[adrian_b]

In Modern Greek, the voiced plosives of Ancient Greek, i.e. beta, delta and gamma, have become voiced fricatives, while the aspirated plosives of Ancient Greek have become voiceless fricatives.

To deal with the voiced plosives that are present in many modern loanwords, from languages like English, they had to develop ways to write them, using the existing letters of their alphabet, and the solution was to use digraphs, like "mp" for English "b".

[dotancohen]

Thank you.

How do modern Greek speakers pronounce the ancient words? With the new sounds, or the old sounds? Are there many ancient words in modern Greek?

[adrian_b]

I do not know if this remains true nowadays, but in the past most Modern Greek speakers pronounced the ancient words with the modern pronunciation, because this is how it was taught in schools, despite the fact that the Ancient Greek pronunciation was very different.

This is the same like with the Latin language used by the Catholic Church, which traditionally had a modern pronunciation very unlike Ancient Latin, or how the Latin was traditionally taught in English schools, also with a modern pronunciation unlike the ancient pronunciation.

In the last half of century, in many places the teaching of ancient languages has switched to using pronunciations as close as possible to what is known about the ancient pronunciations, but I do not know if this has also happened in Greece.

The Modern Greek has replaced many ancient words with more recent loanwords, but as a reaction to this they have created a form of the language, Katharevousa, which was purged from many loanwords and which used a high proportion of Ancient Greek words. Katharevousa was used for many literary works in the past and it was the official language of Greece since independence until 1976. I do not know if there is still much use of Katharevousa for anything, except for reading the older books and other publications that have used it.

[dotancohen]

Thank you! As a speaker of another ancient language, this is very interesting.