The Importance of Latin and Greek etymologies in English words
Classical Greek has contributed significantly to the richness of English vocabulary.
For speakers of English, Greek has been traditionally perceived as remote, esoteric, and yet worth a great deal of respect. Greek word-forming patterns, words, and word elements were adopted and adapted into Latin over 1, 500 years, and passed through Latin into many European and other languages, being used in the main for scholarly and technical purposes.
The flow into English was at first limited and largely religious. The significant influx was in the late Middle ages and the renaissance. The spelling of Greek words in English was shaped by the orthographics of Latin and French: Greek kaligraphia bacame Latin calligraphia, French calligraphie, and English calligraphy. Occasionally, a more Greek look survives; as with, kaleidoscope, not calidoscope, and kinetic, not cinetic.
The word-creating capacity of Greek, while prodigious, is not unique; nor has it usually had a direct channel into the Western European languages; as a result, even the most rigoroous scientific terminologies are hybrid. One example includes the names of the geological eras, created in English as an ad-hoc system unlikely to have been a classical Greek scholar’s choice.
The Greeks were the first Europeans to use an alphabet, to theorize about language, and to frame language categories. Most of the literary genres of the Western world were invented or formalized by the Greeks and many of the names they used have passed with only minor adaptation to many successor languages. Key literary words in English that are of Greek origin include: anachronism, anthology, archetype, biography, catharsis, comedy, criticism, elegy, epic, euphemism, hubris, irony, lyric, metaphor, mythology, poetics, rhetoric, sarcasm, symbolism, and tragedy.
As a result of the continued influence of Greek elements from so many directions, the English language is simply saturated with this classical source. In fact, it is fair to say that without some knowledge of the Greek elements in English, those who utilize the language can not be certain of the accuracy of their spelling or of the correctness of the use of many of the simple and more complex words used in English.