Can you read Ancient Greek?

[half greek]

Originally Posted by Prokomenos
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Ive actually got a question. Is it true that the Cypriot dialect is similar to Ancient Greek? Ive been told that by quite a few Cypriot Greeks.

When considering ancient Greece it is important to be aware of the cultural and political background which was very different to that of a modern nation state. For much of this period Greece was fragmented into city states with their satellite colonies, each with its own political system and cultural values; these may, at various times, have traded with each other, fought each other or formed military alliances. In many cases they did all three. This separateness was reinforced by the Greek language which had evolved as a number of regional dialects through successive southern movements of Greek speaking peoples. The distribution of these dialects reflected patterns of migration and colonization and it did not follow that geographical closeness led to similarities in dialect. For example the Greek of Arcadia, the harsh mountainous interior of the Peloponnese, was closer to the Cypriot dialect than the Doric dialect used in the neighbouring southern Peloponnese. This is usually explained in terms of the colonization of Cyprus by Mycenaean Greeks from the Peloponnese in the late bronze age while the Doric Greeks, who moved into the Peloponnese after the Mycenaeans, never penetrated the inhospitable heartland of Arcadia. A further twist to dialect in ancient Greece is the practice of using a particular dialect for a particular literary form irrespective of the native speech of the author. Thus choral poetry is usually written in Doric even if written by a Boeotian such as Pindar or when used in Athenian (Attic) tragedy.

Some Greek Cypriot words used by older Cypriots.

English , Cypriot, Modern Greek

Watermelon , Batiha , karpoyzi

Stuffed Vines leaves , Koupepia , Dolmades

Two , Kio, Dyo

[half greek]

Arcadocypriot was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia and Cyprus between ca. the 7th and 4th centuries BC. It is directly descended from Mycenaean Greek, being spoken in areas where the Mycenaean population retreated from the Dorian invasion. The dialect is only known from inscriptions. In Cyprus, it was written using the Cypriot syllabary. Tsan was a letter only in use in Arcadia, up to ca. the 6th century BC.



Arcadocypriot kept a lot of characteristics of Mycenaean lost in other classical greek dialects, such as the /w/ sound (digamma).



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