Medieval Greek - Grammar

Grammar

Many decisive changes between Ancient and Modern Greek were completed by circa 1100 AD. There is a striking reduction of inflectional categories inherited from Indo-European, especially in the verb system, and a complementary tendency of developing new analytical formations and periphrastic constructions.

In morphology, the inflectional paradigms of declension, conjugation and comparison were regularised through analogy. Thus, in nouns, the Ancient Greek third declension, which showed an unequal number of syllables in the different cases, was adjusted to the regular first and second declension by forming a new nominative form out of the oblique case forms: Ancient Greek ho patér (ὁ πατήρ) > Modern Greek o patéras (ὁ πατέρας), in analogy to the accusative form ton patéra (τὸν πατέρα). Feminine nouns ending in -ís/-ás formed the nominative according to the accusative -ída/-áda, as in elpís (ἐλπίς) > elpída (ἐλπίδα 'hope') and in Hellás (Ἑλλάς) > Elláda (Ἑλλάδα 'Greece').

Only a few nouns remained unaffected by this simplification, such as to fos (τὸ φῶς), genitive tou fotós (τοῦ φωτός).

The Ancient Greek formation of the comparative of adjectives ending in -ion and -ōn (-ιον, -ων), which was partly irregular, was gradually substituted by the formation using the suffix -ter and regular endings of the adjective: meízōn (µείζων) > mizóteros (µειζότερος 'the bigger‘).

The enclitic genitive forms of the first and second person personal pronoun, as well as the genitive forms of the third person demonstrative pronoun developed into unstressed enclitic possessive pronouns that were attached to nouns: mou (µου), sou (σου), tou (του), tis (της), mas (µας), sas (σας), ton (των).

Besides the particles na and thená (see below) the negation particle den (δέν 'not') was derived from the Ancient Greek word oudén (oὐδέν 'nothing').

Irregularities in verb inflection were also reduced through analogy. Thus, the contracted verbs ending in -aō (έω), -eō (έω) etc., which earlier showed a complex set of vowel alternations, adopted the endings of the regular forms: agapâ (ἀγαπᾷ) > agapái (ἀγαπάει 'he loves'). The use of the past tense prefix, known as augment, was gradually limited to regular forms in which the augment was required to carry word stress. Reduplication in the verb stem, which was a feature of the old perfect forms, was gradually abandoned and only retained in antiquated forms. The small ancient Greek class of irregular verbs in -mi (-μι) disappeared in favour of regular forms ending in -o: chōnnymi (χώννυμι) > chóno (χώνω 'push'). The auxiliary eimí (εἰμί 'be'), originally part of the same class, adopted a new set of endings modelled on the passive of regular verbs, as in the following examples:

In most cases, the numerous stem variants that appeared in the Ancient Greek system of aspect inflection was reduced to only two basic stem forms, sometimes only one. Thus, in Ancient Greek the stem of the verb lambánein (λαμβάνειν, “to take”) appears in the variants lamb-, lab-, lēps-, lēph- and lēm-. In Medieval Greek, it is reduced to the forms lamv- (imperfective/present system) and lav- (perfective/aorist system).

One of the numerous forms that disappeared was the dative. It was replaced in the 10th century by the genitive and the prepositional construction of eis (εἰς 'in, to') + accusative. In addition, the dual, nearly all the participles and the imperative forms of the 3rd person were lost. The optative was replaced by the construction of subordinate clauses with the conjunctions óti (ὅτι 'that') and ína (ἵνα 'so that'). ἵνα first became iná (ἱνά) and later na (να). By the end of the Byzantine era, the construction thélo na (θέλω να 'I want that...') + subordinate clause developed into thena (θενά). Eventually, thena (θενά) became the Modern Greek future particle tha (θα), which replaced the old future forms. Ancient formations like the genitivus absolutus, the aci and nearly all common participle constructions were gradually substituted by the newly emerged gerund and constructions of subordinate clauses.

The most noticeable grammatical change in comparison to ancient Greek is the almost complete loss of the infinitive, which has been replaced by subordinate clauses with the particle na (ѵα). Arabic influences have been assumed as a possible explanation for this phenomenon, as a sentence structure such as I can that I go was common in standard ancient Arabic. Possibly transmitted through Greek, this phenomenon can also be found in the adjacent languages and dialects of the Balkans. Bulgarian and Romanian for example, are in many respects typologically similar to medieval and present day Greek, although genealogically they are not closely related.