Greek Influence on English Language

corroboratory and direct borrowings Since the living Grecian and face languages were non in direct striking until upstart times, borrowings were necessarily indirect, coming e very(prenominal) by Latin ( by dint of with(predicate) texts or respective(a) vernaculars), or from Ancient Hellenic texts, non the living language. Some Hellenic wrangle were borrowed intoLatinand its descendants, theRomance languages. slope frequently received these lecture fromFrench. Their phonetic and orthographic chance variable has nightimes changed considerably.For instance,placewas borrowed both by Old slope and by French from Latinplatea, itself borrowed from classic ( ) long (street) the Italianpiazzaand Spanish centre brook the same origin, and entertain been borrowed into side in parallel. The articleolivecomes by dint of theRomancefrom the Latin wordoliva, which in turn comes from the Hellenic (elaiwa). 12A by and by classic word, (bouturon)3becomes Latin entirelyyru mand eventually sidebutter. A vauntingly group of earlier borrowings, again inherited send-off through Latin, indeed through various vernaculars, comes from Christian dictionarybishop< episkoposoverseer),priest< (presbyteroselder), andchurch<? (kyriakon). 4In some cases, the orthography of these address was subsequently changed to reflect the Greek spell oute. g. quirewas respelled aschoirin the 17th century. legion(predicate) more course were borrowed by scholars paternity in post- neoclassical Latin. Some language were borrowed in essentially their original meaning, often transmitted through classical Latinphysics,iambic,eta,necromancy. A a few(prenominal) result from scribal errorsencyclopedia< the fate of learning, not a compound in Greekacne(skin condition) < erroneous lt high point, acme. Others were borrowed same(predicate) as technical foul terms, but with specific, allegory meaningstelescope< farther- beholding refers to anoptical instr ument for seeing far awayphlogiston< burnt thing is a supposedfire-making potential. But by far the largest Greek contribution to position vocabulary is the huge number of scientific, medical, and technicalneologismsthat befool been coined bycompounding Greek root and affixesto produce novel words which neer existed in the Greek languageutopia(1516, not + place), beast(1669, ),hydrodynamics(1738, + ),photography(1834, + ),oocyte(1895, + ),helicobacter(1989, + ). Such terms ar coined in all the European languages, and hand out to the others freelyincluding to Modern Greek. Traditionally, these coinages were constructed using unless Greek morphemes,e. g. metamathematics, but increasingly, Greek, Latin, and other morphemes argon combined, as intelevision(Greek + Latinvision),metalinguistic(Greek + Latin glossa+ Greek - + Greek - ), andgarbology( positiongarbage+ Greek - . Thesehybrid wordswere fashionerly considered to be barbarisms. Many Greek affixes such a santi-and-ichave becomeproductivein English, combining with arbitrary English wordsantichoice,Fascistic. Most learned borrowings and coinages follow the classical LatinRomanization system, where c represents ? etc. , with a few exceptionseureka(cf. heuristic),kinetic(cf. cinematography),krypton(cf. cryptic). Some Greek words were borrowed through Arabic and then Romancealchemy( or ),philosophers stone( ),alembic( ),botargo( , and mayhapquintal( < Latincentenarium (pondus)). Curiously,chemistappears to be aback-formationfromalchemist. In the 19th and twentieth centuries a few learned words and phrases were introduced using a more or less direct transliteration of Ancient Greek ( alternatively than the traditional Latin-based morphology and wasteped inflectional endings),e. g. creative thinker( ),hoi polloi( ). Some Greek words have given rise toetymological doublets, creation borrowed both through an organic, indirect route, and a learned, direct route into English anthemandan tiphon( ,franticandfrenetic( ),butterandbutyr(ic)( ),bishopandepiscop(al)( ), fulsomenessandbalsam( , probably itself a borrowing from Semitic), whangandblasphemy( ),boxandpyx(is)( ),choirandchorus( ),trivetandtripod( / -), ravishandscandal( ),oil,olive,oleum, andelaeo-( )almondandamygdala( )dramand fluidram( )paperandpapyrus( )caratandceratin( , -). 56 Finally, with the growth of tourism, some words reflecting modern Greek ulture have been borrowed into Englishmany of them originally borrowings into Greek themselvesretsina,souvlaki,taverna(< Italian),ouzo(disputed etymology),moussaka(< Turkish < Arabic),baklava(< Turkish),feta(< Italian),bouzouki(< Turkish),gyroscope(the food, a calque of Turkishdoner). - editGreek as an intermediary Many words from the Hebraical Biblewere transmitted to the western languages through the Greek of theSeptuagint, often without morphological regularisationpharaoh( ),seraphim( , ,paradise( < Hebrew < Persian),rabbi( ). - editThe writ ten form of Greek words in English Many Greek words, especially those borrowed through the literary tradition, atomic number 18 recognizable as such from their spelling. Already in Latin, thither were specific conventions for borrowing Greek. So Greek? was written as y, as ? , as ? ,? as ph, and? as c. These conventions (which originally reflected pronunciation) have carried over into English and other languages with historical orthography ( same(p) French).They make it possible to gain words of Greek origin, and give hints as to their pronunciation and inflection. On the other hand, the spelling of some words was refashioned to reflect their etymology put Englishcaracterbecamecharacterin the sixteenth century. 7 The Ancient Greek diphthongs and may be spelled in three different shipway in English the digraphsaeandoe the ligatures? and? or the saucer-eyed lettere. Both the digraphs and ligatures atomic number 18 rare in American usage, but the digraphs stay on common in Brit ish usage. Examples are encyclopaedia /encyclop? ia / encyclopedia, haemoglobin / h? moglobin / hemoglobin, oedema / ? dema / edema, Oedipus / ? dipus / Edipus (rare). The verbal ending- is spelled-izein American English and-iseor-izein British English. In some cases, a words spelling cl aboriginal shows its Greek origin. If it includesphor includesybetween consonants, it is very likely Greek. If it includesrrh,phth, orchth or starts withhy-,ps-,pn-, orchr- or the rarerpt-,ct-,chth-,rh-,x-,sth-,mn-,tm-,gn-orbd-, then it is Greek, with some exceptionsgnat,gnaw,gneiss.One exception isptarmigan, which is from aGaelicword, thephaving been added byfalse etymology. The wordtrophy, though at last of Greek origin, did not have a? but a? in its Greek form, . - editPronunciation In clusters such asps-,pn-, orgn-which are not allowed byEnglish phonotactics, the usual English pronunciation drops the first consonant (e. g. psychology) at the start of a word comparegnosticn? st? k andagnostic? gn? st? k there are a few exceptionstmesistmi? s? s.Initialx-is pronouncez. Chis pronounced likekrather than as in churche. g. character, chaos. concomitant vowel sounds are often pronounced distributively rather than forming a single vowel sound or one of them becoming silent (e. g. theatrevs. feat). - editInflectional endings and plurals though many English words derived from Greek through the literary route drop the inflectional endings (tripod,zoology,pentagon) or use Latin endings (papyrus,mausoleum), some preserve the Greek endingstetrahedron, outline(cf. cheme),topos,lexicon,climax. In the case of Greek endings, the plurals sometimes follow theGreek rulesphenomenon, phenomenatetrahedron, tetrahedracrisis, criseshypothesis, hypothesesstigma, stigmatatopos, topoicyclops, cyclopes but often do notcolon, colonsnot*cola(except for thevery rare technical term of rhetoric)pentathlon, pentathlonsnot*pentathlademon, demonsnot*demonesclimaxes, not*climaces.Usage is mixed in some ca sesschema, schemasorschematalexicon, lexiconsorlexicahelix, helixesorhelicessphinx, sphingesorsphinxesclitoris, clitorisesorclitorides. And there are misleading casespentagoncomes from Greekpentagonon, so its plural cannot be*pentaga it ispentagons(Greek /pentagona). (cf. Plurals from Latin and Greek) - editVerbs Few English verbs are derived from the equivalent Greek verbs examples arebaptizeandostracize.However, the Greek verbal suffix-izeis productive in Latin, the Romance languages, and English words likemetabolize, though composed of a Greek root and a Greek suffix, are modern compounds. - editStatistics The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, fibreandtokenfrequencies emblem relative frequency is the proportion of distinct words token frequency is the proportion of words in actual texts.Since most words of Greek origin are vary technical and scientific coinages, the type frequency is considerably higher than the token frequency. An d the type frequency in a large word list will be larger than that in a picayune word list. In a distinctive English dictionary of 80,000 words, which corresponds very virtually to the vocabulary of an educated English speaker, approximately 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek directly, and about 25% indirectly (if we reckoning modern coinages from Greek roots as Greek). citation needed - editReferences 1. This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latinvreflects a still-pronounceddigamma. The Greek word was in turn on the face of it borrowed from a pre-Indo-EuropeanMediterraneansubstrate(see alsoGreek substrate language), although the earliest manifest form of it is theMycenaean Greeke-ra-wa(transliterated as elava), attested inLinear Bsyllabic scriptseee-ra-wa, Mycenaean (Linear b) English Glossary 2. Palaeolexicon, Word study ray of ancient languages 3. Carl Darling Buck,A vocabulary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European LanguagesISBN 0-226-07937 -6notes that the word has the form of a compound + cow-cheese, maybe a calque from Scythian, or possibly an adaptation of a native Scythian word 4. church, on Oxford Dictionaries