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63-657: The crossguard was developed in the European sword around the 10th century for the protection of the wielder's hand. The earliest forms were the crossguard variant of the Spatha used by the Huns , the so-called Pontic swords. There are many examples of crossguards on Sasanian Persian Swords beginning from the early 3rd century. They might be the oldest examples. Crossguards were not only used to counter enemy attacks, but also to improve grip. They were later seen in late Viking swords . Crossguards are

126-570: 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,

189-552: 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 , 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

252-556: 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

315-531: A floral motif. After the end of the Middle Ages, crossguards became more elaborate, forming first quillons and then, through the addition of guard branches, the basket hilt , which offered more protection to the unarmored hand. Ewart Oakeshott in chapter 4 of his The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (1964) classifies medieval cross-guards into twelve types: The medieval dagger in the 14th and 15th century also adopted

378-531: 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 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

441-451: A rounded tip. Perhaps the most recognisable descendants of the spathae were the Viking Age blades. These swords took on a much more acute distal taper and point. They had deep fullers running their length, yet still had single-handed hilts which sported a uniquely shaped pommel , flat at the grip side and roughly triangular early on, with the flat curving to fit the hand later. While

504-403: A spatula, a metal-working implement, a palm-leaf and so on. There is no hint of any native Roman sword called a spatha . Referring to an actual sword, the term first appears in the pages of Tacitus with reference to an incident of the early empire . The British king, Caratacus , having rebelled, found himself trapped on a rocky hill, so that if he turned one way he encountered the gladii of

567-486: A standard feature of the Norman sword of the 11th century and of the knightly arming sword throughout the high and late medieval period. Early crossguards were straight metal bars, sometimes tapering towards the outer ends. While this simple type was never discontinued, more elaborate forms developed alongside it in the course of the Middle Ages. The crossguard could be waisted or bent in the 12th and 13th century. Beginning in

630-473: A variant with quillons styled after the hilt of a sword. Quillon-daggers remained popular in the 16th century after the sword type it resembled had fallen out of use. Spatha The spatha was a type of straight and long sword , measuring between 0.5 and 1 metre (20 and 40 inches), with a handle length of between 18 and 20 centimetres (7 and 8 inches), in use in the territory of the Roman Empire during

693-766: 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 , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout

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756-742: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within 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

819-474: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before 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

882-567: Is likely that spatha is the romanization of the Doric Greek word σπάθα ( spáthā ). The word survives in Modern Greek as σπάθη and σπαθί . The Latin word became the French épée , Catalan and Occitan espasa , Portuguese and Spanish espada , Italian spada , Romanian spadă and Albanian shpata , all meaning "sword". The English word spatula comes from Latin spat ( h ) ula ,

945-510: 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 the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to

1008-518: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and 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

1071-758: 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,

1134-630: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek 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

1197-531: Is the cusp or écusson, a protrusion of the crossguard in the center where it is fitted on the blade. Also from the 14th century, the leather chappe is sometimes replaced with a metal sheet. An early example of this is a sword dated to c. 1320–40 kept at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. A later example is the "Monza sword" of Estore Visconti (early 15th century), where the rain-guard is of silver and decorated with

1260-486: 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 a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It

1323-510: 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

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1386-471: The Roman Empire during the 3rd and 4th centuries they would come into contact with the spatha . Surviving examples of these Germanic Iron Age swords have blades measuring between 71 and 81 cm (28 and 32 in) in length and 43 to 61 mm ( 1 + 3 ⁄ 4 to 2 + 3 ⁄ 8  in) in width. These single-handed weapons of war sport a tang 10 to 13 cm (4 to 5 in) long and have very little taper in their blades. They usually end in

1449-492: 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 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

1512-582: The spatha a strong and lightweight blade. The spatha was first introduced to the Romans by Celtic mercenaries during the Second Punic War . The Celts would have used weaponry and armor from their homeland, and one of the Celtic weapons would have been the spatha. Although many believe that the spatha was adopted by the Romans due to contact with Germania , this is not true. The earlier gladius sword

1575-572: The spatha have been found in Britain and Germany. It was used extensively by Germanic warriors . It is unclear whether it came from the gladius or the longer Celtic swords , or whether it served as a model for the various arming swords and Viking swords of Europe. The spatha remained popular throughout the Migration Period . It evolved into the knightly sword of the High Middle Ages by

1638-532: The 12th century. The word comes from the Latin spatha , which derives from the Greek word σπάθη ( spáthē ), meaning "any broad blade, of wood or metal" but also "broad blade of a sword". The Greek word σπάθη was used in the middle archaic period for various types of Iron Age swords . The word does not appear in Homeric Greek , but it is mentioned in the works of Alcaeus of Mytilene (sixth century BC) and Theophrastus (fourth century BC). It

1701-423: The 13th or 14th century, swords were almost universally fitted with a so-called chappe or rain-guard , a piece of leather fitted to the crossguard. The purpose of this leather is not entirely clear, but it seems to have originated as a part of the scabbard, functioning as a lid when the sword was in the scabbard. In the 14th to 15th century, many more elaborate forms were tried. A feature of such late medieval forms

1764-537: The 1st to 6th centuries AD. Later swords, from the 7th to 10th centuries, like the Viking swords , are recognizable derivatives and sometimes subsumed under the term spatha . The Roman spatha was used in war and in gladiatorial fights. The spatha of literature appears in the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD as a weapon used by presumably Celtic auxiliaries and gradually became a standard heavy infantry weapon by

1827-405: The 3rd century AD, relegating the gladius to use as a light infantry weapon. The spatha apparently replaced the gladius in the front ranks, giving the infantry more reach when thrusting. While the infantry version had a long point, versions carried by the cavalry had a rounded tip that prevented accidental stabbing of the cavalryman's own foot or horse. Archaeologically many instances of

1890-465: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . 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

1953-486: 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

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2016-425: 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 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

2079-491: 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

2142-629: 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 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

2205-661: 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 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

2268-404: 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),

2331-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in 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

2394-657: The blade's length increased by around 10 cm (4 in), and the hilt changed significantly. Instead of the Brazil-nut pommel, a thick disc-shaped pommel was attached "on-edge" to the bottom of the iron hilt. In addition the upper guard grew substantially from the near-absent design predating it. Also, the blades tended to taper slightly less than those found in the time of the Vikings . Jan Petersen , in De Norske Vikingsverd ( The Norwegian Viking Swords , 1919), introduced

2457-539: The bogs in the belief that they could go with a deceased chief on his voyage to a better place. A cache of 90 swords was found at Nydam Mose in Denmark in 1858. They were in the form of the spatha and therefore have been classified as "Roman swords". They are dated to the 3rd to 4th centuries. Many connect the Nydam cache with the sword of Beowulf , who was supposed to be a contemporary. When Germanic tribes began to invade

2520-510: The diminutive of spatha . English spade , from Old English spadu or spædu , is the Germanic cognate , derived from a Common Germanic *spadō , ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European stem *sph 2 -dh- . During the Second Punic War , Celtic mercenaries introduced the spatha to the Roman army . The spatha was a weapon used by the cavalrymen , while the auxiliaries and legionaries of

2583-404: The early 19th century that 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

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2646-555: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in 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

2709-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered 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

2772-598: The front handguard into a full cross-guard , and the reduction of the typical Viking Age lobated pommel into simpler brazil nut or disc shapes. The sword of Otto III , (total length 95.5 cm), preserved as a relic in Essen , is an example of the emerging arming sword, although it has been encrusted with decorations during the ensuing centuries. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ )

2835-611: The infantry used the gladius instead. Eventually, the Roman infantry would adopt the spatha in the 2nd century. It was a very versatile sword, undergoing many changes from its origins in Gaul to its usage in the Roman military . The blade was 60 to 75 cm (24 to 30 inches) long. The pattern welding was used to strengthen the core of the blade. The appearance of the metal was enhanced due to inlay and contrasting metals. The sword also incorporated one or two forged fullers, thus making

2898-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of 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

2961-463: 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

3024-490: The latter reserved for eunuchs . One of the more famous spatharokandidatoi was Harald Hardrada . The term " Roman Iron Age " refers approximately to the time of the Roman Empire in northern Europe , which was outside the jurisdiction of the empire, but, judging from the imported Roman artifacts, was influenced by Roman civilization. One source of artifacts from this period are the bogs of Schleswig , Holstein and Denmark . Objects were deliberately broken and thrown into

3087-688: The legionaries, and if the other, the spathae of the auxiliaries. There is no indication in Tacitus that they were cavalry. The next mention of spathae is in the 5th century, by Vegetius , now as a weapon carried by infantry. The spatha remained in use in the Byzantine Empire and its army . In the Byzantine court, spatharios (σπαθάριος), or "bearer of the spatha ", was a mid-level court title . Other variants deriving from it were protospatharios , spatharokandidatos and spatharokoubikoularios ,

3150-621: 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 the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek

3213-441: 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 a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and

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3276-510: The most widely used classification of swords of the Viking Age, describing 26 types labelled A–Z. In 1927, R. E. M. Wheeler condensed Petersen's typology into a simplified typology of nine groups, numbered I–IX. The transition from the Viking Age spatha -inspired sword to the High Medieval knightly sword took place between the 10th and 11th centuries. The main development was the growth of

3339-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, 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

3402-463: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek 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

3465-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from 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

3528-426: The pattern of hilt and blade design of this type might readily be called a " Viking sword ", to do so would be to neglect the widespread popularity it enjoyed. All over continental Europe between the 8th and 10th centuries, this design and its variations could be found. Many of the best blades were of Frankish origin, given hilts in local centres. These blades had significantly better balance. During Norman times ,

3591-437: 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

3654-568: 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

3717-549: 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 the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of

3780-546: 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

3843-634: Was gradually replaced by the spatha from the late 2nd to the 3rd century AD. From the early 3rd century, legionaries and cavalrymen began to wear their swords on the left side, perhaps because the scutum had been abandoned and the spatha had replaced the gladius . In the imperial period, the Romans adopted the original Greek term, spáthē (σπάθη), as spatha , which still carried the general meaning of any object considered long and flat. Spatha appears, first in Pliny and then in Seneca , with different meanings:

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3906-566: 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

3969-653: 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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