The Ancient Greek diphthongs αι and οι may be spelled in three different ways in English: The ligatures have largely fallen out of use worldwide; the digraphs are uncommon in American usage, but remain common in British usage. B.C.E. Greek definition, of or relating to Greece, the Greeks, or their language. (vulgar); (prostitution) Anal sex. For instance, place was borrowed both by Old English and by French from Latin platea, itself borrowed from Greek πλατεία (ὁδός), 'broad (street)'; the Italian piazza and Spanish plaza have the same origin, and have been borrowed into English in parallel. Some Greek words were borrowed through Arabic and then Romance. The verbal ending -ίζω is spelled -ize in American English, and -ise or -ize in British English. Greek and English share many Indo-European cognates. The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, type and token frequencies: type frequency is the proportion of distinct words; token frequency is the proportion of words in actual texts. Meaning "member of a Greek-letter fraternity" is student slang, 1884. late 14c., "of Greece or its people," from Greek (n.). In the case of Greek endings, the plurals sometimes follow the Greek rules: phenomenon, phenomena; tetrahedron, tetrahedra; crisis, crises; hypothesis, hypotheses; polis, poleis; stigma, stigmata; topos, topoi; cyclops, cyclopes; but often do not: colon, colons not *cola (except for the very rare technical term of rhetoric); pentathlon, pentathlons not *pentathla; demon, demons not *demones; climaxes, not *climaces. Traditionally, these coinages were constructed using only Greek morphemes, e.g., metamathematics, but increasingly, Greek, Latin, and other morphemes are combined. From 1888 as "of Greek-letter fraternities." And there are misleading cases: pentagon comes from Greek pentagonon, so its plural cannot be *pentaga; it is pentagons—the Greek form would be *pentagona (cf. Greek phrases were also calqued in Latin, then borrowed or translated into English: The Greek word εὐαγγέλιον has come into English both in borrowed forms like evangelical and the form gospel, an English calque (Old English: gód spel, 'good tidings') of Latin bona adnuntiatio, itself a calque of the Greek. a few borrowings transmitted through other languages, notably Arabic scientific and philosophical writing, e.g., 'alchemy' (< Greek: This page was last edited on 6 October 2020, at 18:01. Some Greek words were borrowed into Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages. The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual', 'a private citizen' (as opposed to an official), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'private', 'one's own'. This file superseded Wiktionary:Greek transliteration/Old in … Comparative more Greek. The stress on borrowings via Latin which keep their Latin form generally follows the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, which depends on the syllable structure in Latin, not in Greek. Plurals from Latin and Greek). For this reason, the Ancient Greek digraph ει is rendered differently in different words—as i, following the standard Latin form: idol < εἴδωλον; or as ei, transliterating the Greek directly: eidetic (< εἰδητικός), deixis, seismic. Most learned borrowings and coinages follow the Latin system, but there are some irregularities: Some words whose spelling in French and Middle English did not reflect their Greco-Latin origins were refashioned with etymological spellings in the 16th and 17th centuries: caracter became character and quire became choir. Mathematical Words: Origins and Sources (John Aldrich, University of Southampton) This page was last edited on 6 October 2020, at 18:01 (UTC). Usage is mixed in some cases: schema, schemas or schemata; lexicon, lexicons or lexica; helix, helixes or helices; sphinx, sphinges or sphinxes; clitoris, clitorises or clitorides. Greek fire "inflammable substance invented 7c. as "the Greek language." Both are used in French; see: Jean-Louis Fisher, Roselyne Rey, "De l'origine et de l'usage des termes taxinomie-taxonomie", Andriotis et al., Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής =. The Germanic languages originally borrowed the word with an initial "-k-" sound (compare Old High German Chrech, Gothic Kreks), which probably was their initial sound closest to the Latin "-g-" at the time; the word was later refashioned. Latin had standard orthographies for Greek borrowings, including, but not limited to: These conventions, which originally reflected pronunciation, have carried over into English and other languages with historical orthography, like French. [14] They make it possible to recognize words of Greek origin, and give hints as to their pronunciation and inflection. Plural Greeks. ISO 843 (1997, TR) was obtained from values shown at. Though many English words derived from Greek through the literary route drop the inflectional endings (tripod, zoology, pentagon) or use Latin endings (papyrus, mausoleum), some preserve the Greek endings: In cases like scene, zone, fame, though the Greek words ended in -η, the silent English e is not derived from it. Similarly, acre is cognate to Latin ager and Greek αγρός, but not a borrowing; the prefix agro- is a borrowing from Greek, and the prefix agri- a borrowing from Latin. Some words are almost always written with the digraph or ligature: amoeba / amœba, rarely ameba; Oedipus / Œdipus, rarely Edipus; others are almost always written with the single letter: sphære and hæresie were obsolete by 1700; phænomenon by 1800; phænotype and phænol by 1930. 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 spoken language.[5]. Many are learned: Curiously, chemist appears to be a back-formation from alchemist. Greek family names are most commonly patronymics but may also be based on occupation, personal characteristics or location. ), the important city in southern Italy where the Latins first encountered Greeks. Under this theory, it was reborrowed in this general sense by the Greeks. Greek gift is from "Æneid," II.49: "timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. In others, the phonetic and orthographic form has changed considerably. Polski Wolny słownik 719 000+ stron. Many Latin phrases are used verbatim in English texts—et cetera (etc. The word God was used to represent Greek Theos and Latin Deus in Bible translations, first in the Gothic translation of the New Testament by Ulfilas. Some Greek words have given rise to etymological doublets, being borrowed both through a later learned, direct route, and earlier through an organic, indirect route:[12][13]. ISO 843 (1997, TR) was obtained from values shown at Eesti Keele Instituut (pdf file), other sources are shown at the foot of this page. English often received these words from French. These are the rules concerning transliteration in Greek entries. Other doublets come from differentiation in the borrowing languages: Finally, with the growth of tourism and emigration, some words reflecting modern Greek culture have been borrowed into English—many of them originally borrowings into Greek themselves: Many words from the Hebrew Bible were transmitted to the western languages through the Greek of the Septuagint, often without morphological regularization:[citation needed]. Some portmanteau words in English have led to suffixes based on Greek words, but which are not suffixes in Greek, e.g., -athon or -a-thon (walkathon, from walk + (mar)athon) and -nomics (Reaganomics, from Reagan + (eco)nomics). Old English Grecas, Crecas (plural) "Greeks, inhabitants of Greece," early Germanic borrowing from Latin Graeci "the Hellenes," apparently from Greek Graikoi. ), ad hoc, in flagrante delicto, mea culpa, and so on—but this is rarer for Greek phrases or expressions: Greek technical terminology was often calqued in Latin rather than borrowed,[18][19] and then borrowed from Latin into English.