[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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