Greece has deservedly become one of the favorite places for beach and educational recreation of Russian tourists. A country where "everything is there" has a rich culture, whose roots go back centuries and millennia. It was then that the modern state language of Greece was born, in which the immortal Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, created his masterpieces.
Some statistics and facts
- Greek is part of the Indo-European language family and is the only representative of the Greek group.
- About 15 million people consider the New Greek native to be native and it serves as an important means of interethnic communication in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania - countries bordering on Greece and having links with it at the level of close migration processes.
- The state language of Greece also has an official status in the Republic of Cyprus. Greek is also one of the languages of the European Union.
- The language of the inhabitants of most of the Balkan Peninsula is one of the oldest written languages on the planet.
- A huge number of names that exist in modern realities are of Greek origin and each of them means something, translated from the language of Ancient Greece.
History and modernity
The first written monuments in Greek were created long before the onset of a new era - in the XIV-XII centuries. They are written in the syllabic Cretan-Mycenaean script, which appeared on the island of Crete during the Minoan civilization.
The Greek alphabet appears a little later in the 8th-7th centuries BC. based on the writing of the Phoenicians, and the Greek writing reaches its highest flowering in the period of the late Roman Empire. It was then that knowledge of Greek was considered mandatory for any educated resident of the empire, and Latin, which was spoken in ancient Rome, received many borrowings from Greek.
The grammar of ancient Greek was notable for its considerable complexity. She was characterized by many prepositions, particles and pronouns, nouns declined in three types, and the system of verb tenses seemed very confusing. The modern state language of Greece looks much simpler and some of its grammatical foundations are similar to those in Russian.
Tourist notes
Once on a tourist trip in Greece, get ready for the indescribable cordiality and hospitality of the Greeks and the almost complete absence of a language barrier. Firstly, in tourist places the absolute majority of the inhabitants of Greece speaks English, and secondly, many things become clear thanks to the great desire of the descendants of Homer to make the guests' rest unforgettable and comfortable.
