Ancient Greek dialects by the grammarians under the terms 'lexeis' or 'glôssai'. The dialects of Classical Antiquity are grouped slightly differently by various authorities. Pamphylian is a marginal dialect of Asia Minor and is sometimes left uncategorized. Mycenaean was deciphered only in 1952 and so is missing from the earlier schemes presented here: The Ancient Greek dialects differed mainly in vowels. Loss of intervocalic "s" and consonantal "i" and "w" from Proto-Greek brought two vowels together in hiatus, a circumstance often called a "collision of vowels". Over time, Greek speakers would change pronunciation to avoid such a collision, and the way that vowels
Ancient Greek Greek in the Hellenistic period. Recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet, suggest that ancient Macedonian might have been a variety of North Western Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics, Ancient Greek words could end only in a vowel or ; final stops were lost, as in "milk", compared with "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in phonemic inventory: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek. Ancient Greek had long and