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Greek (or rather origins thereof)


alexander

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This is how a lot of these things start:

 

So i was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, about me performing experiments on one of my best friend's kids (she's 2) by teaching her Greek alphabet letters :)

 

The phrase that my other friend blurred out "So you are teaching her Latin scripture". And me being me i could not have possibly left that uncommented, so i decided to put together this post for all of you, so you would not say something that's this wrong to any of your linguist friends, and perhaps look smart in their eyes by saying something they may not even know :)

 

Greek is a decendant of actually a decendent of a decendant of a group of languages from the regions of Syria and Akkadia . If that is confusing, let me explain.

 

It all starts in the Eblaite and Assyria-Babylonia (aka Akkadia), at around 3000 BCE, when Sargon I decides to adapt Sumerian cuneiform orthography (long way of saying that it used sumerian writing system, which specified a very speciffic way to write their language), for the purpose of developing the languae of Akkad. It is strongly believed that it was around this time, when Eblaites devlop their scriptures as well, problem is, we know about this group so little that it is hard to say with any certainty. These languages are considered to be a part of the West Semitic group of languages, which were adoped by the Canaanites and developed into the Canaan language, which is one of the first Acrophonical languages, a language which is both pictographic and ideographic, i.e. languages, where the letter represents the same sound as a picture, or glyph. This is sort of a mix of a more modern language with a glyph-based language, this was done to simplify the writing of the scriptures.

 

Actually even ancient Egyptian was eventually reformed into such type of a language, which signifficantly cut down time needed to write syllables, by the scribes, but anyways, back to Greek.

 

Canaanite, or Phoenician, (coming from the name of their civilization) classified now as a an abjab language, it consists of only consonants, much like the sound of ancient Egyptian, the reader had to put in appropriate vowels, infact it is believed that it was a language decendent of Egyptian, though using West Semitic writing system. It is because Phoenician was so widely used by the Phoenician merchants, i should note that they used Arameic alphabet, which is a form of Phoenician, with scriptures that look much like Hebrew, across the Mediterranian, that it was the language that gave birth to Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Brahmi script (the one that gave birth to languages in India, South Asia, Tibet and Mongolia).

 

In order to adopt the Phoenician to Greek speech, the greeks had to alter the phonology of the written sounds, because the phonology of their language was very specific as to the vowel sounds, so they in turn altered the sound to suit there needs, and slightly changed the writing of some letters, and the language was born.

 

(as an example, the Greek Alpha, is a decendent of a Phoenician Aleph, which means Ox, and looks like an A, dropped on its left side)

 

Latin, Cyrilic and Coptic, in turn, were decendents of Greek scripture....

 

Well this is it in the nut shell, hope you have learned something new today :turtle:

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