希腊语对英语的影响.docVIP

希腊语对英语的影响共0条评论...Greek is one of the eight main branches into which the Indo-European languages are divided. The area in which it is spoken has been curiously constant throughout its recorded history. These limits are, roughly speaking, the shores of the Aegean爱琴海, on both the European and the Asiatic side, and the intermediate islands (one of the most archaic of Greek dialects being found on the eastern side in the island of Cyprus), and the Greek peninsula generally from its southern promontories as far as the mountains which shut in Thessaly on the north. Beyond Mt. Olympus 奥林匹斯山and the Cambunian mountains lay Macedonia,马其顿 in which a closely kindred dialect was spoken, so closely related, indeed, that O. Hoffmann has argued (Die Makedonen, G?ttingen, 1906) that Macedonian is not only Greek, but a part of the great Aeolic dialect which included Thessalian塞萨利 to the south and Lesbian to the east. In the north-west, Greek included many rude dialects little known even to the ancient Greeks themselves, and it extended northwards beyond Aetolia埃托利亚（古希腊地名） and Ambracia to southern Epirus and Thesprotia. In the Homeric age荷马时代 the great shrine of Pelasgian Zeus was at Dodona, but, by the time of Thucydides, Aetolia and all north of it had come to be looked upon as the most backward of Greek lands, where men lived a savage life, speaking an almost unintelligible language, and eating raw flesh (?γνωστ?τατοι δ? γλ?σσαν κα? ?μοφ?γοι, Thuc. iii. 94, of the Aetolian Eurytanes). The Greeks themselves had no memory of how they came to occupy this land. Their earliest legends connected the origin of their race with Thessaly塞萨利（希腊地名） and Mt. Pindus, 品都斯山脉(希腊中部山脉)but Athenians and Arcadians also boasted themselves of autochthonous race, inhabiting a country wherein no man had preceded their ancestors. The Greek language, at any rate as it has come down to us, is remarkably perfect, in vowel sounds being the most primitive of any of the Indo-European languages, while its verb syste