I have finished the exercises in the Modern Greek book which had sat on my shelf for many years. I realize that written exercises are no substitute for actual conversations, but in the contemporary world it is useful to know a substantial amount of grammar before joining an online language group. It is extraordinarily embarassing to abort a conversation that has barely begun.
Modern Greek (by which I mean here Δημοτική, Καθαραίβουσα, and the actual language of the street) has several features immediately familiar to the student of Homer and Herodotus: one of these is the case system.
The case system (less the dative) has survived which pleases me, but surely appalls others. The survival of the case system in Modern Greek and its loss in the Romance tongues might be the result of the stress-and-pitch patterns of Greek and Latin. Greek started with a pitch accent, which eventually shifted to a stress accent; a process which was accelerated by the increase in non-native speaker during the period of the dialects of Κοινή. Latin appears to have always possessed a stress accent, but it shifted from a universal first-syllable stress (presumably the effect of the Etruscans, who had an even stronger version of initial stress) to the penultimate/antepenultimate system of Classical times. After pitch accent and many cases of vowel length had been sacrificed on the altar of expediency, the striking differencebetween the Greek and Latin stress systems was the absence of any accents on the ultimate syllable in Latin. The movement from a primarily case system to an analytic system occurred in both languages, but the evanescence of the Greek case system was retarded by the existence of nouns stressed on the final syllable. Stressed syllables are more resilient in the face of impending doom that unstressed ones, and can provide a paradigm for replacing or repairing ending of words accented on the penultimate and antepenultimate syllables. Latin, lacking this reinforcement mechanism, could not halt the accelerating pace of grammatical reanalysis.
