Early Movement Towards Modern Greek

The evidence of the preceding sections makes it clear that the Greek language underwent considerable development and change from the time Greek speakers first entered the Balkans in the 2nd millennium BC up through the Hellenistic era. However, it is important to realize that languages are like living organisms, in that they continually change and evolve; thus, Greek did not stop at the form it assumed in the Hellenistic period but rather continued to develop. Moreover, also as is the case with living organisms, the form taken by a language at any period can be viewed as a function of the form it had in previous stages acted on by normal processes of change, in this case, processes of language change such as sound change, analogy, and reanalysis. In this way, it is generally possible to see the seeds of future directions of development present in any synchronic stage of a language, often manifesting themselves as synchronic variation in the realization of a sound or a morpheme, in the meaning of word, and the like, and thus as competition between an innovative variant and a older variant. Change, in a sense then, comes about through the resolution of this competition, often, but importantly not always, in the direction of the innovative form. As far as Greek is concerned, many of the significant differences between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek have their origins in innovations that emerged first in ancient times and competed with older forms, but were not fully generalized until a later stage in the development of the language. In this way, the variation — the new pronunciations, words, and constructions that arise but are not widely adopted until later — can often represent a foreshadowing of trends that determine the later form of the language.