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English words of Greek origin

Overview

The Greek language
Greek language
Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...

has contributed to the English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...

vocabulary in three ways:

directly as an immediate donor,
indirectly through other intermediate language(s), as an original donor (mainly through Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...

and French
French language
French is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...

), and
with modern coinages or new Greek.

The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, type and token frequencies

Type-token distinction

In philosophy and knowledge representation, the type-token distinction is a distinction that separates an abstract concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept...

: 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.

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Encyclopedia

The Greek language
Greek language
Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...

has contributed to the English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...

vocabulary in three ways:

directly as an immediate donor,
indirectly through other intermediate language(s), as an original donor (mainly through Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...

and French
French language
French is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...

), and
with modern coinages or new Greek.

Overview

The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, type and token frequencies

Type-token distinction

In philosophy and knowledge representation, the type-token distinction is a distinction that separates an abstract concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept...

: 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 roots—and often re-borrowed back into Modern Greek.

Still, there are a few Greek words which were borrowed organically—though indirectly. The English word olive comes through the Romance

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

from the Latin word olīva, which in turn comes from the Greek . This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latin v reflects a still-pronounced digamma

Digamma

Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet, used primarily as a Greek numeral.The letter had the phonetic value of a voiced labial-velar approximant . It was originally called wau. It was later called the "elusive" ' because of its shape...

. The Greek word was in turn apparently borrowed from a pre-Indo-European

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...

Mediterranean substrate

Substratum

In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which is influenced by another, while a superstratum is the language that exerts the influence...

(see also Greek substrate language

Greek substrate language

The term Pre-Greek substrate refers to the unknown language or languages that are conjectured to have been spoken in prehistoric Greece before the settlement of Proto-Greek speakers in the area...

). A later Greek word, , either borrowed from or calqued on a Scythian

Scythian languages

The Scythian languages form a North Eastern branch of the Iranian language family and comprise the distinctive languagesspoken by the Scythian tribes of nomadic pastoralists in Scythia between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD...

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 episkopos (originally meaning just an 'overseer'), priest from presbyter, and church from kyriakon. 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 late 16th century an influx of Greek words were derived directly, in intellectual fields and the new science.

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 orthography) for instance nous, hoi polloi
Hoi polloi
Hoi polloi , an expression meaning "the many", or in the strictest sense, "the majority" in Greek, is used in English to denote "the masses" or "the people", usually in a derogatory sense...

.

Finally with the growth of tourism, some words, mainly reflecting aspects of current Greek life, have been introduced with orthography reflecting Modern Greek

Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers to the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features...

, for instance taverna
Taverna
Taverna refers to a small restaurant serving Greek cuisine, not to be confused with "tavern". The Greek word is ταβέρνα and is originally derived from the Latin word taberna...

.

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 'æ', as 'œ', 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 ways in English: the digraphs ae and oe; the ligatures æ and œ; 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 /encyclopædia / encyclopedia, haemoglobin / hæmoglobin / hemoglobin, oedema / œdema / edema, Oedipus / Œdipus / 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-, or bd-, then it is with very few exceptions Greek. One exception is ptarmigan, which is from a Gaelic

Goidelic languages

The Goidelic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, the other consisting of the Brythonic languages. They historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from the south of Ireland, through the Isle of Man, to the north of Scotland. There are three modern Goidelic...

word, the p having been added by false etymology

False etymology

A false etymology is any assumed or postulated etymology that is incorrect.Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held beliefs about the origins of specific words, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions rather than serious research...

.

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, so we now have not only metaphor (direct borrowing from genuine ancient Greek word) and metamathematics (modern coinage using Greek roots), but also metalinguistic (Greek prefix, Latin stem).

In clusters such as ps- at the start of a word, the usual English pronunciation drops 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").

Plurals

The plurals of learned Greek-derived words sometimes follow the Greek rules: phenomenon, phenomena; tetrahedron, tetrahedra; crisis, crises; hypothesis, hypotheses; stigma, stigmata; topos, topoi; but often do not: colon, colons not *cola (except for the very rare technical term of rhetoric

Colon (rhetoric)

A colon is a rhetorical figure consisting of a clause which is grammatically, but not logically, complete. In Latin, it is called a membrum or membrum orationis....

); 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 (Greek πεντάγωνα/pentagona).

Sources

Scheler, Manfred (1977): Der englische Wortschatz 'English vocabulary'. Berlin: Schmidt.
Konstantinidis, Aristidis (2006): Η Οικουμενική Διάσταση της Ελληνικής Γλώσσας 'The Universal Reach of the Greek Language' ISBN 960-90338-2-2. Athens: self-published.

External links

Mathematical Words: Origins and Sources (John Aldrich, University of Southampton) See Section on Contribution of Greek.

English words of Greek origin

Overview

The written form of Greek words in English

Plurals

Sources

See also

External links