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

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Apr 10 14:23:42 EDT 2007


 Bowick EGRAPSE
> ... 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?'

A worthy question, probably pondered by many person reading through
vast literature and vocabulary of Greek. I wonder what
Wilamovitz-Moellendorff would have said, (a famous researcher of
ancient greek lit of of 19-20th century, who had read everything,
according to one urban rumor)?

> 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.

Maybe you should try looking at Mishnaic Hebrew where a large
collection of Greek loan words are used, and often unnecessarily,
unless 'being different' is a necessity. I mean, did Hebrew need PETRA
when they had sela` and tsur?
If your comments referred to biblical Hebrew, then you must remember
that it is just a piece of a language. However, in general, Hebrew
does not have a large vocabulary in comparison to Greek or 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.

There were certainly non-Greek *QALAT/SA (='sea') types of substrata
influences.
But your answer probably lies elsewhere.
Philosophy, scientific research, and literature tend to engender
vocabulary. Ancient Greek was the leading culture in these fields.
Another factor which might be affecting you is the poetry/rhetoric
phenomenon. Some authors of antiquity seemed to strive for
embellishment over clarity. As one reads in the first century you can
see the two streams in action. On the one hand we have reasonably
unaffected prose in the romance novels and Epictetus, where repetitive
vocabulary give a sense of 'easier reading' literature. These novels
were meant to entertain and are reasonably clear. Epictetus also
strove for clarity and the basic points. On the otherhand, there is
the Second Sophistic, the Atticistic movement that developed out of
the first century and produced an artificial style where old, dead
words were resurrected regardless of their contribution towards
clarity. Thanks to this movement, the vocabulary level of authors was
required to be maintained at a rather high level. And then there is
Lucian, a fly in everyone's ointment. His mimicry of Herodutus in 'the
Syrian Goddess' has got to be considered a great literary achievement,
yet is reasonably clear.

ERRWSO
Randall

> 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

ERRWSO
Randall

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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