It’s All Greek to Me
A history of the Hellenic language
By Emily Liz Helgersen
It’s all Greek to me. When most of us hear the word “Greek,”
we think of Homer’s epics the Iliad and Odyssey, plays such as
Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata, or dialogues like Plato’s Republic.
Those who live anywhere near a fraternity house may be familiar with
parts of the Greek alphabet; just by the University of Toronto, for
instance, is a building with the letters LCA (lambda chi alpha) emblazoned
on the front. But the history of the Greek language is more complicated
than many people realize. Therefore it behooves us to learn a little
more about the language that served as the vehicle for the cradle
of Western civilization.
We might start with a description of the language itself. Greek is
an Indo-European language, like English, French, and Russian. However,
while the three other aforementioned tongues belong to specific subdivisions
of the Indo-European family -Germanic, Italic and Slavic respectively
- Greek constitutes a branch of its own. Greek’s membership in
the Indo-European fold is confirmed by comparing its vocabulary to
that of other languages in this family. For example, the Greek word
“kardia” (the root of “cardiology”) is related
to the Latin “cord” (source of “cordial”) and
to our own “heart.”
_____________________
When
most of us hear the word “Greek,”
we think of Homer’s epics the Iliad and Odyssey.
_____________________
The Hellenes, as the Greeks called themselves (the term “Greek”
comes from “Graecoi,” which referred to a particular tribe
in the region of Epirus), moved into Greece from the north - probably
western Russia - somewhere between 2000 and 1000 B.C. They settled
on the Greek mainland as well as the nearby islands and Asia Minor
(now Turkey). These lands were not virgin territory; they were inhabited
by speakers of yet unknown non-Indo-European tongues scattered throughout
the Mediterranean. Over time these languages were replaced by Greek.
Nonetheless, some historians believe that the Hellenes took a considerable
portion of their vocabulary from non-Indo-European sources. The words
for olive (“elaia”) and wine (“oinos”), items
probably unknown to the original Indo-Europeans, may be among such
borrowings.
The earliest known example of written Greek is a script known as Linear
B that was found on clay tablets on the island of Crete. This script
was a syllabary, a system whereby each syllable is represented by
a symbol. However, the Greeks later adopted an alphabet, in which
a letter marks a particular sound, from the Phoenicians, a Semitic
people from the Near East who spoke a tongue related to Hebrew. The
first two letters of the Greek alphabet, “alpha” and “beta,”
for instance, derive from the Phoenician “aleph” and “beth.”
The Hellenes made a major innovation, though, by designating several
of these letters as vowel sounds, something the Phoenicians and other
Semitic speakers had never done before. The Greek alphabet, by the
way, formed the basis of the Roman alphabet, which all Western European
languages use, and the Cyrillic script, which was developed by the
Greek missionary St. Cyril and employed by most Orthodox Christian
countries in Eastern Europe.
After the period of the Linear B tablets the Hellenic world entered
into a sort of Dark Ages during which no traces of written Greek have
been discovered. The earliest Greek alphabetic writing comes from
an Athenian wine jug around 740 B.C. Following shortly thereafter
were Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Other classical
Greek works include the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Sophocles,
Lysistrata and Birds by Aristophanes, and Euripides’ Medea and
Trojan Women; the poetry of Sappho; treatises like Aristotle’s
Politics; and Herodotus’ Histories.
While Greek remained a single language, due to the large area in which
it was spoken it diverged into a number of dialects. Eventually that
of Athens, called Attic, took precedence over the others. Attic became
not only the literary dialect of Greece but the basis of a vernacular
known as “koine,” meaning “common.” Koine Greek
spread throughout the Mediterranean region after the various Hellenic
city states acquired colonies in Southern Italy and France as well
as the western coast of Spain. The language received an even bigger
boost with the conquests of Alexander the Great, who colonized an
area ranging from Egypt to Northern India. Nevertheless, in general
the inhabitants of the conquered lands spoke Greek not as a mother
tongue but as a second language. In the Near East and Egypt it gained
the status of a “lingua franca,” a language used as a common
or commercial tongue among groups of diverse speech (an example of
a lingua franca today is English in India). This situation continued
even after Greece and its empire were overtaken by the Romans. Though
the Romans generally looked down on their subject peoples, they respected
the Greeks and did not attempt to challenge the primacy of the latter’s
speech in much of Rome’s territory. In fact, many wealthy Roman
families had their children tutored by Hellenic slaves and learned
Greek themselves.
_____________________
The
earliest Greek alphabetic writing comes
from an Athenian wine jug around 740 B.C.
_____________________
One Near Eastern individual who very likely knew koine Greek as a
second language was Jesus Christ. With other Jews he would have used
his native Aramaic, but he may have employed Greek with some of the
Gentiles he met, such as the governor Pontius Pilate and the Roman
centurion whose servant he healed. As Jesus probably did not speak
Latin, which was known by few in Palestine other than the Roman administrators,
and as most Roman officials did not learn Aramaic, Greek was the one
form of speech in which he could communicate with them.
Indeed, the entire New Testament was composed in koine Greek. This
reflected the fact that many Jews – and most of the New Testament
writers were Jewish – of Jesus’ time had become Hellenized,
albeit in culture rather than religion. Of note, three of Jesus’
apostles had Greek names: Peter, meaning “rock;” Andrew,
“manly;” and Philip, “lover of horses.” Several
Jewish historians, like Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus,
also wrote in Greek.
The association between Greek and Christianity led to the adoption
of many religious terms of Greek origin into various other Western
languages. The word “Christ” itself, meaning “the anointed
one,” comes from the Greek verb “chriein,” “to
anoint.” A further example is “bishop” from “episkopos,”
overseer. The prefix “epi” signifies “over” or
“above,” as in “epidermis,” the top layer of skin,
while “skopos” gives us the suffix “scope,” as
in “stethoscope” or “microscope.” Even the homely
“church” boasts a Greek root: it derives from “kyriakos,”
“house of the lord.” “Kyrie” means “lord,”
as we can see in the phrase “Kyrie eleison,” or “Lord
have mercy,” in Christian worship services. Interestingly, the
Romance languages use another Greek derivative, ecclesia (“assembly”),
for church: “chiesa” in Italian, “église”
in French, and “iglesia” in Spanish.
Greek was the official language of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern
part of the Roman Empire. It was spoken as a mother tongue in Greece
itself, Cyprus, and Asia Minor. However, its use declined precipitously
after the last region was conquered by the Turks - who gave the area
its present-day name - in the eleventh century A.D. Greek became for
the most part an exclusively spoken language in Greece itself and
some of the surrounding islands, though small communities of Greek
speakers remained in Turkey until the First World War.
All was not forgotten, however. Interest in classical or ancient Greek
emerged in Western Europe during the Renaissance, when scholars and
writers “re-discovered” the works of antiquity in their
quest to glorify human achievement. This interest, coupled with a
growing emphasis on science, paved the way for a plethora of Greek-derived
scientific and technical terms to enter a number of Western European
languages from the Renaissance until today. Examples include “telephone,”
from “tele” (“distant”) and “phone”
(“sound”) and “aphasia,” speechlessness, a medical
condition in which a person loses the ability to articulate or understand
words.
Modern Greek refers to the language spoken starting from about 1453,
the fall of the Byzantine capital Constantinople (now Istanbul). Interestingly,
the differences between modern and classical Greek are not as great
as those between Anglo-Saxon and modern English or Latin and the Romance
languages. Modern Greek has nonetheless borrowed a number of words
from non-Hellenic sources. For instance, the ancient “ailuros,”
meaning “cat” (as in “ailurophobia,” or fear of
cats), has been replaced by the Latin “gata.” Moreover,
modern and ancient Greek diverged to such a point that until the mid-1970s
the written form of the language, which conserved many elements from
ancient times, differed considerably from the spoken version, just
as Norway had a spoken language and a “book language.” However,
in 1976 the government of Greece declared that “demotike,”
the speech of the people (in “demotike” we might recognize
the term “demos,” people, the root of our own “democracy”),
would be the official written medium of the country.
_____________________
Interest
in classical or ancient Greek emerged
in Western Europe during the Renaissance.
_____________________
While today’s Hellenic world perhaps has not produced the quantity
of literature as its ancient counterpart, modern Greece still boasts
a number of notable writers. Among them are Nikos Kazantzakis, author
of the novel The Last Temptation of Christ, and Odysseus Elytis, whose
poetry, including a poem called “The Passion” (not to be
confused with Mel Gibson’s film of the same name), won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1979.
Greek is presently spoken in Greece itself, in Cyprus, in parts of
Southern Italy - a holdover from ancient colonial times - as well
as by Greek immigrant communities in Canada, the United States and
other countries. My own city of Toronto, for instance, has a number
of homegrown Greek-language newspapers. Classical Greek is still taught
as a second language in some high schools and universities in North
America and Europe, where it was my father’s favourite subject.
I had a Greek-Canadian friend in college named Vicki. She always complained
that her father acted “as if Greece were the most important country
in the world,” sort of like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
In her view, the nation had descended into insignificance long ago.
I found their ongoing feud more humourous than anything else, but
I actually ended up siding with her father. If it had not been for
Greece, I told Vicki, Western civilization as we know it would not
exist. So in honour of Vicki’s father and the country he represents,
I wrote this essay on the Greek language.
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Emily
Liz Helgersen is a secretary and musician based in Canada. When
she’s not busy with her job, social activities and hobbies,
she likes to write about religion, music, culture or anything
else that happens to strike her fancy. In this picture here she’s
trying to look composed despite the fact her brother is pinching
her arm. You can contact her at ehelgersen@hotmail.com
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