The pics thread
- Thread starter Ender Rises
- Start date
dog looks so confused.
SentinelSlain
Suck my joined date.
- Nov 21, 2007
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damnromulans
Klingons do not faint
I found a bunch of fossilized shark teeth in Florida over Christmas
and obtained a lot of succulents
and obtained a lot of succulents
Master_Yoda77
Juggalo
divine_torture
leVel
Serjeant Grumbles
Active Member
- Mar 20, 2005
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^Wrong. Just like octopus, it is not a second-declension Latin noun, so it isn't pluralized with an -i. If you wanna be pedantic, the proper plural is platypodes.
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
Both words aren't even Latin, but Greek.
I'm perfectly fine with people saying octopuses or platypuses, since it's unreasonable to expect the unlettered masses to know these things.
Serjeant Grumbles
Active Member
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Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
MoSeN
I'm a beer
This caught my eye at a local store the other day (the price was some fucking 250$ or something):
Serjeant Grumbles
Active Member
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What's there to kid? It's Latinized Greek, just like most Greek loanwords that find their way into our language.
Master_Yoda77
Juggalo
I think you meant to write Latin via Greek, which suggests that Latin comes from Greek, which it does...for the most part.
TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
Yes but Latin was basically infused with the Greek language throughout ancient Greek history.
Ancient Greek is generally defined as the Greek from the time of Homer (around 750 B.C.) to the decline of the Roman empire (about 480 A.D.). Rome was founded by latin speakers. I'm not sure about those exact words, but yeah Grumbles could be right.
Ancient Greek is generally defined as the Greek from the time of Homer (around 750 B.C.) to the decline of the Roman empire (about 480 A.D.). Rome was founded by latin speakers. I'm not sure about those exact words, but yeah Grumbles could be right.
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
If this is what SG really meant to write, then that's fine. Greek loan words naturally undergo a Latinization when transcribed into the Roman alphabet.
Platypus and octopus are both purely Greek works, coined by a combination of purely Greek root words by taxonomists who classified everything in Latin.
This is false. Latin and Greek are cousins that evolved from the same distant Indo-European ancestor. Latin, as a spoken language at least, did not evolve from Greek. Whatever influence upon Latin's vocabulary happened when Latin had already become a mature literary language.
This is also false. There are much, much fewer Greek loan words in classical Latin than there are in modern English, actually. Well into the imperial period, in fact, we see the opposite happening as Greek began acquiring a few Latin loan words.
I won't even bother with how oversweeping these statements are. The Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire continued to speak Greek long after they were conquered, and even long after the Western half of the Empire crumbled away in the fifth century.
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
I'm also assuming there's general confusion here because the discussion stemmed from scientific, taxonomical terms that neither the ancient Greeks or Romans actually used. They're still fundamentally Greek words and they were used instead of pure Latin because Greek is a better language for coining neologisms out of root words.
divine_torture
leVel
TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
Zeph, correct me if i'm wrong ... but wasn't Latin the dominant language during the Roman Empire(a part of Ancient Greece)? Which would be one of the main reasons why Greek and Latin (the two dominant languages of the RE) were "infused"?
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
"Ancient Greece" geographically was pretty much the same area as modern Greece today, though by the time of the Roman conquests in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, Greek was spoken in many places throughout the Mediterranean world, though mostly in the Eastern half.
I'm not sure what your notion of "Ancient Greece" is but saying the Roman Empire was a part of it, as opposed to the other way around, is as patently false.
Latin was the language of government and law under and throughout the ancient Roman Empire, and it spread as a spoken language to many parts of the Western half of the Empire, i.e. places where its descendants, the Romance languages, are spoken today.
In the Eastern half of the Roman Empire the most widely spoken language was, and remained to be, Greek all the way up to the period of the Muslim conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries CE.
This is not even taking into account the scores of other languages spoken in places under Roman rule, such as Punic in North Africa. The thing about empires is that just because you're ruled by a certain culture or nation, doesn't mean you automatically assimilate to that culture in all its aspects. The upper classes in all those provinces did to a higher degree, but that was a tiny minority of people.
Despite coming under Roman rule, the Greek language maintained its status as a language of elite culture, philosophy, science, literature, etc. and for a long time many native Roman writers wrote in Greek instead of Latin (the emperor Marcus Aurelius, for instance). It also continued as a living language of the common people as it had been for centuries before Roman rule, and continued to be throughout the Byzantine period.
Latin and Greek did not "infuse" nearly as much as you'd think, since Latin speakers in the West and Greek speakers in the East never truly blended together into a single culture. The elites became bilingual for the most part, though in the later period of the Roman Empire, when it became more and more politically divided between West and East, the two cultures diverged more and more and became estranged. Latin stopped being used as the language of government by the Eastern Roman Empire by the seventh century.
TechnicalBarbarity
Poser Disposer
That was clearly a wording mistake on my half.
But yea, like i said i wasn't sure about those exact words(platypus etc). No on said greek came from latin. But the languages did "somewhat infuse" ... so would i be wrong to say some words are greek via latin? I'm honestly asking here, not trying to argue or anything.
And even though i know most of that stuff already, i really enjoyed reading your informed post.
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
Lots of technical terms either borrowed directly from Greek or coined by combining Greek words were introduced into academic Latin during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, when Latin was the only language used in the West for academic and scientific discourse. And this is largely how Greek-derived words entered into English when vernacular languages started taking over from Latin.
This is as close as they come to "somewhat infusing" and it occurred long after the Roman Empire fell.
This is as close as they come to "somewhat infusing" and it occurred long after the Roman Empire fell.
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