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the only member of the Greek subfamily of the Indo-European languages.
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both
Ancient and Modern Greek employ the same alphabet, derived from that of the
Phoenicians comprising 24 letters.
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spoken by some 10 million people in Greece, and also
by some 600 thousand in Cyprus.
- Cypriot
Greek is reported
to be closer to Classical Greek than that spoken in Greece in some
vocabulary and grammar, and to have many
Arabic and
Turkish loan words.
- Modern
Greek is still largely a synthetic language. It is one of the few
Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive.
Noticeable changes in its grammar (compared to Classical Greek)
include the loss of the dative, the optative mood, the infinitive the
dual number, and the participles (except the past participle); the
adoption of the gerund; the reduction in the number of noun
declensions, and the number of distinct forms in each declension; the
adoption of the modal particle θα to denote future and conditional
tenses; the introduction of auxiliary verb forms for certain tenses;
the extension to the future tense of the aspectual distinction between
present/imperfect and aorist; the loss of the third person imperative,
and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, such as
augmentation and reduplication.
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