“masculine” group and females to the “feminine.” Inanimate
objects, however, could belong to any category, and the fact
that a table is feminine or a foot masculine ultimately says
little about the Greek (or Indo-European) worldview.
Verbs in Greek were also heavily infl ected, with suffi xes
(and occasionally prefi xes) used to express diff erences in per-
son, number, mood, voice, and tense. (Most of these are ex-
pressed in English with auxiliary verbs: I free; I will free; I
will be freed, in contrast to the Greek equivalents luō, lusō,
luthēsomai.) Moods include not only the indicative (for state-
ments of fact) and subjunctive (for possibilities) but also the
optative (similar in use to the subjunctive, expressing a doubt
or wish, and eventually abandoned in favor of it). Th e Greek
voices were active, passive, and middle; this last category was
used to emphasize the subject’s participation or involvement
in the action described. Tenses included not only the time
of an action but also its aspect—in other words, its status as
complete or incomplete. Aoristic aspect viewed an action as
happening once (“Socrates spoke in the agora” on one par-
ticular occasion); imperfective aspect showed incomplete or
repeated action (“Socrates was speaking/kept speaking/used
to speak in the agora”). A typical Greek verb had three diff er-
ent stems (to be used with diff erent tenses) and might have
well over three hundred distinct forms.
Th e large number of verb forms made it easy for the lan-
guage to create a complex syntax: For example, conditional
sentences used diff erent moods to express diff ering degrees of
probability. A speaker wishing to say “If it snows tomorrow”
would use the subjunctive to indicate there was some distinct
possibility this might happen; the optative would indicate that
it was far less likely (from the speaker’s perspective). Syntactic
constructions tended to be simpler in poetry (especially in the
Homeric poems, which were composed orally), but historical,
oratorical, and philosophical prose works display a great vari-
ety of subordinate clauses and long, periodic sentences.
Th e pronunciation of Greek is understood surprisingly
well for an ancient language, thanks to the data provided
by historical linguistics. Most Greek dialects had fi ve short
vowels and seven long, plus a small number of diphthongs (a
double vowel sound forming one sound forming one sylla-
ble); most of these have at least rough equivalents in English.
Among consonants the most surprising feature is the treat-
ment of aspirated consonants (pronounced while breathing
out) such as phi and theta. While English derivatives of Greek
words containing these letters (for example, philosophy and
theater) treat them as fricatives (the consonant sound in
speech made by forcing breath through a narrow opening),
they were in fact voiced stops—that is, the equivalent of the
initial sounds of “top” and “pot.” Th e Greek letters pi and tau
represented an unvoiced version, closer to the fi nal sounds of
“top” and “pot,” a distinction that is extremely diffi cult for
native speakers of English to hear. Th e least understood fea-
ture of Greek pronunciation is pitch accent: the vast majority
of words bore an accent that indicated not stress but instead a
cha nge in pitch, rising (acute), fa l ling (grave), or rising-fa l ling
(ci rc u m fl ex). By sometime in late antiquity the pitch accent
was abandoned in favor of a stress accent (which continues
in Greek to this day), and scholars do not agree on precisely
what Greek pitch accent sounded like. Modern tonal lan-
guages such as Chinese are thought to provide an imperfect
analogy for the sound of Greek.
Our earliest historical records show that Greek was al-
ready widespread throughout the eastern Mediterranean: It
was the language of the Greek mainland, the coastal areas
of Asia Minor, and the islands that lay between. In addition,
the language spread along with the great colonization move-
ments of the Archaic Period—mostly to southern Italy and
Sicily but also to North Africa, southern France, and the
shores of the Black Sea. Diff erent cities and regions had dis-
tinct dialects, which spread along with the settlers (colonies
spoke the dialect of their mother city); despite diff erences in
spelling and pronunciation, all Greek dialects seem to have
been mutually intelligible. Th e Greeks themselves roughly
classifi ed their numerous local dialects into two main groups,
Doric and Ionic, a classifi cation that came to possess cultural
and political signifi cance. Th is was particularly true in the
fi ft h century b.c.e. when the Athenians, who spoke Attic (a
variant of Ionic), were opposed to the Spartans and their al-
lies, who spoke Doric. In literature dialects refl ected not only
the author’s place of origin but also the demands of the par-
ticular genre: Th e epics of Homer were composed in a mixed
dialect with Doric features; the comedies of Aristophanes
use a particularly colloquial version of Attic; and the choral
odes of Athenian tragedy were written in a semi-Doric style.
Eventually a form of Attic became the dominant dialect of
the Greek-speaking world. Called the koine, or common dia-
lect, it became the language of the Eastern Roman Empire,
and it is from koine that Byzantine and Modern Greek are
descended.ROME
BY JUSTIN CORFIELD
Th e Latin language is offi cially classifi ed by linguists as being
one of the Italic group of Indo-European languages. It was
originally spoken by small numbers of people who lived on
the Latium plain near the Tiber River in central Italy. It was
related to Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and many other languages
in Europe at the time. As the language of the city of Rome, its
importance resulted from the rise of Rome and its domina-
tion fi rst of Italy and then of the Mediterranean region, cen-
tral and southern Europe, and much of the Near East.
At the foundation of Rome, according to tradition in 753
b.c.e., several related dialects were used in central Italy. Um-
brian, Samnite (or Oscan), Volscian, and Marsian, for which
inscriptions survive, all appear to diff er from Latin slightly
in infl ections and pronominal roots, that is, the roots of
pronouns. Th ere are also many loan words from Etruscan,
mainly technical and religious terms, as well as a large num-
ber of personal names, such as Sulla and Casca.618 language: Rome