[B-Greek] Why are there so many words in Greek?

James Bowick james at bowick.com
Tue Apr 10 09:40:34 EDT 2007


Hello,

Steve Martin once said "Those French have a word for everything!"  I am in
the middle of studying for a Greek final exam and would say "Those Greeks
have five words for everything!"  I am becoming acutely aware of the huge
number of synonyms, and it got me to wondering "why?'

While the question is born of student angst, I really did get wondering
about it.  My very casual observation, no doubt skewered by the body of
literature I am studying, is that there seem to be a huge number of synonyms
for logical connectors, and abstract nouns, but not for core root words,
such as "mother," "father."  I am guessing that there are also a large
number of synonyms for other concrete nouns, but not in the corpus I am
studying.

I did not observe this phenomenon in Hebrew but it is definitely
characteristic of English.  In English the cause can be traced to a huge
number of loan words, especially from French, that create synonyms, some of
which have diverged in use.  But we keep a huge number of Germanic words and
the French counterpart in our language.

My casual speculation is that Greek underwent a similar merger with a
related language sometime in prehistory.  The languages, I speculate, shared
base words, such as "mother" and "father" but had been separated for some
time, developing independantly words for "love" and other abstract
concepts.  I am guessing it was not the merger of the classical dialects
into Koine as I had not heard of substantial different vocabularies for
these dialects, but again, I could be just missing the info.

I would be curious to here the reflections of those of you in the know.  As
I said, this is just a casual observation that I have had no time to put any
real study into.  What do you think?

James Bowick



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