Greek and Latin Roots: Part II – Greek is part two of a two part series. This series examines the systematic principles by which a large portion of English vocabulary has evolved from Latin and (to a lesser degree) from Greek. This book focuses on Greek roots. A link to the first part focusing on the Latin roots can be found below. Part II will try to impart some skill in the recognition and proper use of words derived from Greek. There is a stress on principles: although students will be continually looking at interesting individual words, their constant aim will be to discover predictable general patterns of historical development, so that they may be able to cope with new and unfamiliar words of any type that they have studied. They will be shown how to approach the problem by a procedure known as “word analysis,” which is roughly comparable to the dissection of an interesting specimen in the biology laboratory. The text assumes no previous knowledge of Greek, and does not involve the grammatical study of this language— except for a few basic features of noun and verb formation that will help students to understand the Greek legacy in English. All students will be asked to learn the Greek alphabet. This skill is not absolutely essential for a general knowledge of Greek roots in English. However, it will help students understand a number of otherwise puzzling features of spelling and usage. Although there will be some attention paid to the historical interaction of Greek with English, this text is definitely not a systematic history of the English language. It focuses on only those elements within English that have been directly or indirectly affected by this classical language. In order to provide the broadest possible service to students, the text emphasizes standard English vocabulary in current use. The more exotic technical vocabulary of science and medicine can be extremely interesting, but is explored in only summary fashion. Nevertheless, this text should be of considerable value, say, to a would-be botanist or medical doctor, if only by providing the foundation for further specialized enquiry.
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. 1.01: 97. The Legacy of Greek#sdfootnote1sym 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.