§97. The Legacy of Greek
In a course on classical roots in English, there are several good reasons to examine the Latin influence first, despite the historical priority of Greek. A primary consideration is the fact that Latin—directly, or through French—has had a far greater impact on standard English vocabulary, at every level of usage. In learning Latin roots, we are often just meeting old and familiar friends in a slightly different guise. Greek, in contrast, is likely to seem rather more exotic, since much of its influence has been felt in technical or academic areas of English usage. To be sure, there is a large stock of common, everyday Greek words in English, as we saw at the very beginning of the course (Part I, §3 and §16). But many of these came into English only after they had been borrowed first by the Romans, in order to fill semantic gaps in Latin. When they entered English, they followed the pattern of Latin loan-words, and you will therefore understand their English form better if you know some Latin.[1] A familiarity with Latin will now help you in another way. Greek and Latin are strikingly parallel in many aspects of their morphology—noun and adjective declensions, for example. Even though they belonged to different branches of the Indo-European family, the two languages developed side by side as Mediterranean neighbours, so it isn’t surprising that they share common characteristics. This convenient fact means that we can survey many basic features of Greek word formation without laboriously repeating all the steps that we took in the early chapters of Part I.
In tracing Greek vocabulary to its source, we’ll usually be going back in time to a period before the great age of Rome. As the extant evidence of an historical culture, the ancient Greek language is centuries older than Latin. A recognizable form of Greek was spoken and written in the era of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, some 1500 years before the birth of Christ and the rule of Augustus Caesar. Documents from this palace civilization of the second millennium BC, the celebrated “Linear B tablets,” were discovered only in our century, and were revealed in the 1950s to be an early form of the Greek language. The Hellenic world lapsed into illiteracy during the so-called “Dark Age” that followed the collapse of the Bronze-Age kingdoms; but the art of writing Greek was re-invented when a new system of alphabetic symbols was borrowed from the Phoenicians (see §98).
From the 8th to the 4th centuries BC, before Rome emerged as a major force in the Mediterranean world, the Greek city-states enjoyed an astonishing level of intellectual and cultural energy. This was a 400-year period that began with the epic poet Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey are among the supreme works of world literature, and closed with Aristotle and Alexander the Great—a teacher and his pupil whose combined influence on human history can hardly be overstated.
Any mention of ancient Greece will likely conjure up t