I treat those aspects like American Gods are explained in that book. The origin may be Greek, but it developed into something new and distinct, I don’t claim it.
But the parts that are still alive and well, as the language I speak everyday, it really is an issue for me when I’m told, time and time again, that it basically evolved into Latin, because Romans conquered us and thus Greek ceased to exist (again, actual response form the author of a linguistics article). This, I don’t and won’t accept.
But you won’t find many words with Greek origin that do not stem from scientific literature. Simply because there are few Greeks who introduced their language personally into English and few non-scholars (outside of Greece) who spoke Greek.
That, or my perception of Greek words in English suffers from the problem you describe, as well… Please tell me that I’m wrong if there are an abundance of words with a non-scholarly origin that originate from Greek but get labelled as French, Latin, German, etc.
I’m not sure I see the problem. I do see the problem that not everything should be about America, but when talking about the English language, it’s obviously going to be about America for a very large portion: the largest group of native English speakers are American. It’s not strange people in a culture know little about another culture if they have little contact with it. And it’s not strange that they would be unaware of words that originally stem from a culture they know little about, when those words were introduced through other foreign cultures they have a lot of contact with.
The reason that there is not a lot of direct Greek influence in American culture / language, is because there are not a lot of Greeks in America. Meanwhile, there are huge communities of Spanish, Italian and French speaking people in America. It’s rather obvious that words introduced into English through these melting pots end up being attributed to Spanish, Italian or French, and not to Greek. In the same way that we don’t attribute that tele from telephone to an even older proto-indo-european language. That is, in a dictionary. If it was an etymology dictionary, then of course it should talk about the whole route that is known about the origin of the word, including Greek, and including older languages.
You’d be surprised… I don’t want to link one of those articles that have lists upon lists of words with Greek origins in English, because most of them are written by people trying to prove something I do not agree with.
I think I’ve mentioned “doula” before; it is a Greek word and it means “female slave” (not servant, like it’s usually mentioned, I guess to take the slavery part out of it). It is an ancient Greek word that is still frequently used today, with the same meaning. Imagine how it feels to make the word for slave a job title, when we are bullied everyday for doing things that someone, somewhere, decided that only certain people should be allowed to do.
Also, taking into account how the whole Eastern Roman Empire (whose official language was Greek) fled to the West after 1453 (officially, but obviously earlier people were leaving as well), you realize how much refugees/ immigrants carry their language with them.
Sidenote: I don’t know how much the rest of the Europeans are taught about Turkish/ Arabic words in their vocabulary, or they are trying to hush parts of their history, because nobody likes losing. (I’m not talking scientific communities, but general population.) I use Turkish words everyday, some I know, some I probably don’t. We were slaves for 400 years, obviously things linger, what am I going to do about it, sulk?
My issue isn’t that they don’t know about it, it’s that they deliberately aren’t taught (told, I’d say) about it. (EDIT: And, to be honest, I believe the thinking is “nah, small country, not a power player, who cares”. Which, imagine someone saying that about some other minority). And the result is, that people grow up and teach others things that are not accurate, generation after generation, and they end up with a twisted version of how things are. I don’t see how you don’t see a problem with people who work in linguistics or similar have told me such ridiculous things about my language. Seriously, you think that’s OK? I’m not talking why Mary in LA doesn’t know that music is a word of Greek origin. This is not something that is of grave importance, Mary can live her life and never have to learn about it, I’d be friends with Mary regardless.
But perpetuating the belief that nothing existed before the colonization of the Americas, and on top of that that all countries should live the way American culture dictates, I’d say those are dangerous ideas to have.
and there are many more missing, even though they are very commonly used worldwide in every English version (like “going to the gym” ).
Do note that the New Testament (which is definitely not scientific literature) was originally written in Greek and a lot of words have spilled into the everyday English through the centuries.
It could be argued that when talking about the English language, the main root of the language itself is the most important. American, Australian, Indian, New Zealand etc English all have their own variations, but they all stem from the same language, which, itself was affected by German and Latin and Greek and Spanish and Dutch and and and …
The English language has been in existence for around 1300 years. Billions of people learn it (without really bothering to check if it is British English or American or Australian etc) and from it came all the versions of the language.
The Greek language has been in existence for around 3500 years. Just around 20-25 million people learn it and rest assured it has its own versions and variations, despite the small size. Still a very important language since it affected so many other languages, just because it has been around for so long.
The Latin language has been in existence for around 2800 years. Noone speaks Latin anymore. Need I say how important Latin is to Italian, Spanish, German, English, Romanian, Swedish and so on ?
By comparison the United States have been around for 400 years. Yes, due to the internet and the movies a lot of people tend to come more in contact with that version of the language, but it didn’t really have that much time to alter things. Indians are 1 billion people. They started with British English and then started to alter it and add to it. Not American English. Same goes for Pakistan (hundreds of millions there too), Australia, etc etc
It is not a popularity contest. British English are the basis for all the versions we have today, ergo it is the most important still.
It’s not strange people in a culture know little about another culture if they have little contact with it.
It kind of is, when they claim to have incorporated a lot of their cultural products like, let’s say, Demo-cracy.
This whole thing reminds me of the vast majority of American Christians (mostly Evangelicals and Reformed Baptists) that I have “met” online and think that Christianity started around 500 years ago with Martin Luther. They know that Jesus died 2000 years ago, yet noone wonders “hey, what kind of church and beliefs did we have for 1500 before Martin Luther?” … no knowledge of 1500 of the history of their own religion which they profess to have given their lives over to. Is that history unimportant just because the Roman empire (east and west) which most of that history took place are no longer here?
Here is an example of an actually educated Protestant that is attending “Biblical studies”/theology college:
For those that will not bother to watch it, let us just say that when he realised that he is missing 3/4 of the history of his own religion, he was not very happy to find himself so lacking in his knowledge of his own faith.
History is also not a popularity contest and it does not matter whether there are a lot of Greeks there now or not. Greek and Latin ideas are in their laws, in your culture, in your society and will remain there for a loooong time, whether you notice it or not.
You can, of course, as a culture, choose to ignore its existence, but that doesn’t mean that it is no longer important.
You do not need “large enough of a population” to develop your own idioms and incorporate local words. Just like in evolution, all you need is some good old isolation and even a small village up on a mountain can end up with its own version of the language after a few hundred years.
I never understood the whole “cultural approriation” idea … seems like the most impractical/illogical thing in the last decades to me …
Ok, you’re still missing my point: there are plenty of words that if you go back far enough have a Greek form in some way or another, I don’t dispute that. My problem is with your claims that these words should be marked as “Greek” words.
They’re not introduced in English from Greek directly, and the Greek origin in turn often stems from earlier languages older than ancient Greek. Why make the arbitrary distinction of calling Greek the ultimate root, when it’s not in fact the beginning or the end of the use of the word? Especially if many of these words did not reach English through Greek, but through other various linguae francae?
Let’s look at some examples of why this list of words, in my opinion, unjustly claims a huge class of words to be Greek. I’m not cherry picking these words, by the way, I try to give examples of different problems with the origin of these words:
Airplane
This word did obviously not exist in Greek before the creation of, well, airplanes. It is a combination of “air”, which indeed does have an ancestry through Middle English, Old French, Latin, all the way back to Ancient Greek (and likely further back than that). However, the word “plane” does not even have an Ancient Greek origin, and stems from Latin, to a Proto-Italic language to Proto-Indo-European, never passing through Greek.
So airplane just is the combination of two English words to make a new one, one of which happens to have an ancient root passing through Greek. This does not make “airplane” a Greek word in the slightest.
Anatomy
First off, from the pronunciation alone it is clear that this word was introduced through French, and not through Greek. French in turn got it from Latin, which got it from Ancient Greek. However, both ἀνά and τέμνω have older roots in Proto-Indo-European. Why is the claim that this word is Greek justified if the words go back further? There might have been people talking in Sanskrit 3000 years ago using a word similar to anatomy for all we know.
Angel
This is claimed to be Greek, but similar words existed in Ancient Semitic languages and in Sanskrit centuries before the first Ancient Greek records. It’s just as Greek as it is Latin, or French, or indeed, English.
Ecology
It is, like anatomy, composed of parts that are borrowed from Greek, but in turn have a root going back further. Different than anatomy, is that Ecology was coined by a German scholar, and not ever a word in Greek until it was introduced into Greek scholarly.
Well, you get the point. Most of these words fall in one of the above categories.
Of course, not all words are problematic. As an example:
Academy
Here’s one of the few words that I agree with to be of Greek origin, because it is the name of a Greek location: the place where Plato lectured. Other names of places or figures: marathon (location of a battlefield), Olympic (a mountain) and Nike (a goddess, although perhaps already named like that before the Greeks)
However, such words are in the minority.
To summarise again, my problem is not with the claim that these words at some point were (composed of) Greek (parts), it is with the claim that they should be labelled as Greek. These words do for the majority not originate in Greek because either they have a root going back further than Ancient Greek (such as “angel”), or because they were coined by people using words that were already part of the language (“airplane”).
They were introduced in English through other languages than Greek, thus I don’t see the problem with a dictionary attributing these words to those languages.
Also just to be clear, I do not want to say that Greek is unimportant in the history of European languages, in contrary, it had a huge influence. I only have a problem with the claim of ownership of these words.
About the American thing: I do agree that there are things some Americans unjustly think are uniquely theirs (liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, and so on), and this is indeed stupid.
However, it’s unfair to say that, say, democracy, should be solely attributed to the Greeks. The current forms of democracy in the world are all vastly different, and have gone through various transformations through the ages in various cultures. And there is some part of it contributed by the US, in their short history as well.
No culture should claim ownership of something so vast, complex and multi-faceted as democracy.
Also, there is some evidence that democratic societies also existed in Ancient India, concurrent with the Greeks, so it’s not 100% sure that Greeks were the first either. The Greeks have the benefit of writing a lot about it, though.
I see that this is the crux of the matter. As far as I am concerned, I think that if we want to be factual we need to include as much information as we can and not just stop to just the last language that happened to transport a particular word/type.
In order to adress the matter I will pose you a question that was actually asked by to Minoas (an ancient king serving as an afterlife judge according to myth) by a theif named Sostratos, in Lucian’s “Dialogues of the Dead”. They were talking about predestination, but I think this part of the dialogue fits here as well.
Sostratos:
If someone is forced to kill a human, without being able to resist the commands of those that violently enforce that decision, like an executioner that has to obey the judge or a bodyguard that has to obey the tyrant, who would you accuse for the murder?
Minoas:
It is obvious that I would accuse the judge or the tyrant, because I cannot blame the sword itself. That, as an instrument, just serves the wrath of the person that created the cause.
Sostratos:
Thank you Minoa, you enhance my example. So, another case, if someone, sent by his master, comes and brings you gold or silver, to whom would you owe gratitude for the gift? Who would be our benefactor?
Minoas:
To the person that sent the gift Sostrate, because the person that brought it was just the servant/messenger.
I think my point is made
However, it’s unfair to say that, say, democracy, should be solely attributed to the Greeks.
No argument there and I claimed no such exclusive attribution. But, it is a great part on how the concept was born/produced and incorporated and became what many consider “a western value”, so it should at least be mentioned.
Also, there is some evidence that democratic societies also existed in Ancient India, concurrent with the Greeks, so it’s not 100% sure that Greeks were the first either.
I do not doubt that at all. Democracy seems like a good idea and usually good ideas tend to appear all over the globe, like, convergent evolution or when sometimes two totally different and unconnected people happened to research and eventually publish totally similar scientific theories.
The last time I sat next to a campfire was in 1994. (Yikes). It was at Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia during the July 1st holiday weekend. I was with my sister and future brother-in -law. He was doing some geological surveying related to his doctoral thesis.
We spent two nights there, and it was fitful sleeping because 1. there were reports of bear sightings and 2. the temperature plummeted dramatically that second night, so that you had to grab whatever extra clothing and loose materials were at hand and pile them up on yourself to stay warm. If there was any hanky-panky going on in the other tent, it must have happened then. Much too warm on that first night.
I had a great time there. Played some golf, did plenty of hiking. An amazing number of stars could be seen both nights. And beer never tasted better.
(I’m not sure if this thread is the right place for this post, but I hope so since it involves a poll?)
I had this silly idea the other day to make a go-themed “advent calendar”, where I make one short (5-10 min) video each day from the 1st to the 24th of december. The plan is to pick a pro game and talk about 10-15 moves of it in each video. I think this would be a fun way to look at a game in-depth, while also having time to explain some basics along the way (a similar format to the first chapter of Relentless, where an entire page is dedicated to the first move of the game).
Since this would take a lot of time to make, and it would feel bad to quit half-way through, I’d like to do some “market research” here to judge the interest in advance. So:
What do you think of this idea?
Great idea! I would watch every day.
Good idea, I would probably check out some of the videos.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other.
Bad idea, do something better with your time.
Terrible idea! If you do this, not only will I not watch the videos, I will also leave a disappointed comment on each one asking you to please stop.
