Koine Greek - Name

Name

The word koinē (κοινή) is the Greek word for "common", and is here understood as referring to "the common dialect" (κοινὴ διάλεκτος). The word is pronounced /ˈkɔɪneɪ/ or /kɔɪˈneɪ/ in English; its ancient Greek pronunciation would have been, Modern Greek . The term was applied in several different sense by ancient scholars. A school of scholars such as Apollonius Dyscolus and Aelius Herodianus maintained the term Koine to refer to the Proto-Greek language, while others would use it to refer to any vernacular form of Greek speech which differed somewhat from the literary language. But when Koine Greek became a language of literature by the first century B.C. some people distinguished it into two forms: written (Greek) as the literary post-classical form(which should never be confused with Atticism), and vernacular as the day to day spoken form. Others chose to refer to Koine as the Alexandrian dialect (περὶ τῆς Ἀλεξανδρέων διαλέκτου) or the dialect of Alexandria, or even the universal dialect of its time. The former was often used by modern classicists.