If english words orginated from Latin, Greek etc......?

Question

....then where did they get their words from?

Answer 1

The core part of English vocabulary was inherited from Proto-Germanic about 2500 years ago. Latin, Greek, and Proto-Germanic are all part of the Indo-European language family, so the majority of these words ultimately come from Proto-Indo-European about 6000 years ago north of the Black Sea. This was the ancestor language of Sanskrit (you had two Indian nationalists stating the "Look up Sanskrit" and "Indo-European evolved from Sanskrit" crap) and Sanskrit and Persian are both in the Indo-Iranian subgroup of Indo-European. Sanskrit and Persian are BOTH evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Iranian evolved from Proto-Indo-European. Before Proto-Indo-European, we cannot reconstruct, but language ultimately evolved about 100,000 years ago in Africa. From there, language differentiated over space and time into the multitude of the world's modern languages.

Answer 2

Well I'm Greek and I know that during ancient times our language was affected by other nations (for example our alphabet was based on the alphabet of the Phoenix.The Phoenix's alphabet had no vowels and Greeks enriched it). Latin language and then English language was affected by Greek words that were original in Greece since here the sciences and some meanings such as "democracy,athlet,planet,pharmacy" etc.thrived for first time in Greece.After the Roman empire it was natural that languages that weren't so strong as then to be affected by the Latin language.

To conclude,if you try to find the roots of all the languages you'll get confused as many languages have taken part to build the modern languages.

Answer 3

Technical and scientific English words DO of course come directly from Latin and Greek, which were taught

at the early universities in Europe, Egypt and Bysanz.

Answer 4

Greek and Latin both are indo-european languages, and find many of their word origins the mother indo-european language. The time and place where this language was spoken is still open for debate, but many would say that it was spoken somewhere around the Black Sea 5 to 7 thousand years ago.

Some words, of course were borrowed from languages outside the indo-european language family, mostly from the Semetic Language and Afro-Asiatic Language groups.

Answer 5

Aud = Hear (ex. Auditory) 1 audio 2 audition rupt = break (erupt) 1bankrupt 2rupture tort = twist (distort) 1torture 2contort cide = kill (homicide) 1matricide 2insecticide gress = step (progress) 1digress 2regress sect = cut (bisect) 1disect 2section script,scrib = write (describe) 1scribble 2transcribe ped = foot (pedal) 1pedestrian 2pedometer port = carry (export) 1import 2portable mand = order (mandate) 1demand 2command meanings can be found in a dictionary :) if you want to find other options, there are websites which give examples of words with latin roots...

Answer 6

Where did language come from? Latin, Greek and most languages in what we now call Europe are Indo-European languages and all we know for now is that they originated from Sanskrit (an ancient language from what is now northern India).
There is another group of languages which are known as Indo-Persian - these languages are spoken by Kurds, Iranians and in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and some African languages like Hausa) presumably started out in Mesopotamia - Iraq.
There are many other groups of languages. Turkish is spoken from Turkey eastwards through Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan right to eastern China, the Uighur, but I guess that's enough for one day.

Answer 7

Through the ages land masses have separated and drifted apart. When the continents and islands were joined to each other there were fewer, more widely-spoken languages with regional accents, dialects and variations. As the lands separated these became more pronounced and the words were bastardised and borrowed in the same way that our own languages have been over the last millennium.
Civilisations usually borrow and bastardise words from another language that have no equivalent in their own language, IE - petit in French to petty and petite in English.

Answer 8

English developed from the Saxon, Celtic, Norman, Roman, Greek, various Nordic languages. Each of these languages have been subsumed into the English language and new words formed from old ones, the language itself is constantly developing, new words occur all the time

Answer 9

that was later when it became the 'official' written language, before that it was a very old form of norse which though spoken was not the language of scholars and therefore not recorded in the same way as latin, greek.

Answer 10

Brilliant question!

They combined their own brand new words with borrowed words from even more ancient people - tribes like the Babylonians, the Akkadians and the Sumerians.