Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that, in Linear B during the 15th-13th centuries BC), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three thousand years.
Like most Indo-European languages, Greek is highly inflected. Greek grammar has come down through the ages fairly intact, though with some simplifications. For example, Modern Greek features two numbers: singular and plural. The dual number of Ancient times was abandoned at a very early stage. The instrumental case of Mycenaean Greek disappeared in the Archaic period, and the dative-locative of Ancient Greek disappeared in the late Hellenistic. Four cases, nominative, genitive, accusative and vocative, remain in Modern Greek. The three ancient gender noun categories (masculine, feminine and neuter) never fell out of use, while adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with their respective nouns, as do their articles. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for:
- mood — Ancient Greek: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative; Modern Greek: indicative and imperative (other modal functions are expressed by periphrastic constructions)
- number — singular, plural (archaic Greek also had a dual)
- voice — Ancient Greek: active, middle, and passive; Modern Greek: active and medio-passive
- tense — Ancient Greek: present, past, future; Modern Greek: past and non-past (future is expressed by a periphrastic construction)
- person — first, second, third
- aspect — Ancient Greek: imperfective, perfective (traditionally called aorist), perfect (sometimes also called perfective, see note about terminology); Modern Greek: perfective and imperfective
Greek Translation Services
Corporate Translations are a UK based professional translation agency with expert knowledge and experience translating for businesses in the UK, Greece and Cyprus. Our translation expertise includes business, legal, financial, technical, medical, media and website copy from Greek to English or English to Greek. Based in Essex near London, we are a long-established professional UK business language translation agency. To ensure a fully accurate Greek language translations with the correct terminology, we employ fully trained Greek translators with expertise in many industries to meet your needs.
For more information on our Greek business translation service please click.
Greek Typesetting Services
Our Greek typesetting services cover brochures, business cards, stationery, packaging labels and export documentation. For more information on our Greek typesetting and DTP services please contact us.
Below are a selection of some of the main languages we provide translation services for:
