Greek and English are also intertwined

Another week has gone by and here I am writing another post about the quirks of English. Today I will be delving into the languages having an influence on English. So far, I've written post on the influence of French upon English; the influence of Italian upon English; and the influence of English upon Italian. Today, I'll try to cast some light on the traces of Greek in the English language.

How can we identify Greek words in English?
In a practical sense, some Greek words can be identified by the letter <ph> for the sound [f]. This is thanks to the Greek letter, phi (φ). How many <f> are there in the word 'philosophy'? The answer is zero, that indicates the word comes from Greek.

1. Greek words with letters <ph>

• Dolphin: From Greek, Δέλφος, meaning dolphin and womb
• Elephant: From Greek ἐλέφας,
• Alphabet: This word indicates the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. 
• Pharmacy: From Greek φαρμακεία, meaning medicine. 
• Physics: From Greek φύση, meaning nature.
• Emphasis: From Greek ἔμφασις.
• Phase: From Greek φάσις.
• Phantom: From Greek φάντασμα .
• Orphan: From Greek ὀρφανός.
• Phobia: From Greek φόβος.
• Philosophy: From Greek φίλος (love) and σοφία (wisdom)

There are thousands of examples following this pattern, but what you need to bear in mind every time you see the letters <ph> representing the sound [f] is that that word is likely to be a Greek borrowing!

2. Words spelt <ch> and pronounced [k]

Normally the English words spelt <ch> are pronounced [ʧ], as we do in Spanish. However, there are some words pronounced with [k] that are borrowing from Greek. This is due to letter chi χ. Here you have some examples:

English word	Greek origin	English pronunciation
Ache	Αχος (grief)	[eɪk]
School	Σχολή (leisure)	[sku:l]
Chemistry	Χημία (blackness)	[‘kemɪstri]
Stomach	Στόμαχος (stomach)	[‘st˄mɪk]
Chaos	Χάος (gap, chaos)	[‘keɪɒzs]
Orchid	ὄρχις (testicle)	[‘ɔ:kɪd]
Character	Χαρακτήρ (nature)	[‘kærəktə]
Archive	ἀρχεῖον (public records)	[‘a:kaɪv]

3. Famous Greek suffixes (or words that are considered suffixes in English):

There are plenty of words in Greek that have become fossilized in English to such an extent that they are considered prefixes or suffixes:

• -phone: From Greek φωνή. It means sound. From that word, we have the terms 'telephone', 'microphone', 'allophone' or 'Anglophone' among others.
• -phobia: From Greek φόβος, meaning 'fear'. From this word, English has created hundreds of terms, e.g. 'homophobia' or 'hydrophobia'. 
• -logy: From Greek  -λογία, meaning 'science' or 'study'. Thanks to this suffix, English has coined terms like 'terminology' or 'methodology' (the science of method).
• - ics: From Greek ῐκός, meaning 'related to'. In a practical sense it depicts sciences or fields of knowledge. Thus, we have words such as 'politics', 'mathematics' and 'aerobics'.

4. Famous Greek prefixes

• Amphi-: From Greek ἀμφί, meaning 'both', as can be seen in the word 'amphibian' (lives in both sides, ground and water).
• Hydro-: From Greek ὑδρο, meaning 'water', as in 'hydrophobia' (fear to water) or 'hydrated' (having water). 
• Micro- / macro- : From Greek μικρός (small) and μακρός (big), for example, 'microscope' or 'macroeconomy'.
• Hypo-/ hyper-: From Greek ὑπο (under) and ὑπέρ (over). Thus, if you have hypotension, your tension is lower than normal. However, if you happen to have hypertension, then, your tension is over the normal limits. 
• Uni- / di- / tri- / tetra- / penta-/ deca- / poly-: These prefixes refer to numbers. Uni- refers to number one, as in 'unicorn' (one horn); di- refers to number two as in 'diarchy' (two governments); tri- makes reference to number three, as in 'triplets', tetra- is related to number four as in 'tetrahedron'; penta- means five as in 'pentagon'; deca- refers to number ten, as can be seen in the word 'decalogue' and 'poly' means a non-specific quantity, meaning 'a lot of', as can be seen in 'polyglot' (a person capable of speaking a lot of languages).

5. Greek plurals

As I wrote in my post about irregular plurals, Greek loanwords are easily identified by their endings. There are four endings that can help us identify Greek borrowings:

• Words ending in -on: In Greek, there are neutral words ending in -on whose plural is formed by removing -on and adding -a. Here you have some examples: Criterion (singular) criteria (plural); phenomenon (singular); phenomena (plural)
• Words ending in -is: The plural of these words is created by removing -is and adding -es. The plural form of the word 'hypothesis' is 'hypotheses', and the plural of the word 'basis' is 'bases'
• Words ending in -ex / -ix: To make the plural, the morpheme -es needs to be added. However, with these words some irregularities will appear when forming the plural. Thus, the plural of 'index' is 'indices' and the plural of 'matrix' is 'matrices.'
• Some words ending in -a: There are some minor words in English whose plural is formed by adding -ta. This is the case of 'enigma', whose plural can be 'enigmas' or 'enigmata.' The same happens with 'schema' whose plurals can be 'schemas' or 'schemata'. 

General tips to identify Greek borrowings

To sum up, Greek loanwords can be spotted and identified quite easily:

1) Words with <ph> and [f] sound like 'philosophy' or 'dolphin.'

2) Words with <ch> and [k] sound like 'chaos' or 'chemistry.'

3) Words with Greek prefixes and suffixes like -phobia, -logy, amphi-, hyper-, hypo-....

4) Irregular plurals of words ending in -on / -is / -ex / -ix / which do not follow the normal pattern of plurals. 

Both Greek and English are fascinating language. I hope that thanks to this post, you can now identify Greek borrowing much more easily! If you are more interested in this issue, I recommend you watch this video explaining the vast influence of Greek upon English. 

P.S. To test your knowledge on Greek loanwords, have a look at these self-correctable exercises.