[B-Greek] French?

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 10 09:07:30 EDT 2007


While we don't normally give it much thought, it really shouldn't be so very surprising that there would be some influence of Greek upon French though I think that it is likely of a rather limited nature.  We know of Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily so that the area has been known as Magna Graecia, but we sometimes forget that the Greeks also founded Marseilles in France.  The influence is thus old and has most likely been largely eroded over time, but it is there.
 
george
gfsomsel
 
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learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth, 
defend the truth till death.
 
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----- Original Message ----
From: Jonathan Robie <jwrobie at mindspring.com>
To: B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 5:17:11 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] French?


I'm reading "The Relevance of Greek Discourse Studies to Exegesis", by
Stephen H. Levinsohn, Journal of Translation, Volume 2, Number 2 (2006).

This surprised me:

> As an aside, what I found interesting, as I prepared for a workshop on 
> 1 Corinthians in Papua New Guinea,
> was the frequency with which the Frenchman Frédéric Louis Godet (1886) 
> had something valuable to say
> about discourse-related features of the Greek. Why? Probably because 
> his mother tongue, though a
> Romance language, evidences more Greek influence than Germanic ones do.

Can anyone help me understand in what way it can be said that French
shows more Greek influence than Germanic languages? The highly declined
nature of German, and its freedom in word order, have always made German
feel more similar to Greek to me, but he must be thinking of other
characteristics of the languages.

Jonathan

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