11. Do You Speak Ancient Greek?

The answer is – yes, you do. And it doesn't matter what your native tongue is – Russian, Spanish, English or Norwegian: whenever you use your telephone, sympathise with somebody, have symptoms of a stomach ache, go to school or to the zoo, get extremely exhausted, listen to a symphonic orchestra, study physics or chemistry, or just build your first pyramid of three bricks – be sure that you speak Greek. However, if you happened to be born Russian, you may live in happy ignorance about this to the end of your life, unless you start learning a foreign language.

Romans, Europeans and "New Russians"

Imagine a "new Russian." What does a person do, when he suddenly becomes rich? First, he buys things. Then he travels to other countries to get more things. Then he realizes it isn't enough, and tries to learn what other people know: he starts going to museums and theatres, to famous places and cities, tries to read and study more and if it's too late for himself, he looks for the best school for his children, making them learn foreign languages and study abroad. The most fashionable language in Russia is English, since it's the most popular one in international communication. But a hundred or two years ago it was French, and in Peter's times – German, and still earlier it was Greek. Keep that in mind, and let's have a look at the rest of Europe.

To be an educated person in Medieval Europe, one had to know Latin. Learned men spoke the language to each other and wrote manuscripts in it, although by that time Latin had long been a dead language. Still, it remained, so to say, the language of international scientific communication. Why? Let's move still further into the past, when Rome was a powerful empire. We know that the Romans conquered lots of lands and peoples, and moved as far as the British Isles, Africa and Asia. But if Egypt and oriental countries had already created their prominent and highly developed cultures, European nations remained on a rather primitive level. They were for the most part illiterate tribes. Therefore, wherever the Romans came, they brought their alphabet, calendar, laws and traditions. Afterwards the Roman Empire vanished, being ruined by some of the same tribes, but culture has its own ways of development that are always progressive, no matter who conquers who. Thus, the former European barbarians started to create national cultures of their own, basing them on what had already been invented by the Romans. They used the Latin alphabet for their native writing, and as to science and philosophy, they introduced only Latin-based terms, just to seem more significant and wise. Knowledge of Latin, due to sources of knowledge in general, became fashionable. That is how lots of Latin (actually, Greek) roots, Latin suffixes and prefixes as well as their inconvenient spelling filled European languages, remaining and working in them ever after. Whatever new terminology humanity invents on the way of its progress, the words of Ancient Greece live on m them: photosynthesis, anthropomorphous, telepathy, hydrodynamics, and so on.

But it isn't the answer to spelling yet, and we have to move further, when the same old story happened to the Romans themselves. In the beginning they were not at all philosophers, but brave soldiers. First, they built their Eternal City, then filled it with beautiful things and buildings and, having become rich and powerful, wished to be educated, as their neighbours. Just as our "new Russians." The educational base for the Romans was, no doubt, Hellas. That's where they took books and philosophy from, as well as teachers for the patricians' kids. Greek became the fashionable language to study. However, there was peculiarity about the fashion, since the Romans had already created their own alphabet and, therefore, had to rewrite Greek scientific terms and other words in Latin. That is when our problems began! The scrupulous descendants of Romulus and Remus did their best to copy strange Greek soundings. If only they could imagine, what they were doing! They started to spell the sounds, that seemed aspirated to them with their native letters plus "h": ph, th, ch, rh, but they couldn't, of course, make everyone pronounce them this way, so they finished by speaking as it was convenient: [f], [t], [k], [r]. Then, finding no more correspondences, they went as far as to invent three more letters especially to reproduce specific Greek ones: x, y, z, and put them at the end of the Latin alphabet after the last letter W. Just compare, by the way, the former Latin alphabet from A to W and Greek from A (alpha) to Д (omega). For instance, the letter "y" meant a sound like "ii" in German or "eu" in French, but as the Romans had no such a sound, they very soon started to read it as "i" and even called it "i-grec," that is "i Greek." Anyhow, we have to "thank" the Romans, whenever we have troubles in spelling words like "hypothesis," "anxiety," "sympathy," "horizon," etc. But what's the use of knowing it? Maybe, for a European student it's nothing, but for a Russian learner, it's half a clue. The other half has to be found in the history of the Russian language.