known as Iberian; these languages died out by the fi rst cen-
tury c.e. and were replaced by Latin. People in the Pyrenees
spoke a language that became the ancestor of Basque; these
people were isolated enough to keep their language into mod-
ern times. Th e Finno-Ugric languages, ancestors of modern
Finnish and Hungarian, came from western Asia and may
have arrived in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Ural
Mountains as early as 4000 b.c.e.
GREECE
BY JEFFREY S. CARNES
Ancient Greek is one of the branches of the Indo-European
language family; that is, it is one of the several dozen descen-
dants of Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken at least
4,500 years ago in Central Asia and whose “daughter lan-
guages” (descendants) include English and almost all modern
European languages. Proto-Indo-European left no written
records, but its existence and much information about its vo-
cabulary and structure have been reconstructed by historical
linguists based on similarities among its daughter languages,
including obvious similarities in vocabulary. We fi nd Greek
mētēr cognate with, or similar to, Latin mater, Sanskrit mat,
Russian mat’, German Mutter, and English mother. Related
Indo-European languages form subgroups (Germanic, Italic,
and Balto-Slavic); Greek is the only surviving member of the
subgroup to which it may have belonged. (Although Greek
has obvious structural similarities to Latin, and there was
much borrowing of vocabulary between the two, the idea that
the languages belonged to the same Indo-European subgroup
has been discredited.)
Greek is a heavily infl ected language; that is, one in
which the relation between words in a sentence is conveyed
by changes in the form of the word, typically by the addi-
tion of suffi xes. Greek nouns and adjectives can be infl ected
to form fi ve diff erent cases (nominative, accusative, genitive,
dative, and vocative), which have diff erent functions in syn-
tax, or the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence.
Th e nominative, for instance, is used for the subject of a sen-
tence and the accusative for the direct object of a fi nite verb.
A practical consequence of this is that Greek word order is
freer than that in English: anthrōpos tima theon (“a man hon-
ors a god”) could equally well be written with its three el-
ements (subject, object, and verb) in any other order (theon
tima anthrōpos or tima theon anthrōpos) with almost no dif-
ference in meaning. In English, where word order determines
meaning, this would be impossible. Th e Greek case system
is inherited from Indo-European and shows the tendency of
languages to simplify case systems; thus, older cases like the
ablative (still found in Latin) have been lost in Greek, their
functions taken over by the genitive (which expresses pos-
session) and the dative (expressive of the indirect object of
a verb). Th e vocative indicates the speaker’s direct address to
another person.
Greek nouns and adjectives exhibited gender and num-
ber. Number included not only the expected singular and
plural but also a form called the dual, sometimes used for
beings or items in pairs, as in a team of oxen or a pair of
shoes. Grammatical gender, another Indo-European inheri-
tance whose original function is obscure, divides nouns into
three classes: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Nouns repre-
senting male humans and animals typically belonged to theLinear A tablets, from Agia Triada, Heraklion (Alison Frantz Photographic Collection, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
language: Greece 617