Why were the Ancient Greeks such rotten linguists?

Question

Again and again the Greeks mangled foreign names - couldn't they get them right, or did they just not bother? Why had they so little interest in other peoples' literature?

Sorry, William H, but even when the Greeks were under the thumb of the Romans, they behaved as if the Romans had no literature at all. Did they translate any Egyptian Literature? Carthaginian? Babylonian? Indian? Next to nothing.

Oh, and the Greeks didn't write Darius, they wrote Dareios. They DID have a way of writing RU - rho-upsilon will do fine - and if they didn't have a way of writing 'sh', WHY DIDN'T THEY DEVISE ONE - as English has done, and other languages too? In Malaysia I sometimes took my car to the woksyop.

Answer 1

mmmmm....did u read CRATYLUS by Plato?
Was Socrates really a wise man?
sorry, Greeks, if that hurts u...

Answer 2

Like Guandong - which became Canton according to the Brits.
The obvious answer is that, at the time they could shout Greek louder than the Brits, who were still living in caves, could shout Anglo-Saxon.
You've got it backwards. Ancient Greeks gave names to many places. These names were then anglicised, francicised, germanified, so that now we think these names are the 'real' names and the ancient Greeks hadn't got a clue.

Answer 3

i fail to see the logic in your conclusion. the greeks were superb linguists and took great care in translating languages unknown to them into the hellenized form. you have to remember that many languages contain letters foreign in an indo-european tongue such as greek so they had to translate it to the best of their ability. good example is the name Darius, the original persian form is Daruvish, they are very similar. the greek language does not have the letter "ru" of the letter "sh".

Answer 4

I was of the impression that they were cunning linguists, and master debaters. Guess I was wrong. :-)

Answer 5

So right. But we do it as well. Paris (paree) Munchen (munich) and so on.