It’s all Greek to me

 
Last Sunday, after the liturgy, Yvonne and I stayed on for coffee and, of course, cakes. We met a bright little Greek girl – Penelope, the granddaughter of Kyria Ioanna. She told us she had spoken both English and Greek since she was a baby. I said I was giving this talk today with the title ‘It’s all Greek to me’. Straightaway, she told me ‘It was Shakespeare who said that. He wrote 36 plays.’ We were so impressed with Penelope. The next generation of well-educated Greeks!
 

I was a couple of years older than Penelope when I started to learn ancient Greek at a boys Grammar school in the midlands. My father was an engineer who had let school at fourteen. He was disappointed, I think, that I did not share his interest in machines and machinery. But he was impressed that his son was now studying both Latin and ancient Greek. He was even more impressed when, as my Greek vocabulary increased, I could tell him ‘machine’ was a word the ancient Greeks were using 3,000 years ago. Many times, he said to me ‘It’s all Greek to me.’
 
He had come across a few letters of the Greek alphabet from when he was studying mathematics at school; Pi (Π), of course, Alpha and Beta (as we say it). Perhaps he knew geometry was a Greek invention, but he knew nothing of the Greek language. Sometimes, he looked over my shoulder at a page of ancient Greek; he could see I was not frightened of it, but even appeared to be able to read it and to translate it. When he said ‘it’s all Greek to me’ he meant he could not understand a single word of it – it was completely beyond him. That’s what we mean when we say ‘it’s all Greek to me’ – με ξεπερνάει τελείως.
 
Why do we say ‘it’s all Greek to me’? Why Greek? First, I think, because Greek has its own alphabet – a page of Greek is a page of strange symbols that we cannot read or understand; as, of course, is Russian, while Chinese has no alphabet at all.  So, secondly, I believe, we say ‘it’s all Greek to me’ because we feel a close connection with Greece; also, many of us, have a deep affection for Greece.
 

We feel we know something, at least, of Greece, far more than we know about many other cultures and countries. We know it as the home of democracy, where mathematicians and philosophers flourished; we are familiar with the gods of Mount Olympus, with Helen of Troy, with the Spartans, for example. They are part of our culture too…
 
But do all countries say ‘it’s all Greek to me’? No. I think you Greeks say Αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα (Chinese) or Αυτά μου φαίνονται αλαμπουρνέζικα (nonsense or gobbledgook) and Greek Cypriots, I believe, say Εν τούρτζικα που μιλάς; (Turkish). In most countries, it is either Greek or Chinese that we use to describe what is impossible to understand.
 
In Croatian, though, they say ‘it’s all Spanish to me’. In Danish ‘It’s all Russian to me’. ‘It’s all Hebrew' to people in Finland.  ‘It’s all hieroglyphics’ to speakers of Hebrew. Italians say ‘it’s all Arabic’ to them. So, it’s not universally ‘all Greek to me’. Hieroglyphics, of course, is a Greek word: literally ‘holy scratchings’, dating back to a time when words were scraped on stone.
 
By the middle ages, men were writing on animal skins, called vellum - περγαμηνή. Most of the scribes - γραφείς, whose job was to copy texts, knew Latin but very few of them knew any Greek. Many of these texts included some passages or notes in Greek. The scribes were probably the first people to say ‘it’s all Greek to me’.
 

As Penelope told us, it was William Shakespeare who said ‘It’s all Greek to me’. In 1599 Shakespeare wrote his tragedy Julius Caesar. I’d like to read to you the passage where he said it. It occurs after a festival was held at which Caesar was offered the crown of Rome:
 
CASSIUS:       Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA:          Ay, he spoke Greek.
CASSIUS:       To what effect?
CASCA:          … those that understood him smiled at one another and shook
their heads; but, for my part, it was Greek to me
 
Caesar had been acting like a king and the conspirators were not certain about Cicero’s attitude towards him because he spoke in Greek and the conspirators did not understand Greek. No doubt, after Shakespeare used the phrase, it became widely used.
 
The great English poet, Shelley, said “We are all Greeks”. He proposed the Greek cultural identity as a universal life model. “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece […] we might still have been savages; […] The human form and the human mind attained a perfection in Greece […]”. He never travelled to Greece, but considered the modern Greek “the descendant of these glorious beings […]“.
 

I was 12 when I took my first steps towards Greece. The first thing we learned was the alphabet. I remember, it was our first homework. Our brains were like sponges then; there were only 24 letters in the Greek alphabet; about half of them were the same or similar to English, and so there wasn’t really much to learn. For a while, though, I kept on mixing up lower case ζ and ξ.
 
At university I studied law. I thought I would have no more use for Greek. I threw away all my notes. The day I collected my degree results, I took the train to Athens. I arrived in the middle of the night and paid 40 drachmas to sleep on the roof of a student hostel in Plaka. In the morning, I stepped onto the pavement and there was the Acropolis. I could not speak for a while.
 
That first morning in Athens, was wonderful. The streets were named after old philosophers, I remembered the Greek alphabet and I could read their names in Greek and in English. The sign on the front of the shop said ΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΙΟ. Pharmacy! Easy! Greece - it was love at first sight. The heat, the noise, the chaos, the crazy broken pavements, all of it. Fifty years on, and still, I see ΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΙΟ and I am just a little excited. The Greek alphabet – the gift that keeps on giving.
 
In the late 1970’s, the prime Minister, Konstantine Karamanlis, held a meeting with Konstantinos Tsatsos, then the Culture Minister, and Evangelos Papanoutsos, the educationalist, and he suggested Greece should adopt the Latin alphabet. They were so horrified, the idea died then and there.
 

The English alphabet has 26 letters. The overlap between them is well-known to us all, so I will just mention two letters in the English alphabet that don’t exist now in the Greek alphabet but still have a Greek origin. How come? I am talking about the letters F and Q.
 
Some of the letters that can be seen in ancient Greek inscriptions are not included in the modern Greek alphabet. This is because the Greek language itself has evolved over time; alphabets exist to meet the needs of the language and what is needed changes from time to time: our keyboards, for example, now have an ‘at’ key for typing email addresses.
 
There were many dialects of the ancient Greek language across the wide Greek world. The needs of each dialect were not met by the same letters. In the late fifth century BC, it was the alphabet used by the Ionian Greeks that became the standardized alphabet of Athens and, as the power and influence of Athens spread, this alphabet quickly replaced the local alphabets and some of their letters disappeared.
 
Among these were Digamma and Koppa. Digamma looked like our letter Ϝ, although it reached below the line, rather than above the line, but the sound it made was ‘wau’, like our letter w. ‘Wau’ had been the Phoenician name for this letter.
 
Koppa looked like our letter Q, though the tail went straight down, rather than coming out at an angle as we have it. Koppa was still part of the Greek alphabet when the Romans started using it, which led to this letter becoming the letter Q in Latin and, eventually, in English. Koppa stood for the ‘k’ sound which is now the Greek letter Kappa and the English letter ‘k’.
 
The letters F and Q are examples of how Greek can pop up where you don’t expect it.
 
How much truth is there in the claim ‘it’s all Greek to me’?
 
The answer depends on what you are talking about and how you do the sums. In the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the character Gus insists that every word in the English language has a Greek origin. It’s a running joke throughout the film. Gus was clearly wrong. But he might have been right: when the Americans were creating their new, independent country, in the 18^th century, there was a debate in Congress when the proposal was that this brave new country should adopt Ancient Greek as its new language. The proposal failed – by one vote!
 
There are many estimates as to what percentage of English words have a Greek origin. Some, the high numbers – like 60%, look to me like optimistic guesses by passionate Greeks. The most convincing evidence I could find was that about 15% of commonly used English words come from Greek. If you include all the technical words in the sciences and technology, the percentage will be much higher. The Oxford English Dictionary says there about 170,000 words in current use in English and about 50,000 obsolete words we rarely use. So, 15% of the current English words would be about 25,000 Greek words. I have heard it said, by the way, that the lexicon of modern Greek is about three times bigger than English, which means there would be about half a million words in modern Greek.
 
Many words with Greek origins will be known only to those working in a particular field. If you meet a technical Greek word, however, but you have a knowledge of Greek, you can probably make an informed guess at what the word means. I have done this several times and it’s great when your guess turns out to be a good one.
 
It is interesting to consider by what route Greek words have arrived in English. Some words came direct into English when English was still a very young language. An example of this is the word ‘church’. At the time, in Greek, the word was ‘κυριακόν’ which travelled into Old English as ‘kirk’ and later became ‘church’. In Scotland, it is still ‘kirk’.
 
I am sure that most of us are aware that further back in time, it was the sound of a word that travelled, rather than its written form; there would have been very little ‘writing’ and very few people able to read and write. This means in order to follow the trail of a word, we need to focus on how its sound travelled, rather than changes in its precise form or spelling.
 
The meanings of words too sometimes changed when they were used in new societies or on in new circumstances. Charisma – χάρισμα – originally meant a gift from God, a natural talent, but now it has come to mean in English a particular type of charm that some actors or politicians, for example, might have.
 
But the journey of most Greek words into English was via Latin, into French, and from French into English. This process reflects how Rome took over the Greek world, and this was followed by the Roman invasions of France and England and, then, the invasion of Britain by William of Normandy.
 
There are many examples of this, but an interesting one is the word ‘museum’. In ancient Greece, this was a temple or shrine to the Muses, in later Greek, a μουσείο was a place of study or library, a school of art or poetry, the word became ‘museum’ in Latin when it was a library or study and when it found its way, via French, to English in the 17^th century, it was at first still a place of study. A few years later it took on its present meaning of a place where items are stored and put on display.
 
An olive in Mycenean Greek was ‘ελαιFά’ (el-ay-wau) – the ‘wau’ sound was the letter digamma, in Latin this sound became ‘oliva’, in Old French ‘olive’ and when an olive arrived in England in the 12^th century, it was an ‘olive’. By a similar route, at a similar time, the words ‘chaos’, ‘catastrophe’ and ‘democracy’ arrived here. Democracy itself, as political system, however, only arrived in England in 1832 when 7% of the population were given the vote. 1832 - coincidentally, when Greece became a modern nation state.
 
So far, I have been referring to whole words that came into English either direct from Greek or via Latin and French. However, the majority of English words that have their origin in Greek are composite words - σύνθετες λέξεις: ones that have been created using Greek ‘morphemes’ - μορφήμες.
 
A good example is the word photograph. I think it’s accepted that not even the ancient Greeks invented photography. A Frenchman is credited as the inventor of photography in 1822. He called it ‘heliographie’ - sun writing. In 1839 the astronomer, John Herschel, first used the word ‘photography’ and that is the one we have all come to use. Not sun-writing, but light-writing from the Greek ‘φώτος’ - light, plus ‘-graphy’ - writing. Graffiti also has its root in γράφω - I write, and comes to English via Italian.
 
The word ‘xenophobia’ describes something that has always existed; man feared his neighbours until he could see it was better to co-operate with him. The word ‘xenophobia’ was not adopted in English, until 1903. I am sure, though, we were not always welcoming to strangers before then and, sadly, we are not always now.
 
Frequently, when a new word has been needed in English, rather than use two morphemes, both of which are Greek, as in these examples, we have taken one Greek morpheme and one from a different language. For example, the word ‘television’. Again, television was not invented by the ancient Greeks. The ‘tele-‘part is Greek - ancient Greek ‘τήλε’, meaning ‘far’, while the suffix ‘-vision’ comes, via French, from the Latin word ‘video’ - I see. The word ‘television’ was first used in English in 1907 when it described what was then only a theoretical system - ‘theoretical system’ two more Greek words.
 
Similarly, ‘automobile’ is the Greek ‘auto’ - self, plus the Latin mobilire - to move.
 
I would like to say something about technical and scientific words. Over the last 500 years there have great developments in the areas of medicine, science and technology. This has required the invention of many new words to provide these fields with their own vocabularies. One interesting aspect of this is in medicine where in the field of anatomy (a Greek word that literally means ‘cutting up) the new words tend to come from Latin, while the words for illnesses and specializations are usually Greek. For example:
 
            Latin               gives us                     Greek             we say           gives us
skin     cutis               subcutaneous          δέρμα            derma            dermatitis, dermatology
brain  cerebrum     cerebral                    ενκέφαλο     (κεφάλι)encaphalo encephalitis 
nose   nasum           nasal                          ρις (or ρινος)  rhinitis (also rhinoceros - nose + horn)
eye     oculus            ocular                        οφθαλμός                ophthalmology
 
Greek love songs, of course, use the demotic Greek word μάτι for eye – μάτια μου. I’ve been told that in the time of katharevousa, you sang ‘οφθαλμέ μου’. Which does seem very strange to my ear.
 
Many English personal names have a Greek origin; I have seen an estimate of 150 names. Yvonne and I have a son, George – farmer in Greek with a root in γή - ge - the earth; and a daughter, Zoe - life. I have referred in the handout some more names with Greek origins.
 
Perhaps we have time to have a quick look at the handout. It would be good to consider some English words that have Greek origins. But where to start? Many Greek words, as we have seen, are often composites when separate morphemes are ‘bolted together’ to form a single word. They are made up of a either prefix or suffix plus a root word. I have managed to squeeze onto the second page of the handout the great majority of prefixes and suffixes. The third page of the handout are ‘out-takes’, rather like the bits of film that are not included in the finished film but end up on the ‘cutting room floor’.
 
Most of you speak Greek and you will find it much easier to spot the Greek roots in English words; it is much harder for English speakers to spot the Greek root because they do not know the Greek. So, I’m probably telling most of you what you know already.
 
It has been a pleasure to be here among philologists - literally lovers of words. Some of you have degrees in philology, I am an amateur, be my critics - literally, my judges, and correct my mistakes.
 
Finally, I would like to end with this thought. There are three words that define European civilisation and they are all Greek:
 
            Europe                      after Evropa - the mother of King Minas of Crete
            Democracy              literally, the rule of the people; and
            Christianity.
 
Richard Devereux
A talk at the Greek Orthodox Church, Bristol
31 March 2024