HOW THE GREEK LANGUAGE FERTILIZED THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD PART 2

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The Greek Language

Greek, a language with prehistoric origins, is still quite "alive" as the national language of Greece. Historical records of the Greek language go back to the1200s BCE, giving Greek the longest recorded history of any European language. The term "Greek" is a generalization, especially compared to languages like Latin or English. In effect, Greek is an entire language family to itself. In the ancient period, several literary dialects are recorded. Later literary dialects include Aeolic (from the Northern Aegean), Doric (from most of the Greek mainland, Rhodes, and Crete), and Attic/Ionic (Athens and the central Aegean islands). The language of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) is an Ionic dialect with strong influences from the Aeolic (northern) dialects. The Homeric poems reached their traditional form sometime in the 700s BCE, making them some of the earliest examples of Greek literature. Greek-speaking people settled everywhere from Egypt to the south of France to the Crimea; they brought their related but distinct dialects with them to these places. The overwhelming impact of the Homeric poems, and the later political andcultural prestige of Athens, led to the Ionic dialect gaining great literary prestigein later centuries. The Athenian version of the Ionic dialect, called "Attic," wasthe language of classical Greek writers like Thucydides and Plato in the 400s and300s BCE. Attic was also used as an administrative language all over the greater area of Greek political influence. With the conquests of Alexander the Great inthe 300s BCE, a common version of Attic called Koine became the officiallanguage of the vast Macedonian empire that stretched over the easternMediterranean and into western Asia. (The following map shows the extent of Macedonian conquests.)

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The most important thing to realize here is that "Greek" is an abstraction. There was no state called "Greece" in ancient times, even in the sense in which the Roman Republic was a nation; there were simply a lot of small political units, many of them literally isolated (on islands). Even the Macedonian empire did not displace the languages of the peoples it conquered; it simply added a layer of administrative, literary and educational Koine to local linguistic situations that were often very complicated. Jesus Christ, for example, was a Jew who lived in Roman Palestine. Very few people there spoke Latin ;Jesus and most Jews of the time and place spoke Aramaic, a language unrelated to Latin or Greek. Yet educated, literate people in Palestine communicated internationally with other educated, literate people in Koine Greek. Hence, the Gospels and Epistles of the Christian New Testament were written in Koine, and circulated throughout the "world" in Greek. The Greek world allowed local cultures to flourish, but translated their activity into Greek for wider use

Greek Borrowings
There are very few Greek words borrowed by the English directly from Greek in the old period. Such is ,for instance,the word church (gr.kuriakon) which was borrowed before the English came to Britain. A large number of Greek word came into English through Latin,e.g. school, bishop, monk, priest,etc.. Many Greek words came into English through French, e.g. fancy, idea, palsy, catalogue, etc..Only at the time of Reinassance, when with the revival of interest in the culture of ancient Greece, English scientists began to read Greek authors in the originals, some English words were directly borrowed from Greek, e.g. lexicon, myth, petal, symphathy. Most of the words spelled with ph, th, ch [k] and y in the middle of the word are of Greek origin, e.g. philosophy. physician, theory, geography. geometry, theatre,etc.. Nowday Greek morphemes are widely used in coining scientific and technical terms,e.g.telephone,telegraph.aerodrome.photograph,etc.. It is interesting to note that modern scientific and technical terms of Greek origin are nearly all of international currency. Greek terms added much to the precision of scientific terminology. How pervasive is the Greek element, direct or indirect, in the Modern English vocabulary may best be illustrated by observing how in a single branch of art or science word of this type tend to accumulate. In natural sciences the preponderance of greek words is triking. It is perhaps sufficient to mention merely the names of such fields as bacteriology, botany, histology, physiology, physics and zoology in order to suggest how the Greek language has permited their various specialized vocabularies. The effect is quite as striking in fields of science that have been recently developed. Here are few of the hundreds of greek terms used in modern medicine: adenoids, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychoanalysis. Greek borrowings were more or less Latinized in form. They are spelt and pronounced not as Greek but as Romans spelt and pronounced them. When, for instance, after the Roman time the Latin ,,c changed its pronunciation before e,Iy (k)-the pronunciation of many Greek words was changed. Thus we got a word like the modern ,,cycle which is very unlike the Greek ,,kuklos -circle. Among numerous Greek borrowings in the English vocabulary we find the following: Analysis, gymnastics, Botany, ode, Comedy, physics, Chorus, philology, Democrat, philosophy, Democracy, problem, Dialogue, prologue, Epilogue, rhythm, Episode, scheme, Epos, scene, Elegy, tragedy, etc. Quite a number of proper names are also Greek in origin, e.g George, Eugene, Helene, Sophie, Peter, Nicholas, Theodor and still others. So much of Greek has come through Latin that it is often hard to give 2

HOW THE GREEK LANGUAGE FERTILIZED THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD PART 2
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credit to the paper source. We may easily find Greek words in the more modern terminology of the fields of general science, of medicine, and in the technical terms of language study. Here are some loan-words which linguistics owes to Greek: antonym, archaism, dialect, etymology, euphemism, homonym, neologism, hyperbole, idiom, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc.. A lot of English terms in rhetoric and grammar originated in Greece. The punctuation mark called a comma originates from the Greek word komma, which meant ,,a piece cut off and then ,,the mark that sets off a phrase. The word colon is from kolon a limb or joint, and hence that piece of a sentence called a clause, then the colon mark to indicate the division of the clause. The word period was originally periodus- a going around, a cycle, as of years .By the end oh the 16th century it meant the point of completion of any action, then a full sentence or the pause following one ,and finally the dot that marksthe end of a sentence. There are numerous English compounds coined from such Greek roots,as:autos-self,chroma-colour,ge-earth,graphein-write,logos-discourse, phonevoice, kratos- power, skopein-to see, telos-at adistance, e.g.autograph, autocrat, chromatology,geography,geology,phonograph,photochromy,telegraph,telephone, telescope. It has been customary to call such newly formed words Greek, but this is, of course, very relative, for many of them were coined neither in Greek nor in Latin, but created in other languages from Greek or Latin roots. New derivatives of this kind may be traced in most modern European languages. Take such words in Russian an Ukranian as :lokomotiv, avtomobilili. The word lokomotiv, for instance, has been derived from two Latin elements:locus+motus; the word automobili consists of Greek and Latin roots:Gr.autos+Lat.mobilis. The Greek Language has contributed to the English vocabulary in three ways: 1.directly as an immediate donor, 2. indirectly through other intermediate language(s), as an original donor (mainly through Latin and French), and 3.with modern coinages or new Greek. The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, 1. type and 2. token frequencies Type frequency is the proportion of distinct words; token frequency is the proportion of words in actual texts. Since most words of Greek origin are specialized technical and scientific coinages, the type frequency is considerably higher than the token frequency. And the type frequency in a large word list will be larger than that in a small word list. In a typical English dictionary of 80,000 words, which corresponds very roughly to the vocabulary of an educated English speaker, about 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek directly, and about 25% indirectly. Since the living Greek and English languages were not in direct contact until modern times, borrowings were necessarily indirect, coming either through Latin (through texts or various vernaculars), or from Ancient Greek texts, not the living language. More recently, a huge number of scientific, medical, and technical neologisms have been coined from Greek rootsand often re-borrowed back into Modern Greek. Still, there are a few Greek words which were borrowed 3

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organicallythough indirectly. The English word olive comes through the Romance from the Latinword olva , which in turn comes from the Greek (elaw). This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latin reflects a still-pronounced digamma. The Greek word was in turn apparently borrowed from a pre-Indo-european Mediterranean substrate (see also Greek substrate language). A later Greek word, , either borrowed from or calqued of Scythian word, becomes Latin butyrum and eventually English butter. A larger group of early borrowings, again transmitted first through Latin, then through various vernaculars, comes from Christian language: bishop from (epskopos' overseer'), priest from ( presbteros 'elder'), and church perhaps from ( k r i a k n ) though etymologists are not unanimous about this last. Unlike later borrowings, which came from a written, learned tradition, olive, bishop, and so on were transmitted through vernaculars, so their English spelling does not reflect their Greek forms. Until the 16th century, the few Greek words that were absorbed into English came through their Latin derivatives. Most of the early borrowings are for expressions in theology for which there were no English equivalents. In the late16th century an influx of Greek words were derived directly, in intellectual field sand the new science. In the 19th and 20th centuries a few learned words and phrases were introducedusing a more or less direct transliteration of Ancient Greek (rather than the traditional Latin-based orthography) for instance nous hoi polloi. Finally with the growth of tourism, some words, mainly reflecting aspects of current Greek life, have been introduced with orthography reflecting ModernGreek , for instance taverna.

The written form of Greek words in English

Greek words borrowed through the literary tradition (not butter and bishop) are often recognizable from their spelling. Already in Latin, there were specific conventions for borrowing Greek. So Greek was written as 'y', as '', as' ', as 'ph', etc. These conventions (which originally reflected differences in pronunciation) have carried over into English and other languages with historical orthography (like French). They make it possible to recognize words of Greek origin, and give hints as to their pronunciation and inflection. The Ancient Greek diphthongs and may be spelled in three different waysin English: the digraphs ae and oe ; the ligatures And ; or the simple letter e. Both the digraphs and ligatures are uncommon in American usage, but thedigraphs remain common in British usage. Examples are: encyclopaedia/encyclopdia/encyclopedia, haemoglobin/hmoglobin/ hemoglobin, oedema / dema / edema, Oedipus / dipus / Edipus (rare). The verbal ending - is spelled -ize in American English and ise or ize in British English.In some cases, a word's spelling clearly shows its Greek origin. If itincludes ph or includes y between consonants, it is very likely Greek. If it includes rrh, phth, or chth; or starts with hy-,ps-, pn-, or chr-; or therarer pt-, ct-, ch th-, rh-, x-, sth-, mn-, or bd-, then it is with very few exceptions Greek. One exception is ptarmigan, which is from a Gaelic word, the p having been added by false etymology. In English, Greek prefixes and suffixes are usually attached to Greek stems, but some have become productive in English, and will combine with other stems, some now have not only metaphor (direct borrowing from genuine ancient Greek word) and meta mathematics (modern coinage using Greek roots), butalso meta linguistic (Greek prefix, Latin stem). 4

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In clusters such as ps - at the start of a word, the usual English pronunciationdrops the first consonant (e.g. psychology); initial x- is pronounced z. Ch is pronounced like k rather than as in "church" (e.g. character, chaos). Consecutive vowels are often pronounced separately rather than forming a single vowel sound or one of them becoming silent (e.g. "theatre" vs. "feat").The plurals of learned Greekderived words sometimes follow the Greek rules: phenomenon, phenomena; tetrahedron, tetrahedra; crisis, crises; hypothesis, hypotheses; stigma, stigmata; topos, topoi; cyclops, cyclopes; but often do not: colon, colons not *cola (except for the very rare technical term of rhetoric); pentathlon, pentathlons not *pentathla; demon, demons not* demones. Usage is mixed in some cases: schema, schemas or schemata; lexicon, lexicons or lexica; clitoris,clitorises or clitorides. And there are misleading cases: pentagon comes from Greek pentagonon, so its plural cannot be *pentaga; it is pentagons.

Conclusion
In conclusion I can say that Greek palyed a very important role in forming the english and not only english language, I can even say that it put the basis of a new language. The Greek language has been very important for Western civilization, and most Western languages have borrowed many Greek words, mainly in the field of science. After the Renaissance Greek replaced Latin as the number one source for new scientific terms. Biology, astronomy, kleptomania, paedophilia and Cybernetic are just afew words of the many that were created from Greek elements and are now used in most European languages in only slightly modified forms (e.g. French biologie, Portuguese, biologia, Swedish, biologi, Russian Biologija, Hungarian biolgia). Even non-European languages have in some cases borrowed Greek words, either directly from Classical Greek, or through the medium of other European languages. Examples of such words are Turkish Bioloji (from French biologie),Malay biokimia (biochemistry) and Tagalog Heolohiya (from Spanish geologia).Greek is written in the Greek alphabet. In texts written in Classical Greek you will notice that usually each word has a vowel with an accent mark on it. These show the pitch or tone associated with that vowel. There were originally three different tones in Greek, and the accent marks were invented by a grammarian called Aristophanus of Byzantium in 260 B.C. as an aid for readers of the works of Homer. In the 7th century these accent marks started to appear in other texts, and this practice was continued until a spelling reform in 1985. It is unknown how these tones were pronounced; they were replaced by a stress accent like the one existing in English, many centuries ago. Nowadays only this stress accent is indicated in Greek words (unless the word consists of only one syllable, in which case an accent would obviously be redundant). Undoubtedly Greek schoolchildren and foreigners who are trying to learn Greek have reason to be thankful for this spelling reform! Another feature abolished by the spelling reform was the use of the signs psili and dasia over vowels or over the letter Rho when they started a word.A dasia indicated that the vowel used to be preceded by an aitch sound (or followed by one in the case of rho), and a psili indicated no aitch sound. Like the tone accents the aitch sound disappeared a long time ago from the Greek language. But in Greek borrowings in European languages (which were after all usually borrowed from Classical Greek) the letter h is not uncommon(e.g. helium and rheumatism). Now thanks to Greek language we have the posibility to know a lot of useful things in all domeins because we meet Greek 5

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not only in English but in other languages too, and not only in the domein of linguistics but also in science, art, technology and so on. Bibliography 1.N.N.Amosova: ,,The etymology of English language,1956;2 . M . O r e m b o v s k a i a : ,,English Lexicology, 1989; 3 . T . O r e m b o v s k a i a : , , E n g l i s h L e x i c o l o g y , 1 9 8 9 ; 4.T. Gvarjaladze:,,Foreign Elements in Modern English,1996; 5.Scheler, Manfred: ,,English Vocabulary,Berlin,1977; 6.Konstantinidis, Aristidis: ,,The Universal Reach of the Greek Language,Athens, 2006. Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/31164666/Introduction