Contact:   Mrs. Georgia Zenallis, Director
Teachers:  Mrs. Anthanasia Armatas and
                Mrs. Voula Kandis

The Greek School Independence Day Program will be held in the Alex D. Krassas Event Center on Sunday, March 21st at 3:00. There will be a luncheon served. The program is FREE -- hope to see you all there!
The Three Hierarchs, Patron Saints, of Greek Letters

Telephone:     330-454-7278 Ext. 406

Information:     Our Greek School programs are designed for children and adults to learn reading, writing, and language skills. The classes are held on Mondays, and Thursdays.

Class times and fees are determined annually. All materials are Metropolis approved.

Greek language

The Greek language (Ελληνικά /Elini'k{/) is an Indo-European language which has existed from around the 14th century BC in the Cretan inscriptions called Linear B. Mycenaean Greek of this period is distinguished from later Classical or Ancient Greek of the 8th century BC and after, when texts came to be written in the Greek alphabet.

NOTE. Greek is written in a non-Latin script. Most examples below are in the Greek alphabet, with transcriptions in SAMPA.

Modern Greek is a living tongue and one of the richest surviving languages today, with more than 600,000 words. Some scholars have overly stressed similarity to millennia-old Greek languages. Its interintelligibility with ancient Greek is a matter of debate. It is claimed that a "reasonably well educated" speaker of the modern tongue can read the ancient dialects, but it is not made plain how much of that education consists of exposure to vocabulary and grammar obsolete in normal communication. Greek from the Hellenistic and Byzantine times is markedly closer to Modern Greek. From 1834 to 1976 there was an attempt to impose Καθαρεύουσα
/k{T{'rEvus{/ (purified language, an attempt to correct centuries of natural linguistic changes) as the only acceptable form of Greek in Greece. After 1976, Δημοτική /Dimoti'ci/ (speech of the people) was finally accepted by the Greek government as both the de facto and de jure forms of the language. A large number of words and expressions have remained unchanged through the centuries, and have found their way into a number of other languages, including Latin, Italian, German, French, and English. Typical examples of such words include mostly terminology names, like astronomy, democracy, philosophy, thespian, anthropology etc. (For a more complete list, see List of English words of Greek origin)

Modern Greek

From these roots evolved the Modern Greek of today. Modern Greek has a somewhat artificial, conservative form called Καθαρεύουσα /k{T{'revus{/, which includes numerous Ancient Greek words pronounced in a modern way, and the spoken form Δημοτική /Dimoti'ci/, which since 1976 is the official language of Greece, instead of Καθαρεύουσα.

Grammar

Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages, is highly inflected, for example, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs have four moods, three voices, as well as three persons and three numbers and various other forms. Modern Greek is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained a synthetic passive. Δημοτική has lost the dative (except in a few expressions like εν τάξει /En 'd{xi/, which means OK). Other noticeable changes in the its grammar include the loss of the infinitive, the dual number and the simplification of the system of grammatical prefixes, like augment and reduplication.

Phonology

Greek has sandhi rules, some written, some not. ν before bilabials and velars is pronounced "m" and "ng" respectively, and is written μ (συμπάθεια) and γ (συγχρονίζω) when this happens within a word. The word ἐστὶ /Es'ti/, which means "is" in Greek gains ν, and the accusative articles τον and την in Modern Greek lose it, depending on the start of the next word; this is called "movable nu". In τον πατέρα "the father" the first word is pronounced "tom", and in Modern Greek (but not Ancient Greek, which had an independent "b" sound) the second word is pronounced "batera" because "mp" is pronounced as "mb".

Historical sound changes

The main phonetic changes between Ancient and Modern Greek are a simplification in the vowel system and a change of some consonants to fricative values. Ancient Greek had five short vowels, seven long vowels, and numerous diphthongs. This has been reduced to a simple five-vowel system. Most noticeably, the sounds i, ē, y, ei, oi have all become i. The consonants b, d, g became v, dh, gh (dh is /D/ and gh is /G/). The aspirated consonants ph, th, kh became f, th, kh (where the new pronunciation of th is /T/ and the new pronunciation of kh is /x/).

Writing system

Greek is written in the Greek alphabet which dates from the 8th century BC. The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters which are:
Α, Β, Γ, Δ, Ε, Ζ, Η, Θ, Ι, Κ, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ξ, Ο, Π, Ρ, Σ, Τ, Υ, Φ, Χ, Ψ, Ω.