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( Proto-Greek language)
*Dates (beginning with Ancient Greek) from D.B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids 1997), 12. The Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects (Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, Doric and Northwest Greek), and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek. Most scholars would include the fragmentary ancient Macedonian language, either as descended from an earlier "Proto-Hellenic" language, or by definition including it among the descendants of Proto-Greek as a Hellenic language and/or a Greek dialect.[1] Proto-Greek would have been spoken in the late 3rd millennium BC, most probably in the Balkans. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants, speaking the predecessor of the Mycenaean language, entered the Greek peninsula either around the 21st century BC, or in the 17th century BC at the latest. They were separated from the Dorian Greeks, who entered the peninsula roughly one millennium later (see Dorian invasion, Greek Dark Ages), speaking a dialect that had in some respects remained more archaic. The evolution of Proto-Greek should be considered with the background of an early Palaeo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. The characteristically Greek representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels is shared by the Armenian language, which also shares other phonological and morphological peculiarities of Greek. The close relatedness of Armenian and Greek sheds light on the paraphyletic nature of the Centum-Satem isogloss.
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