«Greek has always remained one language. [..] Nor has there ever been in historic times any other language even partially intelligible to Greek speakers without special study. […] Perhaps connected with this continuous identity over some three and a half millennia is the slowness of change in Greek. It is still recognisably the same language today as it was when the Homeric poems were written down, probably around 700 B.C., […] The continuity of lexical stock is striking – though here too things are not as simple as they seem at first sight. And though there has been much rearrangement of morphological patterns, there has also been much continuity, and Greek is quite clearly even today an archaic, ‘Indo – European’ type of language, like Latin or Russian, not a modern, analytical language, like English or Persian.»