LANGUAGES
Greek is spoken by the 10 million inhabitants of Greece and some 82% of the population of Cyprus, numbering a further half million. It is also spoken around the world in the diaspora of Greeks who have emigrated for political or, far more commonly, economic reasons to the USA, Australia, Britain and elsewhere. In terms of number of native speakers it ranks well down the list of world languages. However, culturally its importance is disproportionate. As the language of classical Greek philosophy and literature and, later, as the language of the Christian Gospels and the early Church it has profoundly shaped Western thought.
The earliest records of written Greek are inscribed on baked mud tablets found at the beginning of the present century in the ruins of the palace of Knossos on Crete and, later, at sites on the Greek mainland. Written
in a syllabic script known as Linear B in which each symbol represents a consonant plus vowel combination, they can be dated to the period immediately before the demise of the Minoan civilization of Knossos which occurred in about 1450 B.C.
The earliest Greek texts, such as the linear B tablets of Knossos, were written in syllabic scripts. The Greek alphabet, from which we derive our own alphabet via the Etruscans and Romans, came into use in the 8th century B.C. being adapted from the Phoenician alphabet; since the Phoenician, a semitic language, had no vowels in its alphabet, the Greeks used consonants not needed for the representation of Greek for the six Greek vowels.
SOME GREEK WORDS TRANSLATED IN ENGLISH
- ����(MILO)
- APPLE
- νερό(NEDE)
- WATER
- φίδι(FIDI)
- SNAKE
- άλογο(ALOGO)
- HORSE
- τρέχω(TRECHO)
- RUN
- ποταμός(potamos)
- RIVER
SOME GREEK SENTENCES TRANSLATED IN ENGLISH
- πώς βλέπε εσείς?
- HOW ARE YOU?
- που έχω εσείς μένω?
- WHERE HAVE YOU STAYED?