Proto-Greek language
[17] The evolution of Proto-Greek could be considered within the context of an early Paleo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages.
Their proposed route of migration passed through Romania and the eastern Balkans to the Evros river valley from where their main body moved west.
[21] As such Katona as well as M.V Sakellariou agree that the main body of Greek speakers settled in a region that included southwestern Illyria, Epirus, northwestern Thessaly and western Macedonia.
[22] Older theories like those of Vladimir I. Georgiev placed Proto-Greek in northwestern Greece and adjacent areas (approximately up to the Aulon river to the north), including Parauaea, Tymphaia, Athamania, Dolopia, Amphilochia, and Acarnania, as well as west and north Thessaly (Histiaeotis, Perrhaibia, Tripolis), and Pieria in Macedonia, during the Late Neolithic.
[6][23][24][25] The boundaries are based on the high concentration of archaic Greek place-names in the region, in contrast to southern Greece which preserves many pre-Greek.
[27][28] In modern bibliography, models about the settlement and development of proto-Greek speakers in the Greek peninsula place it in the region at the earliest around 2200–2000 BC, during the Early Helladic III.
[1] Ivo Hajnal dates the beginning of the diversification of Proto-Greek into the subsequent Greek dialects to a point not significantly earlier than 1700 BC.
[9][10][11][12] During this period of c. 1700 BC, South Greek-speaking tribes spread to Boeotia, Attica, and the Peloponnese, while North Greek was spoken in Epirus, Thessaly, parts of Central Greece, and perhaps also Macedonia.
It was a relatively late change in Proto-Greek history, and must have occurred independently[31] of the similar dissimilation of aspirates (also known as Grassmann's law) in Indo-Iranian, although it may represent a common areal feature.
The change may have even been post-Mycenaean:[30] Greek is unique among Indo-European languages in reflecting the three different laryngeals with distinct vowels.
Most Indo-European languages can be traced back to a dialectal variety of late Proto-Indo-European (PIE) in which all three laryngeals had merged (after colouring adjacent short /e/ vowels), but Greek clearly cannot.
Such contractions occur in the inflection of a number of different noun and verb classes and are among the most difficult aspects of Ancient Greek grammar.
Proto-Greek preserved the gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, dual, plural) distinctions of the nominal system of Proto-Indo-European.
[citation needed] The peculiar oblique stem gunaik- "women", attested from the Thebes tablets is probably Proto-Greek.
[citation needed] ("Yoke" in later Proto-Hellenic and both Classical and Modern Greek is masculine due to a gender shift from *-ón to *-ós).
[citation needed] Proto-Greek inherited the augment, a prefix e-, to verbal forms expressing past tense.
However, the augment down to the time of Homer remained optional and was probably little more than a free sentence particle, meaning 'previously' in Proto-Indo-European, which may easily have been lost by most other branches.
The third singular phérei is an innovation by analogy, replacing the expected Doric *phéreti, Ionic *phéresi (from PIE *bʰéreti).
