Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops (such as , as in English "bot, spot, pot"); a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.
Koine Greek, the variety of Greek used after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, is sometimes included in Ancient Greek, but its pronunciation is described in Koine Greek phonology. For disagreements with the reconstruction given here, see below.
Dialects
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, consisting of many dialects. All Greek dialects derive from Proto-Greek and they share certain characteristics, but there were also distinct differences in pronunciation. For instance, the form of Doric in Crete had a digraph , which likely stood for a sound not present in Attic. The early form of Ionic in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed (Homeric), and the Aeolic dialect of Sappho, likely had the phoneme at the beginnings of words, sometimes represented by the letter digamma , but it had been lost in the standard Attic dialect.
The pluricentric nature of Ancient Greek differs from that of Latin, which was composed of basically one variety from the earliest Old Latin texts until Classical Latin. Latin only formed dialects once it was spread over Europe by the Roman Empire; these Vulgar Latin dialects became the Romance languages.
The main dialect groups of Ancient Greek are Arcadocypriot, Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic. These form two main groups: East Greek, which includes Arcadocypriot, Aeolic, Ionic, and Attic, and West Greek, which consists of Doric along with Northwest Greek and Achaean.
Of the main dialects, all but Arcadocypriot have literature in them. The Ancient Greek literary dialects do not necessarily represent the native speech of the authors that use them. A primarily Ionic-Aeolic dialect, for instance, is used in epic poetry, while pure Aeolic is used in lyric poetry. Both Attic and Ionic are used in prose, and Attic is used in most parts of the Athenian tragedies, with Doric forms in the choral sections.
Early East Greek Most of the East Greek dialects palatalized or assibilated to before . West Greek, including Doric, did not undergo this sound change in certain cases, and through the influence of Doric neither did the Thessalian and Boeotian dialects of Aeolic. Attic , Doric ('he places') Attic , Doric ('they are') Attic , Doric ('twenty')
Arcadocypriot was one of the first Greek dialects in Greece. Mycenaean Greek, the form of Greek spoken before the Greek Dark Ages, seems to be an early form of Arcadocypriot. Clay tablets with Mycenaean Greek in Linear B have been found over a wide area, from Thebes in Central Greece, to Mycenae and Pylos on the Peloponnese, to Knossos on Crete. However, during the Ancient Greek period, Arcadocypriot was only spoken in Arcadia, in the interior of the Peloponnese, and on Cyprus. The dialects of these two areas remained remarkably similar despite the great geographical distance.
Aeolic is closely related to Arcadocypriot. It was originally spoken in eastern Greece north of the Peloponnese: in Thessaly, in Locris, Phocis, and southern Aetolia, and in Boeotia, a region close to Athens. Aeolic was carried to Aeolis, on the coast of Asia Minor, and the nearby island of Lesbos. By the time of Ancient Greek, the only Aeolic dialects that remained in Greece were Thessalian and Boeotian. The Aeolic dialects of Greece adopted some characteristics of Doric, since they were located near Doric-speaking areas, while the Aeolian and Lesbian dialects did not.
Boeotian underwent vowel shifts similar to those that occurred later in Koine Greek, converting to , to , and to . These are reflected in spelling (see Boeotian Greek phonology). Aeolic also retained .
Homeric or Epic Greek, the literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, Iliad and the Odyssey, is based on early Ionic and Aeolic, with Arcadocypriot forms. In its original form, it likely had the semivowel , as indicated by the meter in some cases. This sound is sometimes written as in inscriptions, but not in the Attic-influenced text of Homer.
West Greek The Doric dialect, the most important member of West Greek, originated from western Greece. Through the Dorian invasion, Doric displaced the native Arcadocypriot and Aeolic dialects in some areas of central Greece, on the Peloponnese, and on Crete, and strongly influenced the Thessalian and Boeotian dialects of Aeolic.
Doric dialects are classified by which vowel they have as the result of compensatory lengthening and contraction: those that have are called Severer or Old, and those that have , as Attic does, are called Milder or New. Laconian and Cretan, spoken in Laconia, the region of Sparta, and on Crete, are two Old Doric dialects.
Ancient Macedonian, Thessalian, Elean, and Epirote shared an "oddity" of cases where voiced stops (, written ) appear to correspond to Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates . In most Greek, the Proto-Indo-European aspirates were devoiced to voiceless aspirates , written (though these would later become fricatives in Attic Koine around the first century AD). As with Macedonian, this phenomenon is sometimes attributed to non-Greek substrate and adstrate influence, with some linguists attributing such an influence on Epirote to Illyrian. Filos, however, notes, that the attribution of , and for specifically voiced stops is not secure. Emilio Crespo, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid, wrote that "the voicing of voiceless stops and the development of aspirates into voiced fricatives turns out to be the outcome of an internal development of Macedonian as a dialect of Greek" without excluding "the presence of interference from other languages or of any linguistic substrate or adstrate", as also argued by M. Hatzopoulos.
Attic and Ionic Attic and Ionic share a vowel shift not present in any other East or West Greek dialects. They both raised Proto-Greek long to (see below). Later on, Attic lowered found immediately after back to , differentiating itself from Ionic. This long vowel then merged with /ɛː/ and was noted in the Ionic alphabet (which became used by the Athenians in the classical era) All other East and West Greek dialects retain original .
Ionic was spoken around the Aegean Sea, including in Ionia, a region of Anatolia south of Aeolis, for which it was named. Ionic contracts vowels less often than Attic (see below).
Attic is usually the dialect taught in modern introductory Ancient Greek courses, and the one that has much of the most important literature written in it. It was spoken in Athens and Attica, the surrounding region. Old Attic, which was used by the historian Thucydides and the tragedians, replaced the native Attic with the of other dialects. Later writers, such as Plato, use the native Attic forms.
Later Greek
Koine, the form of Greek spoken during the Hellenistic period, was primarily based on Attic Greek, with some influences from other dialects. It underwent many sound changes, including development of aspirated and voiced stops into fricatives and the shifting of many vowels and diphthongs to (iotacism). In the Byzantine period it developed into Medieval Greek, which later became standard Modern Greek or Demotic.
Tsakonian, a modern form of Greek mutually unintelligible with Standard Modern Greek, derived from the Laconian variety of Doric, and is therefore the only surviving descendant of a non-Attic dialect.
Consonants Attic Greek had about 15 consonant phonemes: nine stop consonants, two fricatives, and four or six sonorants. Modern Greek has about the same number of consonants. The main difference between the two is that Modern Greek has voiced and voiceless fricatives that developed from Ancient Greek voiced and aspirated stops.
In the table below, the phonemes of standard Attic are unmarked, allophones are enclosed in parentheses. The sounds marked by asterisks appear in dialects or in earlier forms of Greek, but may not be phonemes in standard Attic.
+ Consonant phones Labial Coronal Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive aspirated tenuis voiced Nasal () Fricative voiceless voiced () Trill voiceless () voiced Approximant voiceless * * voiced * *
Stops + Triads of stops labial stops dental stops velar stops Ancient Greek had nine stops. The grammarians classified them in three groups, distinguished by voice-onset time: voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated (tenuis), and voiced. The aspirated stops are written . The tenuis stops are written , with representing lack of aspiration and voicing, or . The voiced stops are written . For the Ancient Greek terms for these three groups, see below; see also the section on spirantization.
English distinguishes two types of stops: voiceless and voiced. Voiceless stops have three main pronunciations (allophones): moderately aspirated at the beginning of a word before a vowel, unaspirated after , and unaspirated, unreleased, glottalized, or debuccalized at the end of a word. English voiced stops are often only partially voiced. Thus, some pronunciations of the English stops are similar to the pronunciations of Ancient Greek stops.
Fricatives Attic Greek had only two fricative phonemes: the voiceless alveolar sibilant and the glottal fricative .
is often called the aspirate (see below). Attic generally kept it, but some non-Attic dialects during the Classical period lost it (see below). It mostly occurred at the beginning of words, because it was usually lost between vowels, except in two rare words. Also, when a stem beginning with was the second part of a compound word, the sometimes remained, probably depending on whether the speaker recognized that the word was a compound. This can be seen in Old Attic inscriptions, where was written using the letterform of eta (see below), which was the source of in the Latin alphabet: Old Attic inscriptional forms , later ('faithful to an oath') , later ('sitting beside, assessors') , later ('let him be present') ('yay!') ('peacock')
was a voiceless coronal sibilant. It was transcribed using the symbol for in Coptic and an Indo-Aryan language, as in for ('of Dionysius') on an Indian coin. This indicates that the Greek sound was a hissing sound rather than a hushing sound: like English s in see rather than sh in she. It was pronounced as a voiced before voiced consonants.
According to W.S. Allen, zeta in Attic Greek likely represented the consonant cluster , phonetically . For metrical purposes it was treated as a double consonant, thus forming a heavy syllable. In Archaic Greek, when the letter was adopted from Phoenician zayin, the sound was probably an affricate . In Koine Greek, represented . It is more likely that this developed from rather than from Attic . Ζεύς ('Zeus') — Archaic , Attic , late Koine
in the clusters were somewhat aspirated, as and , but in this case the aspiration of the first element was not phonologically contrastive: no words distinguish , for example (see below for explanation).
Nasals