Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
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literature of the particular sociolinguistic role of Greek (and hence Greek borrowings) in the Latin world.
Gastronomy was a particular strength of the Greeks—the very words for olive and its oil (OLIVA, OLEVM) are old borrowings from Greek (elaiwā, elaiwon)—but this shows up in many names for sauces (GARVM ‘fish sauce’, HYDROGARVM ‘diluted fish sauce’, TISANA ‘barley water’, EMBAMMA ‘ketchup’), vegetables (ASPARAGVS, RAPHANVS ‘radish’, FASEOLVS ‘kidney bean’, CRAMBE ‘cabbage’) and seafood (ECHINVS ‘urchin’, GLYCYMARIS ‘clam’, POLYPUS ‘polyp’, SCOMBER ‘mackerel’, SEPIA ‘cuttlefish’), as well as some foreign delicacies that were to become common (AMYGDALVM ‘almond’, DACTYLUS ‘date’, GLYCYRRHIZA ‘liquorice’, ORYZA ‘rice’, ZINGIBER ‘ginger’). The word for liver, which has been absorbed by so many Romance languages (French foie, Spanish higado, Italian fegato, Rumanian ficat) is from Latin FICATVM, which originally did not mean ‘liver’ at all, but ‘figged’. This was a loan translation of Greek sukōtón, since the liver of animals raised on figs was such a popular delicacy. The word MASSA (which just means ‘mass’) is another borrowing, from Greek mâza, generalized from a mass of barley cake. The whole set of equipment for drinking wine, delivered in an AMPHORA, diluted in a CRATER, and ladled out with a CYATHVS into a large CANTHARVS or SCYPHVS, or an individual CARCHESIVM or CYMBIVM, was labelled in Greek. The culture of drinking too was named in Greek: an aperitif was a PROPIN ‘fore-drink’, a toast PROPINATIO, a game of drunken marksmanship with wine lees had the Greek name COTTABVS.
Most musical instruments had Greek names: SYRINX ‘panpipes’, CYMBALA, TYMPANVM ‘drum’, LYRA, CHORDA ‘string’, PLECTRVM as well as MVSICA itself. More sophisticated engineering tended to be named in Greek, such as the construction terms TROCLEA ‘pulley’, ARTEMON ‘block and tackle’, ERGATA ‘windlass’, POLYSPASTON ‘hoist’, CNODAX ‘pivot’, COCLEA ‘screw mechanism’; and so were the ORGANA of high-tech warfare—CORAX ‘crow’ (battering ram), HELEPOLIS ‘city-taker’ (siege tower), CATAPVLTA ‘off-swinger’, BALLISTA ‘shooter’, ONAGER ‘wild ass’ (all forms of catapult). So, of course, were many terms in the world of school and writing: SCHOLA, ABACUS (‘chequerboard’ as well as ‘abacus’), EPISTVLA ‘letter, missive’, PAPYRVS, CALAMVS ‘pen’, ENCAVSTVM ‘molten wax, ink’, GRAMMATICVS ‘language teacher’, RHETOR ‘oratory teacher’, BIBLIOTHECA ‘library’.
Physical culture too was a Greek speciality. Medical terms taken from Greek have often had a long life (e.g., plaster from Latin EMPLASTRVM, Greek emplastron ‘moulded on’, palsy from PARALYSIS ‘detaching’, dose < DOSIS ‘giving’, French rhume < RHEVMA ‘flow’, for the common cold).* The Roman institution of the bath was clearly heavily influenced by its Greek origins too: BALNEVM (from Greek balaneîon) ‘bath’, THERMAE ‘hot baths’, APODYTERIVM ‘dressing room’, LACONICVM ‘sweat room’, HYPOCAVSTVM ‘underfloor heating’, XYSTVS ‘running track’, PALAESTRA ‘wrestling ground’, LECYTHVS ‘anointing bottle’, ALIPTA ‘masseur/trainer’ (from Greek aleiptēs ‘anointer’), were all terms of everyday use at the bathing establishment, all derived from Greek. Perhaps even more interestingly, a number of words for parts of the body in Latin are borrowed from Greek. The usual Romance words for leg (e.g., French jambe, Italian and Old Spanish gamba) are derived from a Latin word, GAMBA, itself derived from veterinary Greek kampḗ, ‘bend, joint’. STOMACHVS, originally meaning ‘maw’, the opening of the digestive tract, was a Greek word for which the Romans had a lot of use, since they thought of it as the seat of anger: STOMACHOSVS meant ‘testy’ and STOMACHARI meant ‘to lose one’s temper’. And curiously the Romans too borrowed their (and hence our) word for moustache: Latin MVSTACEVS, never found in Latin literature, is derived from a Doric Greek word for the upper lip, mustákion or mústax.† Its close relative mástax ‘jaw’ was also borrowed in Latin; MASTICARE, a verb derived from it, has resulted in French mâcher ‘chew’ as well as modern English ‘masticate’. What became the favourite word for a punch or blow (seen in French coup, Italian colpo, Spanish golpe) was COLPVS, derived from COLAPHVS, already used in Plautus; in Greek it originally meant ‘a peck’, the blow from a bird’s beak.
Colloquial Latin was also full of Greek-sounding interjections: BABAE or PAPAE ‘wow’, PHY ‘ugh’, VAE ‘oh no’, ATATAE ‘ah’, AGE ‘be reasonable’, APAGE ‘get out of here’, EIA ‘come on’, EVGE ‘hurrah’, all have identical equivalents in Greek. Cicero had been embarrassed to use the seemingly innocuous BINI ‘two each’, since it sounded the same as the Greek imperative bínei ‘fuck!’26 (Spoken Greek had, in any case, always had, for Romans, overtones of the bedroom.)* BASTAT ‘enough’, though unknown in classical Latin, went on to a lively career as a verb in Spanish and Italian and seems to have come from Greek bástaze ‘hold it’.
This last example points to one of the persistent differences between Latin and Greek, namely the accentual patterns. The accent on Greek bástaze made it sound like a two-syllable word in Latin; hence it might be heard by Romans as BÁSTAT. By contrast, Greek names imported into Latin were given new accentual patterns, based on the Latin rule, which have largely stayed with them in modern western European languages: not, as per the original Greek, Athená, Aléxandros, Euripídes, Heléne, Menélaos, Periklés, or Sokrátes, but ATHÉNA, ALEXÁNDER, EVRÍPIDES, HÉLENA, MENELÁVS, PÉRICLES, SÓCRATES. Meanwhile, modern Greek has retained the patterns of ancient Greek.27 Stress patterns, in the languages that have them—French, for example, and Japanese do not—can be remarkably persistent over the millennia, and modern English has turned out in many ways similar to classical Latin; but Greek and Latin are very different and have remained so.†
Latin, particularly colloquial Latin and poetic Latin, was peppered with Greek words. But to get this in proportion, let us consider some comparisons. Sampling in a moderate Latin dictionary (of about twenty thousand headwords) shows that, excluding proper nouns, some 7 percent of vocabulary in the classical era (200 BC to AD 200) was derived from Greek.28 By contrast, in 1450, after an equal four hundred years of Norman and Angevin dominance of written expression, something like half the recorded vocabulary of English was of French origin. Another language with massive borrowing, Turkish, has derived 28 percent of its core vocabulary from Arabic, 8 percent from Persian, mostly in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries; but since the nineteenth it has gained as much as 25 percent from French.29
Beside vocabulary, Latin writers and orators absorbed from Greek a particular attitude towards sentence structure, what is called periodic style. Greek language analysis did give rise to what we now recognize as grammar, but no one sways an audience or wins an argument by grammar alone. Greek analysis of how oratory or dialectic becomes effective was every bit as structured as—and considered much more important than—their analysis of declensions, conjugations, or parts of speech. The Greek word períodos means ‘circuit’, literally a ‘go-round’, as in a race. Aristotle, no doubt following up a doctrine that had been elaborated by the Sophists at the height of fifth-century Greek rhetoric, defined a períodos as “an utterance with a beginning and an end in itself, and a length that can be easily taken in,” contrasting it with a strung-out utterance, which has no end in itself, stopping only when what it is talking about comes to an end. The idea was that audiences are made restless by this strung-out style, not knowing what is coming up; and as an added bonus for the speaker, a speech made up of periodic sentences, the so-called terminated style, is much easier to memorize, since it consists of balanced parts, called ‘limbs’ (kôla, MEMBRA) each of them neither too long nor too short. It can even have rhythm, like verse, making it easier