The Greek language is so old that even Ancient Greek is not the oldest form of the language, nor is its predecessor, Linear B. The last known predecessor of all forms of Greek, and the first really “Greek” language, was a proto-Greek that emerged in the northern Greek peninsula during the end of the Neolithic era, approximately 5000 years ago.
When we think of the alphabet, it is hard not to think of Greek as even the word itself is formed from the names of the first 2 Greek letters, alpha and beta. Though it was predated by the Phoenician by several hundred years, the Greek alphabet was the first complete alphabet. Copying the 22 letters from Phoenician, the Greeks added vowel sounds and started writing from left-to-right, opposite the Phoenicians.
Though the Greeks developed the first full alphabet, this was not their first writing system. Predating the alphabet by around 6 centuries, Linear B was originally developed by the Mycenaean Greeks circa 1450 BC. Possessing 87 syllabic signs and more than 100 ideographic signs, after almost 3200 years of mystery, the system was finally deciphered in the early 1950s by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick.
Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had no lowercase letters. Though it does not really change the language itself, the addition of lowercase, or miniscule, letters was an adoption of the late medieval period, likely to make the language more stylistically compatible with more modern languages.
A new nation deserves a new (old) language, sort of. For the longest time post-independence, there were 2 linguistic schools of thought in Greece, the Katharevousa, advocating a scholarly language based on ancient Greek, and the Demotic, promoting a standardised vernacular form of Greek. Once the Katharevousa was adopted by the Greek government it was almost immediately discovered to be too difficult to use outside of academia and replaced by the Demotic, which has been the national language since 1976.
One of the most interesting words to come from Greek is the initial word for anyone who was not Greek- barbaroi, meaning ‘barbarian.’ The origin of the word comes from the inability of the Greeks to understand foreign languages, which they interpreted to sound like “bar-bar-bar-bar.”
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