by Mary Norris
The champion won on the word koinonia. This I had a bead on, because I knew that Koine was the word for biblical Greek. Koine means the common tongue, like lingua franca. So koinonia is the shared spirit in a community of believers. The bee pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, a former champion himself, offered alternative pronunciations of koinonia, one with the “oi” of classical Greek and the other with the “ee” of the modern language. Bailly won the bee in 1980, on the word elucubrate, from the Latin for “compose by lamplight,” or study late into the night, burn the midnight oil. He is now a classics professor at the University of Vermont.
One boy progressed to the next round on Mnemosyne (Ne-moz-e-nee)—Memory, mother of the Muses, who gave us the mnemonic device. Mnemosyne ought to be the presiding deity of spelling bees. These kids had clearly burned some midnight oil as they trained in combining forms. There were a lot of polysyllabic German-derived words (Bewusstseinslage) in the bee, too, as well as impressionistic French words (cendre) that English has adopted. These borrowings bear the earmarks of their mother tongues: the German tendency to agglomerate, the French to nasalize. Like Bailly, the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee may build a career out of words.
The study of any language—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Taino—opens the mind, gives you a window onto another culture, and reminds you that there is a larger world out there and different ways of saying things, hearing things, seeing things. It always distresses me to hear someone say, “I’m no good at foreign languages,” or demand “English for me, dear.” In learning a foreign language, you have to humble yourself, admit your ignorance, be willing to look stupid. We learn a language by making mistakes. Or anyway I do.
Spelling Greek-derived words in English is difficult enough, but spelling Greek words in Greek is like necromancy. And even though it is a phonetic language, pronunciation is problematic, because of the way stress hops around in Greek. In English, if you put the accent on the wrong syllable, people will usually understand you (though they may laugh at you, to your face or behind your back), but many Greek words are practically unrecognizable to Greeks if the stress is wrong, or they have a completely different meaning from the one you intended. I sometimes wonder what my beloved teacher Dorothy Gregory thought when she saw me off to Greece that first time. She didn’t think it was a good idea to go at Easter, and it did make me feel alienated. Easter (Pascha) is a big family holiday, and I was a total stranger, a xéni. Dorothy would have cringed if she had heard me trying to keep up my end of the Easter greeting: “Christ is risen,” a person says, and you are supposed to respond, “Truly He is risen,” but I got the ending on my adverb wrong and said, “Really? He is?”
Of course, no one in Greece expects an Irish-looking American to speak even a little bit of Greek. Most of them speak English so much better than I speak Greek that it’s hard to find someone to practice on. At a farmers’ market on Rhodes, I was excited to see artichokes for sale. “Aγκινάρες!” I said to the wizened old man at the vegetable stand (agkináres). In response, he said—in English—“Just tell me what you want.” But as I was leaving with a couple of his long-stemmed beauties, I heard him say, in Greek, “How are they called in English?” I stopped, turned around, and said, “Arty choke.” He repeated it: “Άρτι τσοκ.” If I couldn’t get them to teach me Greek, I would help them with their English.
In Piraeus once, investigating the marinas on the opposite side of the peninsula from the huge docks where the ferries come and go, I was invited by a restaurant owner to sit at a prime table, across the street from the restaurant’s kitchen, overlooking the picturesque horseshoe-shaped harbor with yachts from all over the world. He started off in English, and I was feeling beaten down that day, so I ordered in English. After my meal, I crossed the street to use the WC, which was in the basement, and coming up the stairs I noticed a landing along the staircase that had been turned into a terrarium for tortoises. The Greek for tortoise is one of the words that has stuck with me, because I once heard a little boy, spotting a tortoise in the grass in Panorama, a suburb of Thessaloniki, shout “Χελώνα!” It was as if until that moment I did not really believe that Greeks called a tortoise a chelóna. Delighted by the tortoises, I counted them in Greek: mía, dúo, treis, téssereis, pénte, éxi, eftá, októ—októ chelónes! On my way out, I passed my waiter and said, in English, “You have eight tortoises!” “No!” he said, horrified. “We do not eat the tortoises!”
You’re probably wondering if I ever get anything right.
In my first class I learned the Greek words for food and for numbers and for the seasons. The words for the seasons are especially beautiful in Greek. Spring is ánoixi, from the verb ανοίγω, open, uncork—the year opens. Summer is kalokaíri: literally, “good weather.” Phthinóporo is the fall, suggestive of the last harvest and overripe fruit (the consonant cluster at the beginning, phth, at first seems rude to an English speaker, as if you were spitting out a cherry pit). Winter, kheimónas, is a time of scraping by.
From then on in, it’s nouns and verbs, verbs and nouns. Nouns come first: naming things. Then verbs: going places and doing things. Soon enough you have to separate your verbs into tenses, and that’s when it gets complicated and I move along to another language. In Spanish, I never got out of the present tense, forming the past by hooking my right thumb over my shoulder and the future by waving my left hand in front of me to indicate forward motion. I played the simpleton in Mexico, but I managed to eat and drink and buy Band-Aids.
My New Yorker boss Ed Stringham taught me the Greek for “yes” and “no,” and we commiserated over the confusion that reigns between them. The German ja and nein have a clear resemblance to “yes” and “no.” The French oui and the Italian sì and Spanish sí come easily enough, and all the Romance languages—even Portuguese—rely on the basic sound of “no”: no, non, não. But the Greek for “yes” is nai (ναι), which sounds like “no” or “nah,” a negative, while the word for “no” is όχι, which sounds like “OK,” meaning “yes.” Why must life be so cruel? Sometimes when I’m traveling I can’t seem to get out the right word for “yes” in the country I’m in and I cycle through the whole litany: Ja, oui, sì, nai, yes. Όχι is fun to say, once you get used to it. A child sometimes draws out the first syllable—óooχι, on a falling note—in protest. Greek Americans sometimes call October 28th, the day Greece entered the Second World War, Όχι Day, for the refusal by Metaxas, the prime minister, to let Mussolini’s troops enter the country from Albania. Later, the Nazis would not take όχι for an answer.
Greeks often say “yes” twice—“nai nai”—like “yeah yeah,” conveying an attitude, sometimes reassuring, sometimes impatient. The gesture that accompanies nai, equivalent to our nodding, is a single gracious tilt of the head, down and to the side. Όχι is accompanied by a sharp upward stab of the chin, which sometimes seems unnecessarily abrupt. At the newsstand, a taciturn newsagent will sometimes give you the chin flick to indicate that he is out of whatever you wanted. Sometimes he will add, “Feenees,” meaning “Finished” or “All gone.”
The Greeks also have their own way of saying “OK”: entáxei (εντάξει), which means, literally, “in order” and brings us back to the classroom. Τάξη (the nominative in modern Greek) means “class,” as in classroom, where one expects order and discipline. The tricky thing here is to remember that although the stress is on the alpha in εντάξει, when you want a taxi you have to put the stress on the last syllable: ταξί. Otherwise, you are standing on a street corner like an idiot calling out “Class, class!” or “Order, order!” How is anyone supposed to know you want a cab?
Because I could not go back to infancy and learn Greek from the cradle, I made the best of it: I used English to help me learn Greek. There is a lot of Greek in English. Like those first words I learned in order to be polite, parakaló and efkharistó, other words stuck with me because of their echoes in English.
When I arrived at the Hotel Achilleus in Athens, and the receptionist pointed me toward the elevator—one of those tiny European hoisting cages that make you think too much about weights and pulleys—I tried out my Greek, asking “Λειτουργεί;” (Leitourgeí?) “Does it work?” (The question mark in Greek looks like a semicolon.) This word had stuck because of its connection with “liturgy”: the rituals and prayers that are the work of the Church. The receptionist, who moved easily from Greek to German, English, and French, said nai—of course the elevator worked. I found it a little rickety and had the urge to pray when I was in it.
Dorothy Gregory gave me a lot of vocabulary—I have a box of Greek, some of it in her handwriting—but the words that stuck are the ones she used conversationally, in direct address, bringing the word out of the dictionary and into the moment, like the time she said, “Διψάς;” (Dipsás?), and I understood that she was asking, “Are you thirsty?” I knew that a dipsomaniac was someone with an insatiable thirst, but to hear Dorothy use the verb διψάω in the second-person singular present tense and to match it with my parched throat was a revelation. Ναι, διψάω. What are we going to do about it? Is there a water fountain out in the hallway? I wonder if this is why I feel moved whenever I see a Greek man watering a plant or setting out a bowl of water for a dog. To give someone water is to care.
ALL THESE WORDS are modern Greek, which is very much alive. When the English-speaking world needs to name something, it turns to the ancient language. Many words from the natural world come from Greek: ocean, dolphin, hippopotamus, peony, elephant, pygmy. Some of the words that come from ancient Greek (and survive in modern Greek) are for exotic creatures. Octopus is from the Greek: οκτώ (eight) + πους (foot) = eight-legger. (Having learned of its intelligence, I no longer order grilled octopus in restaurants.) Like the octopus, the medusa, or jellyfish, is one of the original sea monsters. So is the hippocampus, or seahorse. The elephant may go back to our old friend the Phoenician aleph, ox.
Some words that look as if they came directly from the Greek turn out, on further study, to have followed a more circuitous route. For instance, the eucalyptus—ευ (good, well) + καλυπτος (covered) = well-covered, as in a hooded blossom—is native to Australia; the word’s first recorded use was in 1788 AD. Of course, it’s also ευκάλυπτος in modern Greek, from English, through ancient Greek. In the Peloponnese once, when somebody identified a fragrant tree that looked to me like wild white wisteria as aκaκίa, acacia, I wondered briefly if the Greek aκaκίa was a transliteration of the English. Which came first, the word or the tree? The thorny acacia is native to Africa and the Middle East, not a transplant from the New World, so aκaκίa came before acacia, but the tree itself no doubt preceded the word.
The names for natural phenomena, like flowers and insects, are often local. For instance, when I was a child, our word for the gnats or midges that swarmed all over Cleveland on muggy summer nights was Canadian soldiers. I picked this up with no idea that it might be interpreted as a slur against our neighbors on the opposite shore of Lake Erie—I just thought it was the bugs’ name. My grandmother used to decorate the narrow strip of land between the house and the driveway with a nasty, shrubby little plant called live-forever. I didn’t like it as a child and I don’t like it now, though I allowed a friend to plant some in my garden under the name sedum. It is a dull plant, though I must admit that its common name is highly descriptive: it does seem to live forever.
Some Greek flower names are actually pre-Greek: they derive ultimately from people and languages that predated ancient Greek. For instance, narcissus (nárkissos) was the original Greek word for the flower, native to southern Europe, we commonly call the daffodil. The myth of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection, is the timeless personification of the flower, accounting for its existence. The word narcissus is related to the Greek nárke, or torpor, numbness, a narcotic quality. Daffodil seems to be a corruption of the Greek asphodel, the flower of Hades and the dead. Jonquil is a Frenchier name for a species of the same flower. The hyacinth is another flower with a myth attached: Hyacinthus was a Greek youth beloved of Apollo who was accidentally killed by the god, who then turned him into a flower.
Greek actually has two words for flower, the ancient ánthos and the frivolous modern louloúdi. For The Greek Anthology, a collection of the best work of the Greek lyric poets, poems were selected as if they were flowers: a word bouquet.
George Orwell lamented the tendency to overlay Greek names on common English flowers. He writes that “a snapdragon is now called an antirrhinum, a word no one can spell”—much less pronounce—“without consulting a dictionary,” and that “forget-me-nots are coming more and more to be called myosotis.” Orwell adds, “I don’t think it a good augury for the future of the English language that ‘marigold’ should be dropped in favour of ‘calendula.’ ” I agree that something is lost when pinks are called “dianthus” and foxglove gives way to “digitalis.” The point is that flowers bloomed before people had books to look up their names in, and in the places where the flowers bloom, people tend to have their own names for them.
It is mainly words for things that were imported to Greece in modern times that have been transliterated into Greek from other languages. For instance, the Greeks did not have beer worth mentioning until the great powers of Europe installed Otto von Wittelsbach, of Bavaria, as their king, in 1832, and he brought along a brewer. The Greeks drafted their word for beer, μπίρα, from the Italian birra.
Many medical words are from the Greek, possibly because much of what we think of as medicine began in Greece. Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, named for Hippocrates, but the notion that it begins with “First, do no harm” is a myth. Hippocrates is generally regarded as the first to treat illness as a natural phenomenon rather than a punishment from the gods. The symbol of the caduceus on the back of an ambulance—a staff with two snakes wound around it—is derived from Greek mythology: it resembles the Rod of Asclepius, the healer and son of Apollo, which has a single snake climbing up it. Greeks gave entirely too much credit to snakes, in my opinion. But I suppose they’re better than leeches.
For a long time, I went around thinking that words like otorhinolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor, diminished in English to ENT), ophthalmologist, and orthodontist were of Greek origin, and they are, but not in the sense that ancient Greeks consulted such specialists or wore metal braces on their teeth. Demosthenes the orator did not consult a speech therapist; legend has it that he filled his mouth with pebbles and addressed the sea, so that when he removed the pebbles and spoke to an audience his voice was clear and powerful. Those English words were put together from Greek parts—little linguistic Frankenstein’s monsters—as the specialties came into being.
An educated medical professional in Victorian times probably studied Latin and Greek, though not all doctors were classicists. Still, when it came time to name things, they fell back on Greek, possibly because it was the oldest, most stable, most dignified source. There might have been a mystification factor: fancy words impress people. Old English had its own words for body parts: lungs, blood, kidney, gut, elbow, knee. We don’t need the Greek words, but the language is the richer for them: we have two ways of saying the same thing. Perhaps the Greek words create a comforting distance between us and our bodies. Would you rather have tennis elbow or epicondylitis? Water on the brain or hydrocephalus? A doctor might call someone a hemophiliac where a mother would bemoan a bleeder. The Greek terms ennoble the ailment, even if they don’t make it go away. Liver disease is hepatitis. Nephritis afflicts the kidneys. Arthritis—what my mother used to call Arthuritis—refers to the joints and is somehow more abstract than joint disease (though I’d rather not have either).
Greek casts a spell of importance over the body parts and the doctors, a spell that a physician might be tempted to exploit. I had some green spots on my toes one summer—I’d been spending a lot of t
ime barefoot on the beach—and I asked my doctor about them. “That’s just pigment,” he said. All he did, in his diagnosis, was use the fancy word for color. If surgeons knew that the word surgery comes from the ancient Greek cheirourgía—χειρ (hand) + έργον (work)—meaning “handiwork” and could apply as well to needlepoint as to brain surgery, they might not be so arrogant.
We are all still humans, in pursuit of the same dreams that inspired our remotest ancestors. Igor Sikorsky, the father of the modern helicopter, built on the work of Daedalus, the original inventor, who made wings out of feathers and wax, which he and his son, Icarus, used to escape Crete. Everyone knows what happened: Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he dropped into what is now called the Icarian Sea. The word helicopter combines helix (spiral) and pteryx (wing, as in pterodactyl, the prehistoric bird with leathery-looking finger wings). In plain English, we call it a chopper.
Or take the telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell. It makes use of the Greek stems for distance (τηλε) and voice (φωνη): voice from afar. The Irish word for telephone is guthán (goohawn), loosely translated as “voice box,” made by adding a suffix to the Irish word for voice. In English, we sometimes refer to the telephone as the horn (“Get him on the horn!”), but the inventor wanted a new word for his revolutionary invention, and “telephone” stuck. Why do we lean on dead languages for new things? Perhaps expressing these things in the language that is oldest, in words that we have in common with many other languages, gives us a touchstone.
