Greek and Latin in English Today Part 1 Derivatives from Greek

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Greek and Latin in English TodayPart 1
Derivatives from Greek
Chapter 1 The Greek Alphabet and
Transliteration
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History of the Alphabet

• Two important writing systems were used in the
  eastern Mediterranean prior to the arrival of the
  Greek alphabet cuneiform and
  hieroglyphics
• Cuneiform first appeared in the valley of the
  Tigris and Euphrates Rivers about 3000 B.C.E.
• It was used by the Sumerians and by their
  conquerors, the Assyrians

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 Among the earliest civilizations were the
diverse peoples living in the fertile valleys
lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or
Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, "between the
rivers." In the south of this region, in an area
now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a
mysterious group of people, speaking a language
unrelated to any other human language we know of,
began to live in cities, which were ruled by some
sort of monarch, and began to write. These were
the Sumerians, and around 3000 BC they began to
form large city-states in southern Mesopotamia
that controlled areas of several hundred square
miles. The names of these cities speak from a
distant and foggy past Ur, Lagash, Eridu. These
Sumerians were constantly at war with one another
and other peoples, for water was a scarce and
valuable resource. The result over time of these
wars was the growth of larger city-states as the
more powerful swallowed up the smaller
city-states. Eventually, the Sumerians would have
to battle another peoples, the Akkadians, who
migrated up from the Arabian Peninsula. The
Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they
spoke a Semitic language related to languages
such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples
clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control
over the city-states they had so brilliantly
created and fell under the hegemony of the
Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the
city that was later to become Babylon.
http//wsu.edu/dee/MESO/SUMER.HTM
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Assyrian Empire 746-609 BCE
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The Assyrians were Semitic people living in the
northern reaches of Mesopotamia they have a long
history in the area, but for most of that history
they are subjugated to the more powerful kingdoms
and peoples to the south. Under the monarch,
Shamshi-Adad, the Assyrians attempted to build
their own empire, but Hammurabi soon crushed the
attempt and the Assyrians disappear from the
historical stage. Eventually the Semitic peoples
living in northern Mesopotamia were invaded by
another Asiatic people, the Hurrians, who
migrated into the area and began to build an
empire of their own. But the Hurrian dream of
empire was soon swallowed up in the dramatic
growth of the Hittite empire, and the young
Hurrian nation was swamped. After centuries of
attempts at independence, the Assyrians finally
had an independent state of their own since the
Hittites did not annex Assyrian cities. For the
next several hundred years, the balance of power
would shift from the north to the
south.   http//wsu.edu/dee/MESO/ASSYRIA.HTM 
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Babylonian Empire 609-539 BCE
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Persian Empire 550-330 BCE
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  Until the sixth century BC, they were a people
shrouded in mystery. Living in the area east of
the Mesopotamian region, the Persians were a
disparate group of Indo-European tribes, some
nomadic, some settled, that were developing their
own culture and religion unique from that of the
great cities to their west. Sometimes history is
about ideas, and nothing more clearly emphasizes
this aspect of history than the sudden eruption
of Persians on to the world stage, or at least
the world stage as it centered around
Mesopotamia. For the sudden rise of Persian power
not only over Mesopotamia, but over the entire
known world, has its center of gravity in a new
set of ideas constellating around a new religion.
For the Persians would become the largest and
most powerful empire ever known in human history
up until that point. By 486 BC, the Persians
would control all of Mesopotamia and, in fact,
all of the world from Macedon northeast of Greece
to Egypt, from Palestine and the Arabian
peninsula across Mesopotamia and all the way to
India.    The Persians throughout their history,
such as we know it, lived peacefully in the
region just north of the Persian Gulf (modern day
Iran). For the most part, they were left
unbothered by the epic power struggles broiling
to the west in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt.
They were Indo-European peoples who spoke a
language similar to Sanskrit. http//wsu.edu/dee/
MESO/PERSIANS.HTM
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Macedonian Empire 336-323 BCE
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Chart of the Semitic Family Tree
http//www.bartleby.com/61/tree.html
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The Semitic languages are a group of related
languages whose living representatives are spoken
by more than 467 million people across much of
the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of
Africa. They constitute a branch of the
Afro-Asiatic language family, the only branch of
that family to be spoken not only in Africa but
also in Asia By the beginning of the 2nd
millennium BC, East Semitic languages dominated
in Mesopotamia, while West Semitic languages were
probably spoken from Syria to Yemen, although Old
South Arabian is considered by most to be South
Semitic and data are sparse. Akkadian had become
the dominant literary language of the Fertile
Crescent, using the cuneiform script they adapted
from the Sumerians, while the sparsely attested
Eblaite disappeared with the city, and Amorite is
attested only from proper names.
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
14th century BC diplomatic letter in Akkadian,
found in Amarna.
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http//www.greatscott.com/hiero/
A section of the Papyrus of Ani showing cursive
hieroglyphs. http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian
_hieroglyphs see also http//www.eyelid.co.uk/hi
ero1.htm
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History of the alphabet From Wikipedia
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphab
et The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient
Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of
writing. The first pure alphabet emerged around
2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic
workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age
alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic
principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most
alphabets in the world today either descend
directly from this development, for example the
Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by
its design. 1 Pre-alphabetic scripts Two
scripts are well attested from before the end of
the fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamian cuneiform
and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were well known in
the part of the Middle East that produced the
first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician. There
are signs that cuneiform was developing
alphabetic properties in some of the languages it
was adapted for, as was seen again later in the
Old Persian cuneiform script, but it now appears
these developments were a sideline and not
ancestral to the alphabet. The Byblos syllabary
has suggestive graphic similarities to both
hieratic Egyptian and to the Phoenician alphabet,
but as it is undeciphered, little can be said
about its role, if any, in the history of the
alphabet. Early history Beginnings in Egypt By
2700 BCE the ancient Egyptians had developed a
set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the
individual consonants of their language, plus a
23rd that seems to have represented word-initial
or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as
pronunciation guides for logograms, to write
grammatical inflections, and, later, to
transcribe loan words and foreign names. However,
although alphabetic in nature, the system was not
used for purely alphabetic writing. That is,
while capable of being used as an alphabet, it
was in fact always used with a strong logographic
component, presumably due to strong cultural
attachment to the complex Egyptian script. The
first purely alphabetic script is thought to have
been developed around 2000 BCE for Semitic
workers in central Egypt. Over the next five
centuries it spread north, and all subsequent
alphabets around the world have either descended
from it, or been inspired by one of its
descendants, with the possible exception of the
Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century BCE adaptation
of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt -
though even here many scholars suspect the
influence of that first alphabet.
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Greek alphabet Transmission to Greece See also
History of the Greek alphabet By at least the 8th
century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician
alphabet and adapted it to their own
language.10 The letters of the Greek alphabet
are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet,
and both alphabets are arranged in the same
order. 11 However, whereas separate letters for
vowels would have actually hindered the
legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew,
their absence was problematic for Greek, where
vowels played a much more important role. The
Greeks adapted those Phoenician letters for
consonants they didn't use to write vowels. All
of the names of the letters of the Phoenician
alphabet started with consonants, and these
consonants were what the letters represented,
something called the acrophonic principle.
However, several Phoenician consonants were
absent in Greek, and thus several letter names
came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since
the start of the name of a letter was expected to
be the sound of the letter, in Greek these
letters now stood for vowels.citation needed
For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or h,
so the Phoenician letters alep and he became
Greek alpha and e (later renamed epsilon), and
stood for the vowels /a/ and /e/ rather than the
consonants /?/ and /h/. As this fortunate
development only provided for five or six
(depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek
vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs
and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o
(which became omega), or in some cases simply
ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.
12 Several varieties of the Greek alphabet
developed. One, known as Western Greek or
Chalcidian, was west of Athens and in southern
Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern
Greek, was used in present-day Turkey, and the
Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world
that spoke Greek adopted this variation. After
first writing right to left, the Greeks
eventually chose to write from left to right,
unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to
left.
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Development of the Roman alphabet A tribe known
as the Latins, who became known as the Romans,
also lived in the Italian peninsula like the
Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe
living in the first millennium BCE in central
Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted
writing in about the fifth century. In adopted
writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped
four characters from the Western Greek alphabet.
They also adapted the Etruscan letter F,
pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the
Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was
curved to make the modern S. To represent the G
sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the
Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern
alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and
Z, as well as some other differences. C, K,
and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to
write both the /k/ and /g/ sounds the Romans
soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it
in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain
the gematria (the numerical sequence of the
alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander
the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and
other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans
began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt
their alphabet again in order to write these
words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they
borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of
the alphabet because the only time they were used
was to write Greek words. The Anglo-Saxons began
using Roman letters to write Old English as they
converted to Christianity, following Augustine of
Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth
century. Because the Runic wen, which was first
used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a
p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to
confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to
be written using a double u. Because the u at the
time looked like a v, the double u looked like
two v's, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U
developed when people began to use the rounded U
when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V
when the meant the consonant V. J began as a
variation of I, in which a long tail was added to
the final I when there were several in a row.
People began to use the J for the consonant and
the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and
it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth
century.
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Descendants of the Greek alphabet Greek is in
turn the source for all the modern scripts of
Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek
dialects, where the letter eta remained an h,
gave rise to the Old Italic and Roman alphabets.
In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have
an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a
vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets
derived from the eastern variants Glagolitic,
Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek
and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian.13
14 Although this description presents the
evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is
a simplification. For example, the Manchu
alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia,
was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was
either independent (the traditional view) or
derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian
apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but
was strongly influenced in its conception by
Greek. The Greek alphabet, itself ultimately a
derivative of hieroglyphs through that first
Semitic alphabet, later adopted an additional
half dozen demotic hieroglyphs when it was used
to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree
syllabics (an abugida), which appears to be a
fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand the
latter may be an independent invention, but
likely has its ultimate origins in cursive Latin
script.