bill cobbett wrote:(
very funny)
Shame that a celebration of The World's Greatest and Most Popular Language has been dragged down to the moral equivalent of the gutter of some Atheneucian Slave Market by the narrow and shallow-minded Olympians or the nationalist dog-buggerers of Piraeus, who jump in to bed with them in some UnHoly and UnGodly Enosis, and who would spread their dogmatic nationalist myths that civilisation, language, culture and the rest have their origins in the Brothels of Boeotia.
... and similar accusations could be laid against those who support similar notions of nationalist superiority when they praise and over-state the Rooman contributions.
All modern Europeans languages can trace their roots, inc the roots of vocab, through various lineages back to very early Indo-European languages that predate the Greek, Romans, Phoenicinians, Egyptians etc.
Greek and Latin and the Language and the matter of the tens of thousands of words that have come in to the Language in the past some 200 years, words which the Greeks and Romans will claim to be theirs ....
Here's a word we're all familiar with.....
Television ..... and doesn't really matter whether some claim that it has its roots in either or both Gr and Latin, the roots of its parts don't really matter other than to the unmanageable hair-splitting, bereft of original thought, time-wasters. The only important point is that the word, like the physical invention itself, is an invention of relatively modern English Speakers.
.... but still wouldn't be surprised if some here would have us believe that on his way back from a hard day's Feelosofising in the Agora, Socrates would plump himself down on the sofa to watch the latest episode of Hawaii-Five-O or Ramsay Street! ... or that Julius Caesar would do something similar.
The thing or any concept like it didn't exist 2,500 years ago and the word didn't exist, the word's an invention of modern English.
Here's a couple of other examples, chosen at random, from the Sciences (and of course the same underlying principle can be used for tens of thousands of other words)....
Microbiologist ..... again doesn't matter what its alleged roots are, the whole word, as a whole, is an invention of modern scientists, modern English Speakers.
Here's another, this one's from early humanoid history...
Australopithecus, it means "Southern Ape", think it's another "bastard word" so will leave the Romans and Greeks to argue over it but they'll have a hard job convincing me that some Atheneucian or Rooman took time off from whipping his slaves to go out on to the African savanna and dig one up to further our understanding.
So these tens of thousands of technical, scientific words, having nothing to do with Greek or Roman contributions to human knowledge really must be discounted from the reckoning.
(alphabet?)
