The Diachronic Contribution of Greek to the Development of the English Language

Abstract

Interlanguage contact and its resulting influences are a fascinating and rewarding field for the scholar and the general reader. Among the benefits of studying this linguistic interaction is the assistance which it provides, especially with the planning and organising of foreign and second language teaching/learning. This paper focuses on the diachronic influence and the contribution of Greek to the development and enrichment of English throughout its history, examining English as the recipient and Greek as the donor of interlanguage influences. It concentrates on English because today it constitutes a global language spoken as mother tongue, official, second or foreign language in countries of all continents, and it is also the second in the world after Mandarin Chinese in number of native speakers. Simultaneously, it focuses on Greek because it is the oldest source of loans (direct and indirect) which English has borrowed, and second, because it occurs on more than one linguistic level, i.e. the graphemic, the morphological and the lexical.