GREEK, or GREEKIAN, any thing belonging to ancient Greece.
The Greek language, as preserved in the writings of the celebrated authors of antiquity, as Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, &c. has a great variety of terms and expressions, suitable to the genius and occasions of a polite and learned people, who had a taste for arts and sciences. In it, proper names are significative; which is the reason that the modern languages borrow so many terms from it. When any new invention, instrument, machine, or the like, is discovered, recourse is generally had to the Greek for a name to it; the facility wherewith words are there compounded, affording such as will be expressive of its use: such are, barometer, hygrometer, microscope, telescope, thermometer, &c. But of all sciences, medicine most abounds with such terms; as diaphoretic, diagnosis, diarrhoea, haemorrhagy, hydrophobia, phthisis, atrophy, &c. Besides the copiousness and significancy of the Greek, wherein it excels most, if not all, other languages, it has also three numbers, viz. a singular, dual, and plural: also abundance of tenses in its verbs, which makes a variety in discourse, prevents a certain dryness that always accompanies too great an uniformity, and renders that language peculiarly proper for all kinds of verse. The use of the participles, of the aorist and preterite, together with the compound words already mentioned, give it a peculiar force and brevity, without taking any thing from its perspicuity.
It is no easy matter to assign the precise difference between the modern and ancient Greek; which consists in the terminations of the nouns, pronouns, verbs, &c. not unlike what obtains between some of the dialects of the Italian or Spanish. There are also in the modern Greek many new words, not to be met with in the ancient. We may therefore distinguish three ages of the Greek tongue: the first of which ends at the time when Constantinople became the capital of the Roman empire; the second lasted from that period to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks; and the third from that time to this.