Learning the Greek Language
Greek constitutes its own branch of the Indo-European languages. It has a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest of any Indo-European language. It is spoken by 15 million people primarily in Greece and Cyprus but also in many Greek emigrant communities around the world.
Greek is written in the Greek alphabet the first true alphabet (as opposed to an abjad or abugida) and the ancestor of both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets.
In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament. It has been spoken as the major language of the Ancient Classical World, and it then became the official language of the Byzantine Empire.
Greek is one of the richest surviving languages in the world today, with a vocabulary more than 600,000 words. Some scholars have stressed the similarity of Modern Greek to millennia old Greek languages. The extent of Modern Greek’s commonality with ancient Greek has been extensively reviewed and debated.
