English words of Greek origin

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Template:Short description Template:AmboxTemplate:Special characters The Greek language has contributed to the English lexicon in five main ways:

Of these, the neologisms are by far the most numerous.

Indirect and direct borrowings

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 through French and other vernaculars), or from Ancient Greek texts, not the living spoken language.<ref name="ayers">Ayers, Donald M. 1986. English Words from Latin and Greek Elements. (2nd ed.). p. 158-159.</ref><ref name="ox">Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, Template:Isbn, s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454</ref>

Vernacular borrowings

Romance languages

Latin freely borrowed words from Greek. Many were passed on to Romance languages then English, usually via French. Some have remained close to the Greek original, e.g., lamp (Latin Template:Lang; Greek Template:Lang). In others, the phonetic and orthographic forms have changed considerably. For instance, place was borrowed into French from Latin Template:Lang, itself borrowed from Template:Lang, 'broad (street)'. Italian Template:Lang and Spanish Template:Lang are of the same origin and are later borrowings into English.

The word olive comes through the Romance from the Latin Template:Lang, which in turn comes from the archaic Greek elaíwā (Template:Lang).<ref>This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latin v reflects a still-pronounced digamma; the earliest attested form of it is the Mycenaean Greek Template:Lang, e-ra3-wo 'elaiwo(n)', attested in Linear B syllabic script. (see C.B. Walker, John Chadwick, Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, 1990, Template:Isbn, p. 161) The Greek word was in turn apparently borrowed from a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean substrate; cf. Greek substrate language.</ref> A later Greek word, boútȳron (Template:Lang),<ref>Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (Template:ISBN) notes that the word has the form of a compound Template:Lang + Template:Lang 'cow-cheese', possibly a calque from Scythian, or possibly an adaptation of a native Scythian word.</ref> became Latin Template:Lang and eventually English butter.

A large group of early borrowings, again transmitted first through Latin then through various vernaculars, comes from Christian vocabulary:

In some cases, the orthography of these words was later changed to reflect the Greek—and Latin—spelling: e.g., quire was respelled choir in the 17th century. Sometimes this was done incorrectly: ache is from a Germanic root; the spelling ache reflects Samuel Johnson's incorrect etymology from Template:Lang.<ref>Okrent, Arika. October 8, 2014. "5 Words That Are Spelled Weird Because Someone Got the Etymology Wrong." Mental Floss. (Also in OED.)</ref>

Other

Exceptionally, church came into Old English as cirice, circe via a West Germanic language. The Greek form was probably kȳriakḗ [oikía] (Template:Lang 'lord's [house]'). In contrast, the Romance languages generally used the Latin words Template:Lang (French église; Italian chiesa; Spanish iglesia) or Template:Lang (Romanian biserica), both borrowed from Greek.

Learned borrowings

Many more words were borrowed by scholars writing in Medieval and Renaissance Latin. Some words were borrowed in essentially their original meaning, often transmitted through Classical Latin: topic, type, physics, iambic, eta, necromancy, cosmopolite. A few result from scribal errors: encyclopedia < Template:Lang 'the circle of learning' (not a compound in Greek); acne < Template:Lang (erroneous) < Template:Lang 'high point, acme'. Some kept their Latin form, e.g., podium < Template:Lang.

Others were borrowed unchanged as technical terms, but with specific, novel meanings:

Usage in neologisms

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But by far the largest Greek contribution to English vocabulary is the huge number of scientific, medical, and technical neologisms that have been coined by compounding Greek roots and affixes to produce novel words which never existed in the Greek language:

So it is really the combining forms of Greek roots and affixes that are borrowed, not the words. Neologisms using these elements are coined in all the European languages, and spread to the others freely—including to Modern Greek, where they are considered to be reborrowings. Traditionally, these coinages were constructed using only Greek morphemes, e.g., metamathematics, but increasingly, Greek, Latin, and other morphemes are combined, sometimes using the Greek interfix -ο-. These hybrid words were formerly considered to be 'barbarisms', such as:

Some derivations are idiosyncratic, not following the usual Greek compounding patterns even if they are composed entirely of Greek elements, for example:<ref>These are all listed as "irregularly formed" in the Oxford English Dictionary.</ref>

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Many combining forms have specific technical meanings in neologisms, not predictable from the Greek sense (cf. libfix):

  • -cyte or cyto- < Template:Lang 'container', means biological cells, not arbitrary containers.
  • -oma < Template:Lang, a generic morpheme forming deverbal nouns, such as diploma ('a folded thing') and glaucoma ('greyness'), comes to have the very narrow meaning of 'tumor' or 'swelling', on the model of words like carcinoma < Template:Lang. For example, melanoma does not come from Template:Lang 'blackness', but rather from the modern combining forms melano- ('dark' [in biology]) + -oma ('tumor').
  • -itis < Template:Lang, a generic adjectival suffix; in medicine used to mean a disease characterized by inflammation: appendicitis, conjunctivitis, ..., and now facetiously generalized to mean "feverish excitement".<ref name="potter">Simeon Potter, Our language, Penguin, 1950, p. 43</ref>
  • -osis < Template:Lang, originally a state, condition, or process; in medicine, used for a disease.<ref name="potter"/>
  • petro- < πέτρο- 'rock'; used to mean petroleum, as in petrodollars.
  • syn- < συν- 'with'; refers to synthesis or synthesizers: syngas, Synclavier.

And some borrowings are modified in fairly arbitrary ways:

In standard chemical nomenclature, the numerical prefixes are "only loosely based on the corresponding Greek words", e.g. octaconta- is used for 80 instead of the Greek ogdoeconta- '80'. There are also "mixtures of Greek and Latin roots", e.g., nonaconta-, for 90, is a blend of the Latin nona- for 9 and the Greek Template:Nowrap found in words such as ἐνενήκοντα enenekonta '90'.<ref>N. Lozac'h, "Extension of Rules A-1.1 and A-2.5 concerning numerical terms used in organic chemical nomenclature (Recommendations 1986)", Pure and Applied Chemistry 58:12:1693-1696 {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}}, under "Discussion", p. 1694-1695 full texte.g.%2C%20nona-%20for%209%2C%20undeca-%20for%2011%2C%20nonaconta-%20for%2090). deep link to WWW version</ref> The Greek form is, however, used in the names of polygons in mathematics, though the names of polyhedra are more idiosyncratic.

Many Greek affixes such as anti- and -ic have become productive in English, combining with arbitrary English words: antichoice, Fascistic.

Some words in English have been reanalyzed as a base plus affix, leading to affixes based on Greek words, but which are not affixes in Greek (cf. libfix). Their meaning relates to the full word they were shortened from, not the Greek meaning:

Nostalgia was coined by a 17th-century German as a calque of German Heimwehe.

Through other languages

Some Greek words were borrowed through Arabic and then Romance. Many are learned:

Others are popular:

A few words took other routes:<ref>Skeat gives more on p. 605-606, but the Oxford English Dictionary does not agree with his etymologies of cobalt, nickel, etc.</ref>

Vernacular and learned doublets

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:<ref name="skeat">Walter William Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, "List of Doublets", p. 599ff (full text)</ref><ref>Edward A. Allen, "English Doublets", Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 23:2:184-239 (1908) {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}} Template:JSTOR</ref> Template:Col-begin Template:Col-break

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Other doublets come from differentiation in the borrowing languages: Template:Col-begin Template:Col-break

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From modern Greek

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:

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Greek as an intermediary

Many words from the Hebrew Bible were transmitted to the western languages through the Greek of the Septuagint, often without morphological regularization:

Written form of Greek words in English

Latin-based orthography

Many Greek words, especially those borrowed through the literary tradition, are recognizable as such from their spelling. Latin had standard orthographies for Greek borrowings, including:

These conventions, which originally reflected pronunciation, have carried over into English and other languages with historical orthography, like French.<ref name="crosby">Crosby, Henry Lamar, and John Nevin Schaeffer. 1928. An Introduction to Greek. section 66.</ref> They make it possible to recognize words of Greek origin, and give hints as to their pronunciation and inflection.

Digraphs and diphthongs

The romanization of some digraphs is rendered in various ways in English. The diphthongs Template:Lang and Template:Lang may be spelled in three different ways in English:

  1. the Latinate digraphs ae and oe;
  2. the ligatures æ and œ; and
  3. the simple letter e.

The ligatures have largely fallen out of use worldwide; the digraphs are uncommon in American usage, but remain common in British usage. The spelling depends mostly on the variety of English, not on the particular word. Examples include: encyclopaedia / encyclopædia / encyclopedia; haemoglobin / hæmoglobin / hemoglobin; and oedema / œdema / edema. 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. The verbal ending Template:Lang is spelled -ize in American English, and -ise or -ize in British English.

Non-latinate orthography

Since the 19th century, a few learned words have been introduced using a direct transliteration of Ancient Greek, including the Greek endings, rather than the traditional Latin-based spelling: nous (νοῦς), koine (κοινή), hoi polloi (οἱ πολλοί), kudos (κύδος), moron (μωρόν), kubernetes (κυβερνήτης). For this reason, the Ancient Greek digraph Template:Lang 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 plurals of words ending in -is are -es (pronounced [iːz]), using the regular Latin plural rather than the Greek -εις: crises, analyses, bases, with only a few didactic words having English plurals in -eis: poleis, necropoleis, and acropoleis (though acropolises is by far the most common English plural).

Irregularities

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.

Indications of Greek origin

In some cases, a word's spelling clearly shows its Greek origin:

  • If it includes ph pronounced as /f/ or y between consonants, it is very likely Greek.
  • If it includes rrh, phth, or chth; or starts with hy-, ps-, pn-, or chr-; or the rarer pt-, ct-, chth-, rh-, x-, sth-, mn-, tm-, gn- or bd-, it is likely Greek.

There are some exceptions to this pattern:

  • Nephew, triumph, and sulphur are ultimately from Latin.<ref>Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 1897, s.v., p. 4432</ref>
  • Gnat, gnaw, gneiss are Germanic.
  • Ptarmigan is from a Gaelic word, the p having been added by false etymology;
  • Style and stylus are of Latin origin, and are probably written with a 'y' because the Greek word Template:Lang 'column' (as in peristyle, 'surrounded by columns') and the Latin word stilus, 'stake, pointed instrument', were confused.
  • A few borrowings from Arabic are spelled with ph: cipher, nenuphar, caliph, saphena.
  • Algorithm is from Arabic, and was originally written algorism, but was respelled in the 16th century, influenced by arithmetic.
  • Trophy, though ultimately of Greek origin, did not have a Template:Lang but a Template:Lang in its Greek form, Template:Lang.

Homographs of different origin

The conflation of ο/ω and αι/ε/η/οι in the usual orthography leads to a few words which are homographs in English although they were distinct roots in Greek: colon 'punctuation mark' (κώλον) vs. 'part of intestine' (κόλον); coma 'unconsciousness' (κῶμα) vs. 'comet tail' (κόμη); ionic 'about ions' (ιονικός) vs. Ionic 'from Ionia' (ιωνικός); chorography 'description of dance' (χορογραφία) vs. 'description of region' (χωρογραφία); pore 'opening in the skin' (πόρος) vs. 'callus' (rare and obsolete) (πώρος).<ref> cf. Quora comment by Eleftherios Tserkezis</ref> Other cases are unrelated to vowel conflation: policy 'principle' (πολιτεία) vs. 'insurance contract' (ἀπόδειξις via Latin apodissa, Italian polizza, French police).

There are also some affixes like this, some productive, some not: halo 'light ring' (ἅλως) vs. halo- 'salt-' (ἁλο-); chor- 'dance' (χορός) vs. 'region' (χώρα); p(a)edo- 'child' (παιδ-) p(a)ediatrics, p(a)edology (rare) vs. pedo- 'soil' (πέδ-) pedology; metro- 'measure' (μετρο-) metrology vs. 'uterus' (μητρο- < μήτρα) metropolis,metrorrhagia; ceno- 'empty' (κενο-) cenotaph vs. 'new, recent' (καινο-) Cenozoic vs. c(o)eno- 'common, shared' (κοινο-) c(o)enobite. Rarer examples are por- 'passage' (πόρος) vs. 'callus' (πώρος); omo- ‘shoulder’ (ὦμος) omophorion vs. ‘raw’ (ὠμός) omophagy. In the case of lipo-, the two roots were already homographs in Greek: ‘fat’ (λίπος) lipoprotein vs. 'lacking' (λίπο- < λείπειν) lipogram. Similarly, -carp- (καρπός) can mean 'wrist' carpal (tunnel) vs. 'fruit' pericarp.

Pronunciation

In clusters such as ps-, pn-, and gn- which are not allowed in English phonotactics, the usual English pronunciation drops the first consonant (e.g., psychology) at the start of a word; compare gnostic [nɒstɪk] and agnostic [ægnɒstɪk]; there are a few exceptions, such as tmesis [t(ə)miːsɪs]. Similarly, initial x- is pronounced z.

Ch is pronounced like k rather than as in "church": e.g. character, chaos. The consecutive vowel letters 'ea' are generally pronounced separately rather than forming a single vowel sound when transcribing a Greek εα, which was not a digraph, but simply a sequence of two vowels with hiatus, as in genealogy or pancreas (cf., however, ocean, ωκεανός); zeal (earlier zele) comes irregularly from the η in ζήλος.

Some sound sequences in English are only found in borrowings from Greek, notably initial sequences of two fricatives, as in sphere.<ref name="hickey" /> Most initial /z/ sounds are found in Greek borrowings.<ref name="hickey">Hickey, Raymond. "Phonological change in English." In The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics 12.10, edited by M. Kytö and P. Pahta.</ref>

The stress of borrowings via Latin generally follows the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, which depends on the syllable weight rules in Latin and ignores Greek stress. For example, in Greek, both ὑπόθεσις (hypothesis) and ἐξήγησις (exegesis) are accented on the antepenult, and indeed the penult has a long vowel in exegesis; but because the penult of Latin exegēsis is heavy by Latin rules, the accent falls on the penult in Latin and therefore also in English.

Inflectional endings and plurals

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:

  • -ον: phenomenon, criterion, neuron, lexicon;
  • -∅: plasma, drama, dilemma, trauma (-ma is derivational, not inflectional);
  • -ος: chaos, ethos, asbestos, pathos, cosmos;
  • -ς: climax (ξ x = k + s), helix, larynx, eros, pancreas, atlas;
  • -η: catastrophe, agape, psyche;
  • -ις: analysis, basis, crisis, emphasis;
  • -ης: diabetes, herpes, isosceles.

In cases like scene and zone, though the Greek words ended in -η, the final silent e in English is not derived from the η.

In the case of Greek endings, plurals sometimes follow the Greek rules: phenomenon, phenomena; tetrahedron, tetrahedra; crisis, crises; hypothesis, hypotheses; polis, poleis; stigma, stigmata; topos, topoi; cyclops, cyclopes; Normally, however, they 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.

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. 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. Plurals from Latin and Greek).

Verbs

A few dozen English verbs are derived from the corresponding Greek verbs; examples are baptize, blame and blaspheme, stigmatize, ostracize, and cauterize. In addition, the Greek verbal suffix -ize is productive in Latin, the Romance languages, and English: words like metabolize, though composed of a Greek root and a Greek suffix, are modern compounds. A few of these also existed in Ancient Greek, such as crystallize, characterize, and democratize, but were probably coined independently in modern languages. This is particularly clear in cases like allegorize and synergize, where the Greek verbs ἀλληγορεῖν and συνεργεῖν do not end in -ize at all. Some English verbs with ultimate Greek etymologies, like pause and cycle, were formed as denominal verbs in English, even though there are corresponding Greek verbs, παῦειν/παυσ- and κυκλεῖν.

Borrowings and cognates

Greek and English share many Indo-European cognates. In some cases, the cognates can be confused with borrowings. For example, the English mouse is cognate with Greek Template:Lang /mys/ and Latin Template:Lang, all from an Indo-European word *mūs; none of them is borrowed from another. Similarly, acre is cognate to Latin Template:Lang and Greek Template:Lang, but not a borrowing; the prefix agro- is a borrowing from Greek, and the prefix agri- a borrowing from Latin.

Phrases

Many Latin phrases are used verbatim in English texts—et cetera (etc.), ad nauseam, modus operandi (M.O.), ad hoc, in flagrante delicto, mea culpa, and so on—but this is rarer for Greek phrases or expressions:

Calques and translationsTemplate:Anchor

Greek technical words were often calqued in Latin rather than borrowed,<ref name="fruyt">Fruyt, Michèle. "Latin Vocabulary." In A Companion to the Latin Language, edited by J. Clackson. p. 152.</ref><ref>Eleanor Detreville, "An Overview of Latin Morphological Calques on Greek Technical Terms: Formation and Success", M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 2015, full text</ref> and then borrowed from Latin into English. Examples include:<ref name='fruyt'/>

  • (grammatical) case, from casus ('an event', 'something that has fallen'), a semantic calque of Greek πτώσις ('a fall');
  • nominative, from nōminātīvus, a translation of Greek ὀνομαστική;
  • adverb, a morphological calque of Greek ἐπίρρημα as ad- + verbum;
  • magnanimous, from Greek μεγάθυμος (lit. 'great spirit');
  • essence, from essentia, which was constructed from the notional present participle *essens, imitating Greek οὐσία.<ref>Joseph Owens, Étienne Henry Gilson, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 1963, p. 140</ref>
  • substance, from substantia, a calque of Greek υπόστασις (cf. hypostasis);<ref>F.A.C. Mantello, Medieval Latin, 1996, Template:Isbn, p. 276</ref>
  • Cicero coined moral on analogy with Greek ηθικός.<ref>Wilhelm Wundt et al., Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life, 1897, p. 1:26</ref>
  • recant is modeled on παλινῳδεῖν.<ref>A.J. Woodman, "O MATRE PVLCHRA: The Logical Iambist: To the memory of Niall Rudd", The Classical Quarterly 68:1:192-198 (May 2018) {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}}, footnote 26</ref>

Greek phrases were also calqued in Latin. Sometimes English uses the Latin form:

Sometimes the Latin is in turn calqued in English:

The Greek word Template:Lang has come into English both in borrowed forms like evangelical and the form gospel, an English calque (Old English Template:Lang 'good tidings') of Template:Lang, itself a calque of the Greek.

Statistics

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.

Since most words of Greek origin are specialized technical and scientific coinages, the type frequency is considerably higher than the token frequency. And the type frequency in a large word list will be larger than that in a small word list. In a typical English dictionary of 80,000 words, which corresponds very roughly to the vocabulary of an educated English speaker, about 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek.<ref>Scheler, Manfred. 1977. Der englische Wortschatz. Berlin: Schmidt.</ref>

Most common

Of the 500 most common words in English, 18 (3.6%) are of Greek origin: place (rank 115), problem (121), school (147), system (180), program (241), idea (252), story (307), base (328), center (335), period (383), history (386), type (390), music (393), political (395), policy (400), paper (426), phone (480), economic (494).<ref>New General Service List, [1]</ref>

See also

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References

Citations

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Sources

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