Greek Influence on English Language

Indirect and direct borrowings 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. Some Greek words were borrowed into Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages. English often received these words from French. Their phonetic and orthographic form has sometimes changed considerably.
For instance, place was borrowed both by Old English and by French from Latin platea, itself borrowed from Greek ??????? (???? ) ‘broad (street)’; the Italian piazza and Spanish plaza have the same origin, and have been borrowed into English in parallel. The word olive comes through the Romance from the Latin word oliva, which in turn comes from the Greek?????? (elaiwa). [1][2] A later Greek word, ???????? (bouturon)[3] becomes Latin butyrum and eventually English butter. A large group of early borrowings, again transmitted first through Latin, then through various vernaculars, comes from Christian vocabulary: bishop < ????????? episkopos ‘overseer’), priest < ??????????? (presbyteros ‘elder’), and church < ? ???????? (kyriakon). [4] In some cases, the orthography of these words was later changed to reflect the Greek spelling: e. g. quire was respelled as choir in the 17th century. Many more words were borrowed by scholars writing in post-classical Latin. Some words were borrowed in essentially their original meaning, often transmitted through classical Latin: physics,iambic, eta, necromancy. A few result from scribal errors: encyclopedia < ????????? ??????? ‘the circle of learning’, not a compound in Greek; acne (skin condition) < erroneous ???? lt; ???? ‘high point, acme’. Others were borrowed unchanged as technical terms, but with specific, novel meanings: telescope < ?????????? ‘far-seeing’ refers to an optical instrument for seeing far away; phlogiston < ????????? ‘burnt thing’ is a supposed fire-making potential. But by far the largest Greek contribution to English vocabulary is the huge number of scientific, medical, and technical neologisms that have been coined by compounding Greek roots and affixesto produce novel words which never existed in the Greek language: utopia (1516, ?? ‘not’ + ????? ‘place’), zoology (1669, ???? ????? ), hydrodynamics (1738, ???? + ????????? ), photography(1834, ??? + ???????? ), oocyte (1895, ??? + ????? ), helicobacter (1989, ???? + ????????? ). Such terms are coined in all the European languages, and spread to the others freely—including to Modern Greek. Traditionally, these coinages were constructed using only Greek morphemes, e. g. metamathematics, but increasingly, Greek, Latin, and other morphemes are combined, as intelevision (Greek ???? – + Latin vision), metalinguistic (Greek ???? + Latin lingua + Greek -????? + Greek -???? ), and garbology (English garbage + Greek -?????? . These hybrid words were formerly considered to be ‘barbarisms’. Many Greek affixes such as anti- and -ic have become productive in English, combining with arbitrary English words: antichoice, Fascistic. Most learned borrowings and coinages follow the classical Latin Romanization system, where ‘c’ represents ? etc. , with a few exceptions: eureka (cf. heuristic), kinetic (cf. cinematography),krypton (cf. cryptic). Some Greek words were borrowed through Arabic and then Romance: alchemy (?????? or ????? ), elixir (?????? ), alembic (????? ), botargo (????????? , and possibly quintal (??????????? < Latincentenarium (pondus)). Curiously, chemist appears to be a back-formation from alchemist. In the 19th and 20th centuries a few learned words and phrases were introduced using a more or less direct transliteration of Ancient Greek (rather than the traditional Latin-based morphology and dropped inflectional endings), e. g. nous (???? ), hoi polloi (?? ?????? ). Some Greek words have given rise to etymological doublets, being borrowed both through an organic, indirect route, and a learned, direct route into English: anthem and antiphon (???????? ,frantic and frenetic (?????????? ), butter and butyr(ic) (???????? ), bishop and episcop(al) (????????? ), balm and balsam (???????? , probably itself a borrowing from Semitic), blame and blasphemy(????????? ), box and pyx(is) (????? ), choir and chorus (????? ), trivet and tripod (??????? /?????? -), slander and scandal (????????? ), oil, olive, oleum, and elaeo- (?????? ); almond and amygdala(???????? ); dram and drachma (?????? ); paper and papyrus (??????? ); carat and keratin (????? , ????? -). [5][6] Finally, with the growth of tourism, some words reflecting modern Greek ulture have been borrowed into English—many of them originally borrowings into Greek themselves: retsina, souvlaki,taverna (< Italian), ouzo (disputed etymology), moussaka (< Turkish < Arabic), baklava (< Turkish), feta (< Italian), bouzouki (< Turkish), gyro (the food, a calque of Turkish doner). ————————————————- [edit]Greek as an intermediary Many words from the Hebrew Bible were transmitted to the western languages through the Greek of the Septuagint, often without morphological regularization: pharaoh (????? ), seraphim(???????? , ??????? , paradise (?????????? < Hebrew < Persian), rabbi (????? ). ————————————————- [edit]The written form of Greek words in English Many Greek words, especially those borrowed through the literary tradition, are recognizable as such from their spelling. Already in Latin, there 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 (like French).
They make it possible to recognize 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: Middle English caracter became character in the 16th century. [7] The Ancient Greek diphthongs ?? and ?? may be spelled in three different ways in 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 the digraphs remain common in British usage. Examples are: encyclopaedia /encyclop? ia / encyclopedia, haemoglobin / h? moglobin / 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 it includes 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 the rarer pt-, ct-, chth-, rh-, x-, sth-, mn-, tm-, gn- or bd-, then it is Greek, with some exceptions: gnat, gnaw, gneiss.

One exception is ptarmigan, which is from a Gaelic word, the phaving been added by false etymology. The word trophy, though ultimately of Greek origin, did not have a ? but a ? in its Greek form, ????????. ————————————————- [edit]Pronunciation In clusters such as ps-, pn-, or gn- which are not allowed by English phonotactics, the usual English pronunciation drops the first consonant (e. g. psychology) at the start of a word; comparegnostic [n? st? k] and agnostic [? gn? st? k]; there are a few exceptions: tmesis [tmi? s? s].
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”). ————————————————- [edit]Inflectional 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 endings: tetrahedron, schema (cf. cheme), topos, lexicon, climax. In the case of Greek endings, the plurals 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; climaxes, not *climaces.
Usage is mixed in some cases: schema, schemas or schemata; lexicon, lexicons or lexica; helix, helixes or helices; sphinx, sphinges or sphinxes; clitoris, clitorises or clitorides. And there are misleading cases: pentagon comes from Greek pentagonon, so its plural cannot be *pentaga; it ispentagons (Greek ????????? /pentagona). (cf. Plurals from Latin and Greek) ————————————————- [edit]Verbs Few English verbs are derived from the corresponding Greek verbs; examples are baptize and ostracize.
However, the Greek verbal suffix -ize is productive in Latin, the Romance languages, and English: words like metabolize, though composed of a Greek root and a Greek suffix, are modern compounds. ————————————————- [edit]Statistics The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, type and 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 (if we count modern coinages from Greek roots as Greek). citation needed] ————————————————- [edit]References 1. ^ This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latin v 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), although the earliest attested form of it is the Mycenaean Greek e-ra-wa (transliterated as “elava”), attested in Linear B syllabic script—see e-ra-wa, Mycenaean (Linear b) – English Glossary 2.  Palaeolexicon, Word study tool of ancient languages 3. ^ Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages ISBN 0-226-07937-6 notes that the word has the form of a compound ???? +????? ‘cow-cheese’, possibly a calque from Scythian, or possibly an adaptation of a native Scythian word 4. ^ church, on Oxford Dictionaries