EH3lD-L85Is.txt

Speaker 1:          00:01          No.

Speaker 2:          00:04          Hello everyone. Welcome to the Lange Focus Channel and my name is Paul. How did Greek influence English? That is the question. As I mentioned in my recent video on the Greek language, Greek is a language that has influenced many others including English. The most remarkable way that Greek has influenced English isn't it's vocabulary. In my previous video, I briefly mentioned that around six percent of the vocabulary of English is of Greek origin, but that some estimates reach as high as 12 or 15 percent. This depends on how you measure it. You can measure type frequency, the percentage of the total number of words with no regard for how often they're used or you can measure a token frequency, meaning the proportion of words in a given speech or text, so words that are more frequently used account for a larger proportion. There's a huge number of words of Greek origin that are used in specialized areas of the sciences, medicine, and technology that aren't used very often in regular speech.

Speaker 2:          00:59          So if we measure type frequency, the percentage of Greek words will be higher because less common words are given equal weight. If we measure a token frequency, the percentage will be lower because less common words are counted less. I believe that the figure of six percent is based on token frequency and the higher figures are based on type frequency. Some Greek words were borrowed directly from Greek into English. Some of these were borrowed early in the history of English like church from the Greek word [inaudible], which entered old English as cute chick and some were borrowed later in the early modern English period. For example, autonomy. This word entered English directly from ancient Greek out to nomia in the 16 twenties, but a larger number of Greek words entered English indirectly through Latin or through Latin than French. For example, museum. This comes from the Latin word [inaudible], meaning library or study, and that comes from the ancient Greek word Moose sale, which meant place of study, library, museum, or school of art or poetry.

Speaker 2:          02:01          And if we go back even further to the original meaning of the ancient Greek word, it meant the seat or shrine of the muses. The nine muses were the daughters of Zeus in the Masani. They were goddesses who symbolized the arts and sciences. Another example, the word olive entered the English language around the twelfth century ce, either from old French bullies or directly from Latin Oliva or Oliva, which in turn comes from the Greek word a lie. Well, the word chaos comes from the Greek word cows and entered English in the 14th century via Latin than French catastrophe entered English and the 15 thirties from Latin catastrophe from the Greek word catastrophe, which was originally pronounced as cholesterol pay, meaning and overturning or a sudden end. The word democracy entered English in the 15 seventies. It came from the middle French word. They mccloskey which in turn came from medieval Latin Democrat, which came from ancient Greek.

Speaker 2:          03:03          The word paragraph entered English in the late 14, hundreds via medieval Latin and French, and it comes from the Greek word [inaudible], which was originally pronounced as paddock it. I pause and there are many more words like this, the largest number of Greek words to enter English. We're actually newly created words. They were newly created using Greek morphemes, but they're words that hadn't existed in Greek before that point. And then those words were borrowed from Latin into English. Some are formed from only Greek morphemes, for example, photography. This word was created in 1834 by combining photo, which meant lights in ancient Greek and the ancient Greek suffix graffel meaning to scratch or to scrape, but later meaning to right. And if you're wondering how those different meanings are related to scrape and to write well, think about how people used to write thousands of years ago. They used to scrape letters into stone tablets.

Speaker 2:          03:57          Another word, xenophobia or xenophobia. This word was created in 19 Oh, three from the Greek root, phenols meaning alien and phobia, meaning fear. Other words were formed from a combination of both Greek and Latin morphemes. For example, television. This word was created from the Greek morpheme t lay meaning far or at a distance. And the French word, Vco meaning site. This word entered English via French. Another example, automobile. The first part comes from ancient Greek autos, meaning self. And the second part comes from the French word [inaudible], which means moving, which came from Latin moby. These movable sociology. The first part comes from the Latin word Celsius, meaning comrade, and the second part comes from the Greek morpheme loggia, meaning discourse. Now just have a look at them morphemes that are highlighted. You've probably seen many more words that feature these same Greek morphemes. There are lots of common Greek roots in English, for example, and throat meaning man, crone or Chron, meaning time them meaning people, head meaning child.

Speaker 2:          05:05          There are also many Greek affixes app or an meaning without by or bio meaning life or living thing, hyper meaning excessive micro meaning small geo meaning earth or geography, anti meaning against it, a suffix that forms adjectives and many more. A huge number of these newly coined words exist in areas of academia, medicine, science, and technology because the huge advancements in these areas over the past 500 years required the creation of lots of new vocabulary in the field of medicine. For example, Latin words, both old and new, newly coined ones were often used for anatomy. While Greek words were used for the names of illnesses or specializations. A lot of these specialized words are not used in daily conversation very often, but without them it will be very difficult to talk about these advanced fields of study. It's also worth noting that these words are not exclusive to English.

Speaker 2:          06:00          A lot of them are used in other languages as well when talking about those fields of study. Here are a couple of hints on how to recognize Greek vocabulary. Most words starting with Ph are Greek. Some vowels, spellings give us a hint like aee or oee. Together, if you see a wide between consonants, it's likely a Greek word. If a word starts with any of these consonant clusters, then it's almost certainly a word of Greek origin. Some of these clusters can't be pronounced in English like ps or pen or Gen. so the first letter is dropped in pronunciation. An interesting example back in the 19 fifties, professor sandol phones, the Lotus, a Greek economist and the 75th prime minister of Greece gave two speeches in which she addressed the audience in English, but using exclusively words of Greek origin with the exception of grammar, words like articles, prepositions and conjunctions.

Speaker 2:          06:53          All of the content where it's wearing Greek here is a piece of one of those speeches which he gave to the International Bank for Reconstruction and development. It is Zeus and that's them up on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonize between the seller of numismatic plethora and the curb dis of economic anemia. It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather crypto plethora wrists, although they emphatically stigmatized numismatic plethora, energize it through their tactics and practices. Our policies have to be based more on economic and less on political criteria. Now, let's break that down a little bit. The first part it is Zeus is anathema on our epoch. This means it is [inaudible] curse or a punishment on our time or era. In a typical English sentence, you might expect to see God in this context instead of Zeus, for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies.

Speaker 2:          07:53          Here, he's saying that Zeus is punishment, is for the uncontrolled activity of our economies and our economic heresy, meaning violating, accepted economic ideas, and next he'll explain what the punishment is that we should agonize between the seller of numismatic plethora and the coverup this of economic anemia. Now these two words here, Scylla and Charybdis, these are actually characters from Greek mythology. They are to mythical sea monsters, too dangerous monsters that it's difficult to navigate between because if you move away from one, you move toward the other. Their names here are indicating to dangerous situations, so the first of those two dangerous situations is numismatic plethora. Numismatic means related to coins or currency and plethora means abundance or a lot of these two words together, me and inflation, meaning there's too much currency in circulation, so prices increase. And the second dangerous situation, the curb, this is economic anemia. Anemia meaning stagnation or loss of energy. Most of the second part is probably easier to understand, but let's look at one part, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather crypto plethora, wrists.

Speaker 2:          09:06          Now this word requires a look. Crypto means secret and plethora. Wrists, remember that word before Plethora, which means abundance or a lot of, and then it's. That's an affix showing the dewar of an action. So Plethora. Wrists are people who create an abundance of money. They create inflation, although they emphatically stigmatize numismatic plethora, although they speak badly about inflation, they energize it through their tactics and practices. He's saying that politicians are secretly creating inflation despite what they say. That's just an excerpt, but I'll leave a link to the full version of the two speeches in the description below. Now, the irony of me describing that speech in standard English is that I've probably used a lot of words of Greek origin myself without realizing it. So the question of the day, were you surprised to discover how much English vocabulary comes from Greek? Were you surprised by any of the examples? Also, feel free to leave additional examples in the comments down below. Be sure to follow Lang, focus on facebook, twitter, and Instagram, and once again, thank you to all of my amazing patrion supporters for their monthly pledges, especially these people right here on the screen. Thank you for watching and have a nice day.