By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Greece has long been a culture and society that others have looked to in order to organize new societies. Greek mythology, philosophy, and more have been the inspiration for so many things in Western culture, and if it weren’t for that we would not have the society we have today. A huge part of Greek culture is, of course, the language, which in and of itself has been a huge factor in determining the fates of many future languages. You don’t have to look very hard to find remnants of Greek in English and many other languages. Here are the top three ways that the Greek language has influenced other languages:
1. The Greek Alphabet
Most people are vaguely aware of the Greek alphabet thanks to fraternities and sororities who use their symbols to name their societies. The Greek alphabet was actually derived from another alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet. It hasn’t changed since it was developed, and still has the same 24 symbols used to write out every word in the Greek language. This alphabet in turn is what both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were derived from, the Latin alphabet being the writing system used by almost 130 different languages, including English and all of the Romance languages. You could say that if it weren’t for the Greek alphabet, we would be writing with a completely different writing system right now.
2. Greek Literature
No one can have any sort of education without the mention of Greek literature, specifically that of ancient Greece. The Odyssey and the Iliad are just two examples of the epic poetry that was prominent in ancient Greece, and that was later mimicked by other cultures. Western culture has also taken a lot from the works of Greek philosophers, from Plato to Socrates and Aristotle. The basis of our very government, the democracy, is the very same as the one debated by many of these same philosophers. The record they kept of these debates has been essential to the development of Western society.
3. Greek loanwords
Much of the lexicon of many languages, including English and the Romance languages, come from Latin or Greek, Latin also being influenced greatly by Greek. Greek may be one of the languages that is borrowed from the most in terms of vocabulary, and many words used for scientific and technical purposes are directly from Greek. Any word that ends in -logy can be easily recognized as Greek, and many words in English and other languages use prefixes and suffixes with Greek origins. Anyone who has studied linguistics will truly know the contribution that Greek has made to the vocabularies of so many languages.
Alpha Omega Translations is a translation, interpretation, and desktop publishing company that has years of experience. Greek is just one of the many languages it works with, and it is definitely an important language in the translation world as it is an official European Union language.