The paper surveys the history and the development of Greek nominal paradigms, from Mycenean Greek up to the present. In the long time span (about 3000 years) covered by written sources, two major changes contributed to reshape nominal paradigms, i.e. case syncretism, which had the effect of reducing the number of cases, and the elimination of socalled athematic declension, which resulted in the reduction of the number of inflectional
classes and the redistribution of nouns between the remaining classes. It is argued that both developments can be better understood in terms of spread of stable and superstable markers, along with ongoing elimination of markers with low token frequency.
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