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Greek’s relationship to Romance Languages | ||
Tags: Romance Languages | Greek | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| dlb Triglot Groupie Joined 5807 days ago 44 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Greek, Italian | Message 1 of 22 12 February 2010 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just started working on learning Greek at the beginning of January, so I don't know much about the language, but I've noticed similarities with the Romance languages, such as verb conjugation endings. I looked on a language tree and don't see a relationship between Greek and Romance languages other than they both come from the Indo-European language "trunk". But is there another connection, maybe historical that connects these languages?
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6796 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 2 of 22 12 February 2010 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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You'll find similarities among the conjugations of most Indo-European languages — even Lithuanian case endings
show a resemblance to Greek. Greek is a separate branch of the Indo-European family though, and branched very early — earlier than Latin. After that, the main way it influenced Latin and the Romance languages was through vocabulary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReachingOut Pentaglot Groupie Greece Joined 5265 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, German, GreekB2, French, Romanian Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 22 25 July 2010 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think that there is any connection is the verb conjugations but there are some Italian influences, especially in the West of Greece. Historically, some areas of Greece were occupied by the Venetians and quite a few words of Italian origin have come into the vocabulary.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6170 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 4 of 22 25 July 2010 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Other than the common Indo-European origin and some loanwords in both directions, there is not much of a relationship to the Romance languages. True, the conjugation might be similar with Romance languages, but so is Slavic conjugation (well, at least Russian is similar):
SPANISH: hablar yo hablo tú hablas él habla nosotros hablamos vosotros habláis ellos hablan ITALIAN: parlare io parlo tu parli lui parla noi parliamo voi parlate loro parlano RUSSIAN: говорить я говорю ты говоришь он говорит мы говорим вы говорите они говорят GREEK: μιλώ εγώ μιλώ εσύ μιλάς αυτός μιλά εμείς μιλάμε εσείς μιλάτε αυτοί μιλούν Edited by ellasevia on 25 July 2010 at 8:00pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReachingOut Pentaglot Groupie Greece Joined 5265 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, German, GreekB2, French, Romanian Studies: Italian | Message 5 of 22 26 July 2010 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Unfortunately I don't know much about Latin and very little Ancient Greek, but I can't help wondering how much Latin could have been influenced by Ancient Greek. I can see where one might suppose there are similarities.
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| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6467 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 6 of 22 26 July 2010 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is shared vocabulary (philosophia is the first one to spring to mind), but that's about the end of the link, unless you go back nearly to PIE.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6731 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 22 28 July 2010 at 5:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Insofar there is a link then it is from Greek to Latin and the modern Romance languages. The Romans imported lots of Greek terms for medicine, culture and other things - doctors and artists in Rome were mostly Greeks. And this import of terms continued up to the renaissance and even beyond. For instance many scientific animal- and plant names have a Greek component.
One Romance language, namely Romanian, has some grammatical traits in common with Greek, such as as the loss/weakening of the infinitive, but those things are common ground for several languages on the Balkan Peninsula (Albanian, Bulgarian etc. Modern Greek contains some loanwords from for instance English, but not nearly as many as other languages. Of course the Greek alphabet may have been a barrier, but then you would have seen the same effect in the Slavic languages, and my impression is that they have more loanwords than Greek. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReachingOut Pentaglot Groupie Greece Joined 5265 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, German, GreekB2, French, Romanian Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 22 28 July 2010 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||
I don't know whether there existed an infinitive form in Ancient Greek, but modern Greek has no infinitive form at all, this being replaced by a subjunctive , for example "to read" is "να διαβάσω" and dictionaries always give the first person singular in the present tense in place of an infinitive. (διαβάζω) Romanian does have an infinitive form which is used in certain constructions, for example "a se folosi înainte de..." meaning "to be used before..." and "pentru a merge" "in order to go." Other than that I don't think that there are too many similarities between Greek and Romanian. It's certainly true that Greek has quite a few loan words, not just from English but also from Italian as mentioned earlier and Turkish. In particular the younger generation are more likely to use these words, even though a Greek equivalent may exist. For example, the word "ίντερνετ" (internet) is used a lot, though there is also a Greek equivalent "διαδίκτιο." 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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