Introduction

Greek sans flexions, or GSF, started off as a throwaway comment on the Conlang mailing list (there under the dog-Latin name “Graeca sine flexione”), which turned into a thread of its own on what Greek might be like if it were stripped of its inflections, similar in spirit to Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione (also known as Interlingua, but not to be confused with the more well-known Interlingua of the International Auxiliary Language Association).

Several ideas were advanced on the list for possibilities. I took some of them, ignored some others, and came up with some of my own as well to create this particular variety of Greek sans inflections. Others are welcome to do the same if they'd like. (To clear things up: I'm not proposing this as an international auxiliary language.)

Completely without inflections? Well, not quite: for starters, I thought that giving up the plural would be too much, so while marking the definite article, adjectives, and nouns for number is technically optional, I usually do so. (The plural marker is a fixed morpheme, though, which is added onto the end of a word and causing no other changes to the root of the word itself.) Also, some endings that were inflectional endings in Modern or Ancient Greek are left in words, e.g. adverbial endings or the like. However, they don't change, and they're probably not productive in GSF.

The phonology is basically that of Modern Greek (though the spelling is more phonetic than that of MG, e.g. with one symbol for each vowel sound and with various palatalisation effects explicitly marked); the vocabulary is mostly that of Modern Greek but there are occasional Ancient Greek words in there as well.

The definite article, nouns, and adjectives are typically based on the accusative singular (masculine in the case of the article and adjectives). Verb forms are typically based on the aparemphato (Modern Greek infinitive form), which is occasionally extrapolated when not attested in Greek.

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