The Tree of Wisdom: the Language and Culture of Ancient Greece

The language and writing in ancient Greece were not unified for a long time. As far as language is concerned, Greek in the classical period is divided into Attica-Ionian dialect (Attica dialect is the dialect of Athens, but also the dialect of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and others; Ionian dialect is distributed in the middle of the west coast of Asia Minor, which is the dialect of Thales and Herodotus. Acadia-Cyprus dialect (the ancient Greek language closest to Mycenae, Acadia is in the central Peloponnesus, far from Cyprus, and the separation between the two places may be the result of immigration); Western dialect (mainly covering the northwest of Greece, including dorris dialect used in Sparta, Crete and Rhode Island); Eolis dialect (northern Aegean region such as Tessali, Biotia and Lesbos); Pang filia dialect (located in modern southern Turkey, with a narrow distribution). In the Hellenistic era, Attica-Ionian dialect, which has the richest history and philosophical tradition in China, developed the so-called "Coyne" and became the language used in the New Testament.

As far as words are concerned, linear words were originally used. The linear character A (BC18-14th century) was written on a clay tablet, like two rivers. The written characters are unknown, which may not be Greek, but there is a developing relationship between the writing system and the linear character B. The linear character B (15-12nd century BC) used to write Greek is a syllable, that is, a symbol represents a syllable without a single consonant. At first, it was successfully deciphered with the help of proper nouns such as place names appearing in the literature (for example, Knossos is spelled ko-no-so=Konossos). The Greek alphabet originated from the Phoenician alphabet. However, the Phoenician writing system did not write vowels like the Egyptian holy book or Ugarit cuneiform, and the Greeks creatively put the unventilated glottic letters (Arabic' elif',? ) and pharyngeal letters (Arabic' ain',? ) is used to represent vowels a(α) and o(ο), and on this basis, new letters are created to represent long O, aspirated unvoiced consonant P, aspirated unvoiced consonant K, disyllabic consonants ps and ks.