Volunteers’ Experiences
How I learnt Greek (in 6 months)
by Santiago Oribe
Normally, when I meet new people around they tend to think that I study some kind of philology or whatever related to languages. In fact, I’m just a physicist who happens to be strongly interested in languages. The reason for this passion of mine is still partly unknown to me, but the thing is that I love learning (about) different languages. Before I tell you about my love story with Greek, I’ll just talk a bit about the history and the peculiarities of this fantastic language.
Modern About the Greek language
First of all, let’s say that Greek belongs to the
Indo-European language family, which means that it is genetically related to languages as diverse as English, French and Hindi. Unlike languages such as Latin, which gave birth to Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, etc., Greek has remained essentially the same language for roughly forty centuries of uninterrupted history. This of course doesn’t mean that Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are the exact same thing, it rather means that there’s a continuity between different stages of the Greek language, since it never split -according to most linguists- into different dialects that would in turn become independent languages.
Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and has nowadays about 13 million native speakers around the world. This name refers to the modern standard language, which is to a large extent based on the “demotic Greek”, which was spoken by the vast majority of the people on a daily basis, although it has some influence from “katharevousa Greek” (the learned version of Greek that was used in formal contexts until the second half of the 20th century) and other historical forms of the language.
In general, Greek roots are everywhere in many
languages in the whole world. Some of the words that have Greek origin do come directly from Ancient Greek (“democracy”, “philosophy”, etc.) or Byzantine Greek (“bishop”, from the Greek επίσκοπος ̉ [epískopos], ‘supervisor’), whereas the majority of the words from scientific disciplines were coined using Greek roots, but were never Greek words on their own (“allergy”, for example, comes from the German word “Allergie”, which was created from the Greek words άλλος ̉ [álos], ‘other’ and έργον ̉ [érgo], ‘work, function’).
My experience
That’s enough theory, I guess. Let me share my
Ancient Greek script
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experience with you.
