ABSTRACT
Modern Greeks have often had difficulty in defining and expressing their relationship with the ancient Greeks. The study of modern Greek attitudes to the relationship between their own language and that of the ancient Greeks is illuminating, because these attitudes are indissolubly linked with their attitudes towards their more general cultural relationship with the ancient Greeks. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the terms used to denote the Modern Greek language were diverse and subject to change. Filippos Iliou counted more than seventy different formulations used for the Modern Greek language during the period 1801-20 alone. An indication of the difficulty that Greeks had in conceptualizing the linguistic changes caused by the passage of the millennia is the frequently expressed theory that contemporary colloquial Greek is a dialect of Hellenic in the same way that Attic, Doric, Aeolic and Ionic are.
