The Greek & Latin Roots of English (3 page)

Barry Blitt
New Yorker
cover (© Barry Blitt)

And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech … and they said, “Come let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be witholden from them, which they purpose to do. Come let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth
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GENESIS 11:1–9 (King James Version)

LANGUAGE FAMILIES

Language is a human activity, and like all human activities, it seems to have infinite variability. It is estimated that there are between 2,900 and nearly 10,000 living languages in the world.
¹
Nevertheless, despite that variability, it is possible to distinguish the patterns and relationships of these languages to one another. As a result, they have been classified into families, the members of which are considered by linguists to be related because of similarities in structure, grammar, phonology, and vocabulary.

Yet, like every other kind of human activity, language is subject to change; and many languages have disappeared or evolved into other languages over the centuries. For example, Latin is no longer spoken, but it survives through its direct descendants, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Other ancient languages survive only in written form, and still others have disappeared without a trace because they were not written down, and their speakers were absorbed into other populations.

What Were They Saying?

What was the first language? Philosophers and linguists, kings and theologians have debated this question for several thousand years. Early Christian scholars maintained that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was Hebrew, while an eighteenth-century Swedish clergyman jokingly suggested that in the Garden, God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent who tempted Eve spoke French.

The major families, or trees, of human languages have many branches.

Sino-Tibetan

Most languages spoken in China belong to the Sinitic branch of this family. There are more than a billion speakers of the eight varieties of Chinese that are regarded by some linguists as separate languages, united only by a common writing system.

More than 300 languages in the Tibeto-Burman branch are spoken in parts of Burma,Tibet,Thailand,Vietnam, and Laos.

Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic)

The Afro-Asiatic family includes over 250 languages that are spoken in North Africa and southwest Asia. The Semitic languages, which include Arabic and Hebrew, as well as many of the languages of the ancient Near East, constitute the largest branch of this family.

Among other languages belonging to this family are nearly 175 that are spoken in North Africa, including Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia) and Hausa, the primary language of more than 25 million people in West Africa.

Austro-Asiatic

There are three branches and over 100 languages that belong to the Austro-Asiatic family spread across southeast Asia. The largest of these branches is Mon-Khmer, which includes the languages of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Burma and Malaysia.

Dravidian

The Dravidian family is composed of more than seventy languages spoken primarily in southern and eastern India, although speakers are found as far away as southern and eastern regions of Africa. Although the vast majority of the population of India speaks languages that belong to the Indo-European family, the Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 230 million people. Tamil is the most diffuse, with 50 million speakers in India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as other areas of the Indian and South Pacific Oceans.

Niger-Congo

It is estimated that there are between 1,000 and 3,000 languages spoken in Africa by over 400 million people
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, but fewer than 5 percent have more than a million speakers. The largest African language family is the Niger-Congo group, which encompasses about a thousand languages, and several thousand dialects. Within this family are the approximately 700 languages belonging to the Benue-Congo branch, which includes more than 500 Bantu languages, among them Swahili, Rwanda, Khongo, Xhosa, and Zulu. Since there is such an extraordinary diversity of African languages, Swahili or Arabic is often used as a
lingua franca
.
³

Uralic

The two branches of the Uralic family are the Finno-Ugric languages, spoken in central and northern Europe (including Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Lapp), and the much smaller group of Samoyedic languages that are spoken by perhaps 30,000 people scattered across Siberia and the Arctic.

Altaic

The geographical distribution of the Altaic languages ranges from the Balkan Peninsula to Central Asia, and includes over forty languages that are divided into three groups: Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu.

The largest group, Turkic, includes Turkish, Uighur (whose speakers are found mainly in China), and the languages of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Although Korean and Japanese share some similarities with other members of this family, the connections have not been determined precisely.

Caucasian

The region of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and Black Seas, contains the highest concentration of languages in the world; although smaller in area than Great Britain, more than twenty different languages are spoken there, but only Georgian has more than a million speakers.

Because this region formed part of the former Soviet Union, the vocabulary of these languages has been heavily influenced by Russian.

North and South American Languages

At the time of the arrival of Europeans, there were perhaps 300 languages spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of North America. More than half of these have disappeared, with fewer than 300,000 speakers of these languages still remaining.

In South and Central America, there are approximately 11 million speakers of Amerindian languages. Among these is Quechua (the official language of the Incas and spoken by more than 6 million people). There once may have been as many as 2,000 languages spoken in South America.

Who Are You?

There are also some languages that are called “orphans” or “isolates,” single languages that seem to bear no relationship with any other, such as Ainu, a now nearly extinct language spoken in areas of Japan but unrelated to Japanese, or Basque, the language of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees region of Spain and France.

THE BRANCHES OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN TREE

The largest and most widely diffused of these language families is Indo-European, with over 2 billion speakers around the world. Of course the origins of all language families are difficult to pin down with any certainty, but historical and comparative linguists have constructed a model that would explain most fully the development of the Indo-European tree and the growth of its various branches. They posit a common ancestor of these languages that they label as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a language thought to be spoken by a people living in what is now southwestern Russia and Kazakhstan about 6,000 years ago. As this population spread out in all directions, PIE evolved into dialects and then into mutually incomprehensible languages, but their common source could be established through similarities in grammatical structure and vocabulary. Here's an example:

Linguists have classified the surviving branches of the Indo-European family as follows:

Survivors, or Against All Odds

Some branches of the Indo-European tree have withered and disappeared; others, such as Armenian and Albanian, survive as a single offshoot.

Yes, languages die too, like individuals. They may decompose into fine dust or a heap of bones from which it is difficult to reconstruct the image of the living organism that was once there. They may be embalmed and preserved for posterity, changeless and static, lifelike in appearance but unendowed with the breath of life. While they live, however, they change
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—MARIO PEI,
The Story of Language

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH

Although English is classified as belonging to the Germanic branch of the Indo- European tree because of its structure, grammar, and basic vocabulary, it has been strongly influenced, through the accidents of history and politics, by other Indo- European languages, most notably Latin and its offshoots, the Romance languages, and, to a lesser extent, Greek.

Latin and the Power of Rome

At the height of its power in the second century CE, the Roman Empire extended from the Euphrates River in the East to Britain in the West. Everywhere in Europe and North Africa that the Romans went, they brought with them not only soldiers and government officials, but also their language; and therefore, in order to do business with the ruling powers, one had to learn at least a little Latin. Over several centuries, the Latin spoken in the provinces often became mixed with the local languages, out of which evolved the foundations of at least some of the languages spoken in Europe today.