Greece - Korina Miller [622]
Greek maintained its status and prestige during the rise of the European Renaissance and was employed as the linguistic perspective for all contemporary sciences and terminologies during the period of Enlightenment. Today, Greek constitutes a large part of the vocabulary of many Indo-European languages, and much of the lexicon of scientific repertoire.
The modern Greek language is a southern Greek dialect which is now used by most Greek speakers both in Greece and abroad. It is the result of the mixing of ancient vocabulary with words from Greek regional dialects, namely Cretan, Cypriot and Macedonian.
Greek is spoken throughout Greece by a population of just over 10 million, and by some 5 million Greeks living abroad.
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Pronunciation
All Greek words of two or more syllables have an acute accent (´), which indicates where the stress falls. For instance, γαλμα (statue) is pronounced aghalma, and αγπη (love) is pronounced aghapi. In our pronunciation guides, italic lettering indicates where stress falls, eg a·ghal·ma. Note also that dh is pronounced ‘th’ as in ‘there’ and gh is a softer, slightly guttural version of ‘g’. See the box on Click here for more details.
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Accommodation
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Conversation & Essentials
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Directions
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SIGNS
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THE GREEK ALPHABET & PRONUNCIATION
Combinations of Letters
The combinations of letters shown here are pronounced as follows:
The pairs of vowels shown above are pronounced separately if the first has an acute accent, or the second a dieresis (˙˙), as in the examples below:
Some Greek consonant sounds have no English equivalent. The υ of the groups αυ, ευ and ηυ is generally pronounced ‘v’. The Greek question mark is represented with the English equivalent of a semicolon (;).
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TRANSLITERATION & VARIANT SPELLINGS: AN EXPLANATION
The issue of correctly transliterating Greek into the Roman alphabet is a vexed one, fraught with inconsistencies and pitfalls. The Greeks themselves are not very consistent in this respect, though things are gradually improving. The word ‘Piraeus’, for example, has been variously represented by the following transliterations: Pireas, Piraievs and Pireefs; and when appearing as a street name (eg Piraeus St) you will also find Pireos!
This has been compounded by the linguistic minefield of the two forms of the Greek language. The purist form is called Katharevousa and the popular form is Dimotiki (Demotic). The Katharevousa form was never more than an artificiality and Dimotiki has always been spoken as the mainstream language, but this means there are often two Greek words for each English word. Thus, the word for ‘bakery’ in everyday language is fournos, but the shop sign will more often than not say artopoieion. The baker’s product will be known in the street as psomi, but in church as artos.
A further complication is the issue of Anglicised vs Hellenised forms of place names: Athens vs Athina, Patra vs Patras, Thebes vs Thiva, Evia vs Euboia – the list goes on and on. The existence of both an official and everyday name for a place can explain why you see variations such as Corfu/Kerkyra, Zakynthos/Zante, and Santorini/Thira. In this guide we usually provide modern Greek equivalents for town names, with one well-known exception, Athens. For ancient sites, settlements or people from antiquity, we have tried to stick to the more familiar classical names; so we have Thucydides instead of Thoukididis, Mycenae instead of Mykines.
Problems in transliteration have particular implications for vowels, especially given that Greek has six ways of rendering the vowel sound ‘ee’, two