Attic Greek

Greek is the primary member of the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. In ancient times, Greek had already come to exist in several dialects, one of which was Attic. The earliest attestations of Greek, dating from the 16th to 11th centuries BC, are written in Linear B, an archaic writing system used by the Mycenaean Greeks in writing their language; the distinction between Eastern and Western Greek is believed to have arisen by Mycenaean times or before. Mycenaean Greek represents an early form of Eastern Greek, the group to which Attic also belongs. Later Greek literature wrote about three main dialects: Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic; Attic was part of the Ionic dialect group. "Old Attic" is used in reference to the dialect of Thucydides (460–400 BC) and the dramatists of 5th-century Athens whereas "New Attic" is used for the language of later writers following conventionally the accession in 285 BC of Greek-speaking Ptolemy II to the throne of the Kingdom of Egypt. Ruling from Alexandria, Ptolemy launched the Alexandrian period, during which the city of Alexandria and its expatriate Greek-medium scholars flourished.[2]

The original range of the spoken Attic dialect included Attica and a number of the Aegean Islands; the closely related Ionic was also spoken along the western and northwestern coasts of Asia Minor in modern Turkey, in Chalcidice, Thrace, Euboea, and in some colonies of Magna Graecia. Eventually, the texts of literary Attic were widely studied far beyond their homeland: first in the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, including in Ancient Rome and the larger Hellenistic world, and later in the Muslim world, Europe, and other parts of the world touched by those civilizations.

The earliest Greek literature, which is attributed to Homer and is dated to the eighth or seventh centuries BC, is written in "Old Ionic" rather than Attic. Athens and its dialect remained relatively obscure until the establishment of its democracy following the reforms of Solon in the sixth century BC; so began the classical period, one of great Athenian influence both in Greece and throughout the Mediterranean.

The first extensive works of literature in Attic are the plays of dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes dating from the fifth century BC. The military exploits of the Athenians led to some universally read and admired history, as found in the works of Thucydides and Xenophon. Slightly less known because they are more technical and legal are the orations by Antiphon, Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, and many others. The Attic Greek of philosophers Plato (427–347 BC) and his student Aristotle (384–322 BC) dates to the period of transition between Classical Attic and Koine.

Students who learn Ancient Greek usually begin with the Attic dialect and continue, depending upon their interests, to the later Koine of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, to the earlier Homeric Greek of Homer and Hesiod, or to the contemporaneous Ionic Greek of Herodotus and Hippocrates.

A ballot voting against Themistocles, son of Neocles, under the Athenian Democracy (see ostracism) Inscription: ΘΕΜΙΣΘΟΚΛΕΣ ΝΕΟΚΛΕΟΣ (classical standard Θεμιστοκλῆς Νεοκλέους Themistoklês Neokléous). The text is an example of the epichoric alphabet; the last two letters of Themistocles are written in a boustrophedon manner and that Ε and Ο are used for both long and short e and o.

Attic Greek, like other dialects, was originally written in a local variant of the Greek alphabet. According to the classification of archaic Greek alphabets, which was introduced by Adolf Kirchhoff,[3] the old-Attic system belongs to the "eastern" or "blue" type, as it uses the letters Ψ and Χ with their classical values (/ps/ and /kʰ/), unlike "western" or "red" alphabets, which used Χ for /ks/ and expressed /kʰ/ with Ψ. In other respects, Old Attic shares many features with the neighbouring Euboean alphabet (which is "western" in Kirchhoff's classification).[4] Like the latter, it used an L-shaped variant of lambda () and an S-shaped variant of sigma (). It lacked the consonant symbols xi (Ξ) for /ks/ and psi (Ψ) for /ps/, expressing these sound combinations with ΧΣ and ΦΣ, respectively. Moreover, like most other mainland Greek dialects, Attic did not yet use omega (Ω) and eta (Η) for the long vowels /ɔː/ and /ɛː/. Instead, it expressed the vowel phonemes /o, oː, ɔː/ with the letter Ο (which corresponds with classical Ο, ΟΥ, Ω) and /e, eː, ɛː/ with the letter Ε (which corresponds with Ε, ΕΙ, and Η in later classical orthography). Moreover, the letter Η was used as heta, with the consonantal value of /h/ rather than the vocalic value of /ɛː/.

In the fifth century, Athenian writing gradually switched from this local system to the more widely used Ionic alphabet, native to the eastern Aegean Islands and Asia Minor. By the late fifth century, the concurrent use of elements of the Ionic system with the traditional local alphabet had become common in private writing, and in 403 BC, it was decreed that public writing would switch to the new Ionic orthography, as part of the reform following the Thirty Tyrants. This new system, also called the "Eucleidian" alphabet, after the name of the archon Eucleides, who oversaw the decision,[5] was to become the Classical Greek alphabet throughout the Greek-speaking world. The classical works of Attic literature were subsequently handed down to posterity in the new Ionic spelling, and it is the classical orthography in which they are read today.

• Attic tends to replace the -ter "doer of" suffix with -tes: dikastes for dikaster "judge".
• The Attic adjectival ending -eios and corresponding noun ending, both having two syllables with the diphthong ei, stand in place of ēios, with three syllables, in other dialects: politeia, Cretan politēia, "constitution", both from politewia whose w is dropped.

Attic Greek grammar follows Ancient Greek grammar to a large extent. References to Attic Grammar are usually in reference to peculiarities and exceptions from Ancient Greek Grammar. This section mentions only some of these Attic peculiarities.

Classical Attic may refer either to the varieties of Attic Greek spoken and written in Greek majuscule[12] in the 5th and 4th centuries BC (Classical-era Attic) or to the Hellenistic and Roman [13] era standardized Attic Greek, mainly on the language of Attic orators and written in Greek uncial.

Attic replaces the Ionic -σσ with -ττ :

• Attic γλῶττα → Ionic γλῶσσα "tongue"
• Attic πράττειν → Ionic πράσσειν "to do, to act, to make"
• Attic θάλαττα → Ionic θάλασσα "sea"

• Buck, Carl Darling (1955). The Greek Dialects. The University of Chicago Press.
• Goodwin, William W. (1879). Greek Grammar. Macmillan Education. ISBN 0-89241-118-X.
• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-36250-0.
• Threatte, Leslie (1980). The grammar of Attic inscriptions. Vol. I: Phonology. Berlin: De Gruyter.

• Allen, W. Sidney. 1987. Vox Graeca: The pronunciation of Classical Greek. 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Bakker, Egbert J., ed. 2010. A companion to the Ancient Greek language. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Christidis, Anastasios-Phoivos, ed. 2007. A history of Ancient Greek: From the beginnings to Late Antiquity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Colvin, Stephen C. 2007. A historical Greek reader: Mycenaean to the koiné. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Horrocks, Geoffrey. 2010. Greek: A history of the language and its speakers. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Palmer, Leonard R. 1980. The Greek language. London: Faber & Faber.
• Teodorsson, Sven-Tage. 1974. The phonemic system of the Attic dialect 400–340 BC. Gothenburg, Sweden: Institute of Classical Studies, University of Göteborg.
• Threatte, Leslie. 1980–86. The grammar of Attic inscriptions. 2 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Γεώργιος Μπαμπινιώτης, Συνοπτική Ιστορία τής Ελληνικής γλώσσας, Athens 2002.

• English-Attic Dictionary (Woodhouse)
• Perseus Digital Library
• Greek Word Study Tool (Perseus)
• A Greek Grammar for Colleges (Smyth) Archived 2015-05-01 at the Wayback Machine
• Syntax of Classical Greek (Gildersleeve) Archived 2015-05-01 at the Wayback Machine
• Ancient Greek Tutorials – Provides Attic Greek audio recordings
• Classical (Attic) Greek Online