Proto-Greek language
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Proto-Greek language is the common ancestor of the Greek dialects, including the Mycenean language, the classical Greek dialects Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, Doric and North-Western Greek, and ultimately the Koine and Modern Greek. Some scholars would include the fragmentary Ancient Macedonian language, either as descended from an earlier "Proto-Hellenic" language, or by definition including it among the descendents of Proto-Greek.
Proto-Greek would have been spoken in the 3rd millennium BC, most probably in the Balkans. The earliest Hellenic migrants entering the Greek peninsula roughly around 2000 BC spoke the predecessor of the Mycenaean language. They were separated from the Dorian Greeks, who entered the peninsula roughly one millennium later (see Dorian invasion, Greek Dark Ages), speaking a dialect that had in some respects remained more archaic.
The primary sound changes separating Proto-Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language included
- loss of pre-vocalic s
- de-voicing of voiced aspirates
Both sound changes are already complete in Mycenaean. The labiovelars, on the other hand, lost in all classical dialects, are still intact in Mycenaean. The laryngeals appear to have remained partly intact until early dialectal splits. The evolution of Proto-Greek should be considered with the background of an early Palaeo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. The characteristically Greek representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels is shared by the Armenian language, which also shares other phonological and morphological peculiarities of Greek. The close relatedness of Armenian and Greek sheds light on the paraphyletic nature of the Centum-Satem isogloss.
Close similarities of Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit suggest that either both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian were still quite similar to late Proto-Indo-European, which would place the latter somewhere in the 4th millennium BC, or a post-PIE Graeco-Aryan proto-language. Graeco-Aryan has little support among linguists, since both geographical and temporal distribution of Greek and Indo-Iranian fit well with the Kurgan hypothesis of Proto-Indo-European.
