Greek language

===Phonology===
{{Main article|Modern Greek phonology|Koine Greek phonology|Ancient Greek phonology}}
[[File:Seferisrede.ogg|thumb|Spoken [[Modern Greek]]]]
Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only [[oral vowels]] and a fairly stable set of consonantal [[Phonemic contrast|contrasts]]. The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see [[Koine Greek phonology]] for details):
* replacement of the [[pitch accent]] with a [[stress (linguistics)|stress accent]].
* simplification of the system of [[vowel]]s and [[diphthong]]s: loss of vowel length distinction, monophthongisation of most diphthongs and several steps in a [[chain shift]] of vowels towards {{IPA|/i/}} ([[iotacism]]).
* development of the [[voicelessness|voiceless]] [[aspirated consonant|aspirated]] [[stop consonant|plosives]] {{IPA|/pʰ/}} and {{IPA|/tʰ/}} to the voiceless [[fricative consonant|fricatives]] {{IPA|/f/}} and {{IPA|/θ/}}, respectively; the similar development of {{IPA|/kʰ/}} to {{IPA|/x/}} may have taken place later (the phonological changes are not reflected in the orthography, and both earlier and later phonemes are written with [[Phi (letter)|φ]], [[Theta|θ]], and [[Chi (letter)|χ]]).
* development of the [[voice (phonetics)|voiced]] plosives {{IPA|/b/}}, {{IPA|/d/}}, and {{IPA|/ɡ/}} to their voiced fricative counterparts {{IPA|/β/}} (later {{IPA|/v/}}), {{IPA|/ð/}}, and {{IPA|/ɣ/}}.