Ancient Greek grammar Ancient Greek grammar Ancient Greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European morphology. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, numerals and especially verbs are all highly inflected. Another complication of Greek grammar is that different Greek authors wrote in different dialects, all of which have slightly different grammatical forms (see Ancient Greek dialects). For example, the history of Herodotus and medical works of Hippocrates are written in Ionic, the poems of Sappho in Aeolic, and the odes of Pindar in Doric; the poems of Homer are written in a mixed dialect, mostly Ionic, with many archaic and poetic forms.
Ancient Greek personal names used for names that derived not from other words but from the sounds made by little children addressing their relatives. Typically, they involve repeated consonants or syllables (like English "Dada, Nana")—examples are "Nanna" and "Papas". They grew hugely in frequency from a low base in the Roman period, probably through the influence of other naming traditions such as Phrygian, in which such names were very common. The main broad characteristics of Greek name formation listed above are found in other Indo-European languages (the Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, and Slavic subgroups); they look like an ancient inheritance within Greek. The naming