Category talk:Ancient Greek language

Red link

Why is there a red link in this page?Nikolas (talk) 22:09, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Weird family tree

Alert @Erutuon, Mahagaja for this automatic 'family tree' at ancient greek and at modern: I do not understand it at all. Could this be checked?

• Modern Greek (el) comes from what is called here 'Byzantine' ('Medieval Greek' gkm). But now, code el is placed under ancient.
• The 2 Locrian are ancient varieties. They should not be under el
• I understand that ALL the modern-times dialects are post medieval? (Except Tsaconic (tsd) which comes from Doric.) But here they are placed under ancient. Cappadocian (cpg) Pontic (pnt) and Italiot dialects.
• grk‑ita CAT:Italiot & varieties included are Apulian and Calabrian (grc-cal) But Calabrian is here but also CAT under Italiot.
• under ancient?? Mariupolitic grk‑mar, and Yevanic
• At Modern:
  • Whhhatttt is thessalian (el-ths) and arcadian (el-arc)????
  • There is cypriot (el-cyp), and there is paphian (el-pap) as a separate dialect?? And el-pap is not under el-cyp?

Sorry that I do not know much about greek dialects. sarri.greek (talk) 16:58, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

@Sarri.greek: I don't know anything about the modern dialects, but some of your confusion comes from the way our family tree tables reflect etymology-only languages. Yes, Modern Greek descends from Byzantine Greek, but we treat Byzantine Greek as an etymology-only variety of Ancient Greek (not as a separate language), which means the table shows both Modern and Byzantine as descending from Ancient. The difference is that Byzantine is marked with a little blue "E" (for etymology-only language). The issue of the Greek varieties spoken in Italy was discussed here in 2013 and again here in 2018. It looks like there might have been consensus to retire the code grk-cal (and thus delete CAT:Calabrian Greek language) in favor of treating Calabrian as a dialect of Italiot (and thus retaining CAT:Calabrian Greek), but that never actually happened. —Mahāgaja · talk 15:09, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your attention Mahāgaja. You are always very patient. I understand the technical problem. That E‑languages are ignored. I hope that it will be corrected some time in the future? Because this causes the table to be... unreal?

I promise to read the links you gave me. And some online greek sources for mod.gre.dialects:1 and about 'italiot' 2. I am sure that the linguists who added the dialects at this table have excellent bibliography.

My feedback is of a random greek reader, who would be very astonished looking at this table. Especially the modern one. sarri.greek (talk) 16:40, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Many of these problems can be fixed. I just didn't tackle the problem because it seemed big and I didn't want to. But your post elsewhere convinced me finally.

So, I moved the Locrian dialects under Ancient Greek and Thessalian under Aeolian Greek. I think Arcadian is meant to be a subvariety of Arcadocypriot, under Ancient; and Cretan Ancient Greek should be in the same place.

Languages that are descended from Koine or Medieval could be placed under them; there are already some full-fledged languages that are listed as descendants of etymology languages. (It's a new thing.) For instance, Old Anatolian Turkish as a descendant of Proto-Oghuz, a subvariety of Proto-Turkic. So Greek under Byzantine Greek for instance. — Eru·tuon 05:27, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, putting Byzantine Greek as the ancestor of Greek didn't work, so neither will putting Koine as the ancestor of other languages. I'll have to think about whether there's a way to make that work. — Eru·tuon 05:47, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Oh, but just for the family tree, I can put Greek under Byzantine using Module:family tree/data. That doesn't affect anything else on Wiktionary. That module was the reason that Byzantine Greek was under Koine and Koine was under Ancient. So any adjustments to fix the tree can be done there. — Eru·tuon 05:54, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you @Erutuon, thank you very much. It is much better. I cannot tell if details are OK e.g. for the modern dialects Cappadocian and Pontic, or why some contemporary local idioms entered the tree, while others did not, who decided on which to omit or which to include. Thanks: i do not wish to burden you allll the time. You always come to the rescue, Eru. sarri.greek (talk) 11:54, 13 October 2019 (UTC)