Transcript Slide 1

Greek and Latin in English
Today
Part 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.
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http://wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/SUMER.HTM
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, ShamshiAdad, 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/hiero1.htm
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History of the alphabet
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
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 the17
south of Egypt - though even here many scholars suspect the influence of that first alphabet.
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 /ʔ/ 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.
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