How was Greek and Latin formed? What did Greek and Latin form together in the process?
Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at
1:53 pm
They say that English came from Greek and Latin because of many of the prefixes, the base words, and the root words, and then they say Spanish came from Latin. Did Spanish just come from Latin? I know hablar means to talk while sol is a Latin word for sun that came into the Spanish language. So this is why I asked how were the 2 languages of Greek and Latin formed.
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Tagged with: languages • latin word • prefixes • root words • sol • spanish language • sun
Filed under: Greek Language
I don’t know who told you that English came from Greek and Latin, but it’s completely wrong.
First of all, it’s better to say that languages evolved rather than that they are formed. The latter implies that languages were somehow consciously invented.
English is a pure Germanic language which has acquired quite a few loanwords (as has any language) from other languages. Most of these loanwords came either from (Old) French or Latin. This has, however not altered the real core of the language, its grammar, which is still pure Germanic.
Latin, as we know it, is a highly standardized and somewhat artifical language that came into being in the 2nd and 1st centure BC. It evolved in Rome and surroundings from Old Latin and the written language became increasingly codified in this time and the difference with the spoken language, Vulgar Latin, became increasingly big. In the end this Vulgar Latin evolved into the different Romance languages like, Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian a.o.
(Old) Latin is an Italic language in other words, Latin evolved from a proto-Italic languagewhich in turn evolved out of Proto-Indo-European.
(Ancient)Greek evolved from proto-Greek which in turn also evolved out of Proto-Indo-European.
The Germanic languages evolved out of proto-Germanic which in turn also evolved out of Proto-Indo-European.
The same thing can be said of the Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian languages a.o.
All these languages evolved out of a common ancestor (probably existing about 4000 BC) Proto-Indo-European.
So English and Spanish are distant cousins.