090038 VO Historical Grammar of Modern Greek (2024S)

How similar (or different) is Modern Greek to its ancient predecessor? This is a question that often arises in discourses about the historical development of the Greek language either by those who are familiar with the contemporary language or by the ones who learned Classical Greek. While this course does not provide a concrete answer to the similarity question (a difficult to measure notion) it does elucidate the changes that occurred in the language since the Hellenistic Koiné Greek period (roughly 300 BC – 600 AD) to Modern Greek as spoken nowadays. During the course we examine the gradual changes in the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical system from a solid linguistic point of view and we focus on intermediate stages such as Late Middle (13th – 15th c. AD) and Early Modern Greek (16th – 18th c. AD). In so doing, we will make use of the corpora provided by Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and other digital tools. At the same time, the course is understood as a smooth introduction to the theory and the terminology of language change research.