Greek belongs to the Indo-European family and has a written tradition that begins with the Linear B tablets. This pillar covers the origins, structure, scripts, history and standardisation of the language. It keeps apart two things that are often confused: the reconstruction of prehistory, which is an inference of the comparative method, and historical evidence, which is writing with a specific date, place and provenance.
Origins and earliest evidence
Horrocks sets out the developments that identify Greek within Indo-European and explains how hard it is to date prehistoric change B03 §1.1 pp.9–10. These are comparative reconstructions. There are no written texts of a "Proto-Greek", and the Atlas does not present them as if there were. A resemblance between two words does not on its own prove either common inheritance or borrowing.
Mycenaean Greek survives in Linear B, a syllabic system that leaves several linguistic distinctions unmarked B03 §1.2 pp.10–13. The tablets document an administrative writing practice. They are not a census of how people spoke in the Bronze Age. Knossos has alternative archaeological dates, and the Atlas keeps each source's date rather than choosing one "earliest attestation" year. Linear A is not labelled Greek simply because it belongs to the same Aegean world.
The language and its scripts
A form of the language and the script it survives in are different things. Linear B, the local alphabets of antiquity, the Cypriot syllabary, polytonic and monotonic spelling, and the Latin and other scripts used by Greek speaking communities: the Atlas records the script of each witness separately from the variety it documents B03 §§1.2–1.4.
That has practical consequences. A historical spelling does not show every sound distinction of its time. An International Phonetic Alphabet transcription must cite a specific analysis or recording. The full history of alphabet adoption, standardisation and later spelling reforms still needs original research, and pages on Greek written in Hebrew, Arabic or Latin script will be published only when specialist sources support them.
Standard Modern Greek
Standard Modern Greek is the common ground of Ellinofonia. It is not the ancestor of the varieties, and no variety is described as a corruption of it. Its standardisation and diglossia are social and historical processes, not events that happened on a single day.
The Centre for the Greek Language's database of linguistic terms distinguishes diglossia, two forms of the same language with different social functions, from the use of two different languages. It also discusses the changes in education in 1976 and in administration in 1977 B16 §1.7.1. These are institutional milestones in the source's account. They do not mean every difference of register disappeared in those years. The Atlas has not examined a legal text and makes no legal claim.
Demotic and Katharevousa are treated as historical standardising practices with internal variation and learned vocabulary, not as two territorial branches of the language.
The structure of the language
The description of structure is built in five modules shared by every period and variety, so that they can be compared:
- Phonology and prosody. Sounds, stress and their contrasts, recording spelling, reconstructed sound and documented pronunciation separately.
- Nominal and verbal morphology. Inflection, grammatical categories and word formation.
- Syntax. Clause structures, always with their clause context rather than as isolated words.
- Lexical semantics. Concept, word, sense and use as distinct levels.
- Discourse. How language is organised beyond the clause.
Each module will be published for Standard Modern Greek first, with sources in every paragraph, and will become the baseline for comparison with the other varieties. No module has approved content yet. The date of a change will rest on specific evidence, not on the general date of a period.
What remains open
Early subgroupings of Greek, coverage of the earlier Byzantine period, the chronology of regional differentiation, scripts not yet examined, and the social history of diaspora communities all need independent specialist review before any public synthesis.