In the romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding, much of the humor is derived from the father of the bride, whose pride in his Greek heritage is borderline fanatical. I don't know how accurate or inaccurate the film's portrayal of modern Greek culture is, but I do know that when the father insists that he can take any word and prove that its root is Greek, he's got a point.
English a curious language in that it's not really a language of one people so much as a composite of hundreds of other languages. Much of it is derived from Latin, but I'd say we owe at least a third of our words to Greece--sometimes specifically Greek mythology.
For instance, I already talked about the Narcissus and Echo myth, which gave us two common English words. Atlas, a word we use to refer to a large map, was the name of a Titan who was condemned to hold the entire world on his shoulders (hence the connection to geography). As my dear brother already mentioned, the nine Muses gave us the verb "muse" and of course the noun "music." The more common spelling of Kronos is "Cronus," from which we derive the words "chronology" and "chronological," which refer to the order of events, since Cronus had powers over time. From the love-god Eros, we get the word "erotic." Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, became the word for the colored part of the eye.
Here's a weird one: our English word "hermaphrodite" comes from the myth of Hermaphroditus, a son of Hermes. A young woman fell desperately in love with him, but he was pretty lukewarm towards her, so she clung to him and begged Aphrodite that she would never be seperated from him. Unfortunately, the gods granted her wish a little too literally, and they became one entity.
Nemesis was the goddess of retribution--sometimes interpreted as a goddess of revenge, and other times of justice, depending on your opinion--but now the word has come to mean a person that one regards as a rival or enemy.
Our words "panic" and "pandemonium" are references to the god of the wild, Pan, who had the power to create chaos with his call.
Stoicism was a Greek philosophy, a school of thought, but now it's mostly come to mean remaining fairly emotionless or showing little emotion. Hedonism was a philosophy that promoted the pursuit of pleasure, so when people say "hedonistic" now, they mean superficial and pleasure-seeking.
Ironically, the word "dyslexia" is also Greek, so Percy Jackson really does have Ancient Greece to blame for his learning disorders, haha.
Another weird one--"automaton" was the name of the mechanical giants that Hephaestus the blacksmith made, so the Ancient Greeks predicted robots.
A lot of prefixes and suffixes that we add to words are Greek, too--like "-opolis" means city (such as the word "metropolis"), and "-ocracy" or "-archy" means the word refers to a form of government or society ("aristocracy," "democracy," "oligarchy," "anarchy").
Some other words we owe to the Greeks: apostrophe, apathy, lethargy, academy, tragic, epiphany, orthodox, mathematics, agnostic, hygiene, myriad, dogma, diagnosis, semantics, character, didactic, irony, metaphor, cynical, protagonist, and angel.
Whew. And that's hardly a comprehensive list, it's just a basic overview of some common ones. If you want to spot any more words with Greek origins, anything with a "ph" instead of an "f" is probably Greek, and anything with the suffix "'-ology" is Greek for "study of..." The prefixes "mono-" ("one"), "a-" ("none") and "poly-" ("many") are also Greek: monotheist, polytheist, atheist, amoral, asexual, asymmetical, polygon, polygamy, and monogamy, just to name a few.
Interestingly, one can notice that the kinds of words we adopted from them tend to be things we associate with Ancient Greece--learning, science, literature, theater, politics, and religion. Chances are, half the words you'll use in literature class will be Greek--synonym, antonym, homonym, syntax, diction, etc.
So, are there any other words or phrases with their origins in Greek mythology or language that I am forgetting? If you have anything else to add, I'd love to hear them.
One final thought for the day--I'd like to close with another My Big Fat Greek Wedding quote: "There are only two kinds of people in the world--those who are Greek, and everybody else who wishes they were Greek."
Hope everyone's having a lovely July, and to all my American readers, I hope you had a lovely Independence Day.
~Meg
English a curious language in that it's not really a language of one people so much as a composite of hundreds of other languages. Much of it is derived from Latin, but I'd say we owe at least a third of our words to Greece--sometimes specifically Greek mythology.
For instance, I already talked about the Narcissus and Echo myth, which gave us two common English words. Atlas, a word we use to refer to a large map, was the name of a Titan who was condemned to hold the entire world on his shoulders (hence the connection to geography). As my dear brother already mentioned, the nine Muses gave us the verb "muse" and of course the noun "music." The more common spelling of Kronos is "Cronus," from which we derive the words "chronology" and "chronological," which refer to the order of events, since Cronus had powers over time. From the love-god Eros, we get the word "erotic." Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, became the word for the colored part of the eye.
Here's a weird one: our English word "hermaphrodite" comes from the myth of Hermaphroditus, a son of Hermes. A young woman fell desperately in love with him, but he was pretty lukewarm towards her, so she clung to him and begged Aphrodite that she would never be seperated from him. Unfortunately, the gods granted her wish a little too literally, and they became one entity.
Nemesis was the goddess of retribution--sometimes interpreted as a goddess of revenge, and other times of justice, depending on your opinion--but now the word has come to mean a person that one regards as a rival or enemy.
Our words "panic" and "pandemonium" are references to the god of the wild, Pan, who had the power to create chaos with his call.
Stoicism was a Greek philosophy, a school of thought, but now it's mostly come to mean remaining fairly emotionless or showing little emotion. Hedonism was a philosophy that promoted the pursuit of pleasure, so when people say "hedonistic" now, they mean superficial and pleasure-seeking.
Ironically, the word "dyslexia" is also Greek, so Percy Jackson really does have Ancient Greece to blame for his learning disorders, haha.
Another weird one--"automaton" was the name of the mechanical giants that Hephaestus the blacksmith made, so the Ancient Greeks predicted robots.
A lot of prefixes and suffixes that we add to words are Greek, too--like "-opolis" means city (such as the word "metropolis"), and "-ocracy" or "-archy" means the word refers to a form of government or society ("aristocracy," "democracy," "oligarchy," "anarchy").
Some other words we owe to the Greeks: apostrophe, apathy, lethargy, academy, tragic, epiphany, orthodox, mathematics, agnostic, hygiene, myriad, dogma, diagnosis, semantics, character, didactic, irony, metaphor, cynical, protagonist, and angel.
Whew. And that's hardly a comprehensive list, it's just a basic overview of some common ones. If you want to spot any more words with Greek origins, anything with a "ph" instead of an "f" is probably Greek, and anything with the suffix "'-ology" is Greek for "study of..." The prefixes "mono-" ("one"), "a-" ("none") and "poly-" ("many") are also Greek: monotheist, polytheist, atheist, amoral, asexual, asymmetical, polygon, polygamy, and monogamy, just to name a few.
Interestingly, one can notice that the kinds of words we adopted from them tend to be things we associate with Ancient Greece--learning, science, literature, theater, politics, and religion. Chances are, half the words you'll use in literature class will be Greek--synonym, antonym, homonym, syntax, diction, etc.
So, are there any other words or phrases with their origins in Greek mythology or language that I am forgetting? If you have anything else to add, I'd love to hear them.
One final thought for the day--I'd like to close with another My Big Fat Greek Wedding quote: "There are only two kinds of people in the world--those who are Greek, and everybody else who wishes they were Greek."
Hope everyone's having a lovely July, and to all my American readers, I hope you had a lovely Independence Day.
~Meg
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