History
Greek has been spoken in the Balkan Peninsula since around the late 3rd millennium BC. The earliest written evidence is found in the Linear B clay tablets in the "Room of the Chariot Tablets", an LMIII A-context (c. 1400 BC) region of Knossos, in Crete, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living languages. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages.
The later Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet (abjad); with minor modifications, it is still used today.
Read more about this topic: Greek Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)