That rock landed in Paphos at the site of the birthplace of Aphrodite, thus known to this day as Petra Tou Romiou or "Rock of
1710-815: 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 Saracen Saracen ( / ˈ s ær ə s ən / SARR -ə-sən )
1800-758: 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,
1890-611: 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
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#17330854508941980-701: The Annales Bertiniani , and from there they raged in the Rhône valley. The Balearic Islands were finally conquered by the Andalusian Umayyad cause in 902. From 827 the Aghlabid emirs of Kairouan , in today's Tunisia , began the conquest of Sicily , which took a long time, but which marked the apogee of Saracen rule in the Mediterranean for at least two centuries. The conquest was completed in 902, thanks to
2070-615: The equites from Phoenicia and Thamud . In one document, the defeated enemies of Diocletian 's campaign in the Syrian Desert are described as Saracens. Other 4th-century military reports make no mention of Arabs, but refer to Saracen groups ranging as far east as Mesopotamia who were involved in battles on both the Sasanian and Roman sides. The Saracens were named in the Roman administrative document Notitia Dignitatum , dating from
2160-634: The Arab people called Tayy , were located around Khaybar (an oasis north of Medina) and also in an area stretching up to the Euphrates . The Saraceni were placed north of them. These Saracens, located in the northern Hejaz , were described as people with a certain military ability who were opponents of the Roman Empire and who were classified by the Romans as barbarians . The Saracens are described as forming
2250-544: 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
2340-637: 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
2430-510: 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
2520-549: The Mesaoria plain. The location of the mountains near the sea made them desirable locations for watch towers and castles overlooking the northern Cyprus coast, as well as the central plain. These castles generally date from the 10th through the 15th centuries, primarily constructed by the Byzantines and Lusignans. The castles of St. Hilarion , Buffavento , and Kantara sit astride peaks and were of strategic importance during much of
2610-633: 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
2700-468: 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
2790-417: 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,
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2880-532: The 12th century, "Saracen" developed various overlapping definitions, generally conflating peoples and cultures associated with Islam , the Near East and the Abbasid Caliphate . Such an expansion in the meaning of the term had begun centuries earlier among the Byzantine Greeks , as evidenced in documents from the 8th century where "Saracen" is synonymous with "Muslim". Before the 16th century, "Saracen"
2970-475: The 16th century. After this point, Saracen enjoyed only sporadic usage (for example, in the phrase " Indo-Saracenic architecture ") before being outmoded entirely. In the Wiltshire dialect , the meaning of "Sarsen" (Saracen) was eventually extended to refer to anything regarded as non-Christian, whether Muslim or pagan. From that derived the still current term " sarsen " (a shortening of "Saracen stone"), denoting
3060-566: 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
3150-728: The 7th century, in the Greek-language Christian tract Doctrina Jacobi . Among other major events, the tract discusses the Muslim conquest of the Levant , which occurred after the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate following the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad . The Roman Catholic Church and European Christian leaders used the term during the Middle Ages to refer to Muslims . By
3240-649: The 827 Muslim conquest of Sicily . Also in this year, an autonomous Andalusian kingdom was founded in Alexandria , Egypt, which the Abbasid Caliphate put an end to in 825. Then the Andalusians left for the Aegean , where they established the Emirate of Crete , independent and flourishing from a commercial and cultural point of view, as well as powerful from a military point of view, until the Byzantine reconquest in 961. Crete became
3330-732: The Arabian mountain, enslaved by the barbarous 'sarkenoi'." The Augustan History also refers to an attack by Saraceni on Pescennius Niger 's army in Egypt in 193, but provides little information as to identifying them. Both Hippolytus of Rome and Uranius mention three distinct peoples in Arabia during the first half of the third century: the Taeni , the Saraceni , and the Arabes . The Taeni , later identified with
3420-618: The Church of San Marco dei Veneziani was built in old Bari. From Sicily in the 9th century the Arabs continued to plunder the coasts of southern Italy, also establishing new, occasional bridgeheads , such as at Agropoli or Santa Severina , which, despite the unsuccessful intervention of Otto II (in 982), they lasted for a long time, falling away only after 1036, when the death of the Sicilian emir of al-Akhal led to an irreversible fragmentation of power on
3510-486: The Dukes of Spoleto and Camerino - reaped the promised fruit. In reality the raids continued, in fact one of the most serious episodes seems to be the new sack of Oria and Taranto which occurred in 925/926, on which occasion the family of the well-known Oritan Jewish scholar Shabbethai Donnolo was captured. In 970, they returned again to the Gargano, devastating places (the two Roman cities of Siponto and Matinum were razed to
3600-538: 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
3690-540: 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
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3780-431: The Greek". 35°16′59″N 33°32′02″E / 35.283°N 33.534°E / 35.283; 33.534 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 the Indo-European language family. It
3870-566: The Islamic Empire between themselves between the 8th and 9th centuries ( Córdoba , Cairo and Baghdad ), were substantially independent. The repression of the Umayyad insurrection in al-Andalus was bloody and it is in this period (818) that the mass emigration of Andalusians (so indicated, regardless of ethnic origin and religion) took place along two lines, partly to Morocco and others to Egypt. From here they supported their co-religionists for
3960-554: The Muslims to create a fleet capable of undermining Byzantine supremacy in the Mediterranean in a relatively short time. Especially on the Maghreb and Spanish coasts, various emirates had been established where the local component soon merged with the Arab and Berber ones. Each emirate was headed by an emir who, apart from formal subjection to one of the three caliphs who divided
4050-443: The Pentadactylos mountains. One tells the story of a conceited villager who fell in love with the local queen and asked for her hand in marriage. The queen wished to be rid of the impertinent young man and requested that he bring her some water from the spring of Apostolos Andreas monastery in the Karpas, a perilous journey in those days. The man set off and after several weeks returned with a skin full of that precious water. The queen
4140-452: The Saracen port of Taranto remained, from which a very rich slave trade took place. It was the Byzantines who recovered Taranto in 876. However, the Saracen raids in the Adriatic did not end with the reconquest of Taranto, indeed in those years the Muslims completed the conquest of Sicily ( Syracuse in 878, Taormina in 902). In 882, once again allied with the Campanians, they destroyed the abbeys of San Vincenzo and Montecassino, establishing
4230-409: The Saracens as followers of a "false" prophet and "forerunner[s] to the Antichrist," and further connected their name to Ishmael and his expulsion. By the 12th century, Medieval Europeans used the term Saracen as both an ethnic and religious marker. In some Medieval literature, Saracens were equated with Muslims in general and described as dark-skinned, while Christians lighter-skinned. An example
4320-421: The Saracens found a way to prosper thanks to their raids and their offering themselves as mercenaries to the most diverse Christian lords of the time. In 843 the Saracens went so far as to destroy Fondi and Monte Cassino , arriving in Ostia and going up the Tiber to reach Rome where they sacked St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican and Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. The gesture prompted
4410-448: The abbots of Monte Cassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno . In the meantime, an emir reigned in Bari who juggled between the various local powers, without denying the granting, upon payment, of safe conducts for pilgrims who wanted to embark for the Holy Land . He also protected the learned Jewish community of Oria . Expelled for the first time from Bari, a nucleus of them entrenched themselves near Monte Matino ( Horace 's Mons matinus ) on
4500-430: The active combat phase in the four years between 867 and 871. The emir Sawdan, who had also sacked the Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo on the Gargano, was allowed to spend his life in golden captivity by his friend Adelchis, prince of Benevento. But this move turned out to be wrong for the German emperor due to the entry into the scene of the Byzantine emperor Basil I , who frowned upon the intervention in Southern Italy,
4590-404: 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),
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#17330854508944680-423: 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
4770-415: The center of numerous military expeditions in the Aegean, in southern Italy, where Traetto was also founded, and Rome was raided in 846, 849 and 876. In the western Mediterranean, due to the weakening of the Carolingian Empire and its fleet, Marseille was raided in 838 and 846, Arles in 842 and 850 and Fréjus in 869. The Muslims established a refuge in the Camargue in these years, as chronicled in
4860-413: The connection with one of the 12 labours of Hercules, the capture of the Kerynitis deer that lived there. This sacred deer of Artemis with golden horns and bronze legs ran so fast that no one could reach it. Hercules, however, after pursuing it for a whole year, managed to catch it and transport it alive to Mycenae. A devastating fire in July 1995 burned large portions of the Kyrenia Mountains, resulting in
4950-495: 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 ,
5040-400: The county of Capua. The compromise solution did not please Pope Leo IV , who in those years was having Rome surrounded with the " Leonine belt " of walls, as proof of the fear that was still alive, so the pontiff sponsored the formation of a Campanian fleet which in 849 defeated the Saracens off the coast of Ostia. Ludovico, nominated emperor in the meantime, moved towards Bari, also begged by
5130-441: 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
5220-528: 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
5310-428: The earliest known version of the claim that Ishmaelites chose to be called Saracens in order to identify with Abraham's "free" wife Sarah , rather than as Hagarenes, which would have highlighted their association with Abraham's "slave woman" Hagar . This claim was popular during the Middle Ages, but derives more from Paul's allegory in the New Testament letter to the Galatians than from historical data. The name Saracen
5400-408: The existence of such a flag which, apart from the catastrophic environmental damage it causes, the use of chemical substances and the brutal abuse of the environment, involves an absurd waste of electricity at a time of economic crisis? Does Turkey show sufficient respect towards the environment to justify its desire to open the relevant chapter of accession negotiations?" There are many legends about
5490-412: 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
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#17330854508945580-414: The ground), terrifying the inhabitants in massacres and robberies, who were forced to ask Otto the Great for help. It is on Mount Saraceno, where they were strongly entrenched for years, that the Saracens were defeated and driven from the place by Otto the Great. In 1002/03 Doge Pietro II Orseolo successfully led a fleet of 100 ships against the Saracens who had been besieging Bari for months. As thanks,
5670-414: The history of Cyprus during the Middle Ages . A flag of Northern Cyprus is painted on the southern slope of the Kyrenia Mountains. It is reportedly 425 metres wide and 250 metres high, and is illuminated at night. The flag is considered controversial as evidenced in the Parliamentary Question put to the European Parliament by Antigoni Papadopoulou on 22 October 2009, "How can it permit
5760-401: The island. They were expelled from Sicily in 1071, after ten years of war, by the Normans . The chain of coastal towers along the Tyrrhenian coast, connected to each other within sight to exchange signals, had the purpose of spotting pirate ships from afar in order to give the alarm to the defenseless populations in time, but they were only built in the 16th century to protect themselves by
5850-466: The islands of Ischia and Ponza fell under Islamic rule. Again, the Neapolitans, to weaken Benevento, had invited the Saracens to attack Brindisi in 838, from which they extended to Taranto and Bari , which became the seat of the eponymous emirate from 840 to 871. Having defeated a Venetian fleet in the Kvarner Gulf , the Saracens now took advantage of the rivalries between the local powers, acting as masters and now also putting themselves at
5940-454: The kind of stone used by the builders of Stonehenge , long predating Islam. The rhyming stories of the Old French Crusade cycle were popular with medieval audiences in Northern France, Occitania and Iberia. Beginning in the late 12th century, stories about the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem gave accounts of battle scenes and suffering, and of Saracen plunder, their silks and gold, and masterfully embroidered and woven tents. From
6030-449: 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
6120-414: 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
6210-405: The loss of significant forest land and natural habitat. The only other mountain range in Cyprus is the Troodos Mountains . These mountains are a series of sedimentary formations from the Permian to the Middle Miocene pushed up by a collision of the African and Eurasian plates . Though only half the height of the Troodos Mountains , the Kyrenia Mountains are rugged and rise abruptly from
6300-400: 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
6390-465: 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
6480-579: The offensive against the Byzantines, who had cut off supplies by conquering Crete (827) and Malta (870). The settlement of the Saracens was sometimes also encouraged and supported by local lords, as help in disputes, as in the case of Andrea, consul of Naples , who was harassed by the Lombard prince of Benevento Sico and after turning in vain to Louis the Pious he asked the Saracens for help. The intervention
6570-604: The people of Bari to accept the protection of the Berber Khalfun, who as payment was promised nothing less than permission to sack and burn some sacred buildings in the area, but he went so far as to raze the city of Capua to the ground. Ludovico, then in Italy, managed to free Benevento from the mercenaries and pacify the Lombard princes, acting as guarantor for the division of the duchy into the two principalities of Salerno and Benevento and
6660-574: 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
6750-516: The service of the unscrupulous Beneventans themselves. In the year 840, Siconulf , lord of Salerno , fighting with Radelchis and Landulf , lords of Benevento and Capua , called to his aid the Saracens settled in the colony under the Traetto hill, at the mouth of the Garigliano , often and willingly hired by the Duke of Naples , Andrew II . After bloody incursions into some parts of southern Italy ,
6840-475: The story of the Frankish knights at the tent of Saracen leader Corbaran: The tent was very rich, draped with brilliant silk, and patterned green silk was thrown over the grass, with lengths of cut fabric worked with birds and beasts. The cords with which it was tied are of silk, and the quilt was sewn with a shining, delicate samit . The Islamic conquest of countries such as Egypt and Syria had allowed
6930-437: 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
7020-465: The time of Theodosius I in the 4th century , as comprising distinctive units in the Roman army . They were distinguished in the document from Arabs. No later than the early fifth century, Jewish and Christian writers began to equate Saracens with Arabs. Saracens were associated with Ishmaelites (descendants of Abraham 's firstborn Ishmael ) in some strands of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic genealogical thinking. The writings of Jerome (d. 420) are
7110-568: 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
7200-556: Was a term used both in Greek and Latin writings between the 5th and 15th centuries to refer to the people who lived in and near what was designated by the Romans as Arabia Petraea and Arabia Deserta . The term's meaning evolved during its history of usage. During the Early Middle Ages , the term came to be associated with the tribes of Arabia . The oldest known source mentioning "Saracens" in relation to Islam dates back to
7290-579: Was also requested again by his successor Sicard , with the cities of Amalfi , Sorrento and Gaeta joining the Neapolitans: the Saracens behaved correctly towards the cities of Campania, helping them to defeat the Beneventans and signing peace and trade agreements. In exchange the Neapolitans helped the Saracens during the siege of Messina in 843 and maintained a complicit neutrality when Punta Licosa and
7380-546: 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
7470-486: 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
7560-562: Was commonly used in Western languages to refer to Muslims , and the terms "Muslim" and "Islam" were generally not used, with a few isolated exceptions. The term gradually became obsolete in favor of "Muslim" following the Age of Discovery . The Latin term Saraceni is of unknown original meaning. There are claims of it being derived from the Semitic triliteral root šrq "east" and šrkt "tribe, confederation". Another possible Semitic root
7650-476: Was most dismayed to see that he had succeeded, but still refused to marry him. In a fit of rage, he poured the water on to the earth, seized a handful of the resulting mud and threw it at the queens head. She ducked and the lump of mud sailed far across the plain to land on top of the Kyrenia mountain range, where it is to this day, still showing the impression of the thwarted villager’s five fingers. Another famous one
7740-553: Was not indigenous among the populations so described but was applied to them by Greco-Roman historians based on Greek place names. As the Middle Ages progressed, usage of the term in the Latin West changed, but its connotation remained associated with opponents of Christianity, and its exact definition is unclear. In an 8th-century polemical work, the Arab monk John of Damascus criticized
7830-480: 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
7920-566: 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
8010-637: 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
8100-653: 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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