Greek Language, Customs and Traditions

Greek language, Indo-European language spoken primarily in Greece. It has a long and well-documented history—the longest of any Indo-European language —spanning 34 centuries. There is an Ancient phase, subdivided into a Mycenaean period (texts in syllabic script attested from the 14th to the 13th century BCE ) and Archaic and Classical periods (beginning with the adoption of the alphabet, from the 8th to the 4th century BCE ); a Hellenistic and Roman phase (4th century BCE to 4th century CE ); a Byzantine phase (5th to 15th century CE ); and a Modern phase.

Greek( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά, romanized : Elliniká , pronounced [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική, romanized : Hellēnikḗ ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. ^[2] Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; ^{[3] [4]} previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. ^[5] The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems.

The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. ^{[6] [7]} Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics.