Whiskers wrote:

No, the Greeks gave the Greeks some of those things (probably 'borrowed'
from Egypt and Babylon and Persia and the Celtic peoples). The rest of us
did fine on our own, thank you. (Europe was largely ignorant of Greek stuff
from the fall of Rome until the 'Renaissance' of the 14th century, when we
got interested in what the Arabs and Moors had to offer).

The language of this newsgroup owes nothing to Greek or Greece apart from
the odd word here and there; it's a Nordic/Celtic blend [1]. The characters
used to write it derive from the Phoenicians (Semitic people who lived in
the area currently known as Palestine), as do the characters of the Greek
alphabet.

[1] I'm using 'Nordic' here to include 'Germanic'.

And what are your references to support your position? You show me
yours, I'll show you mine.

x-no-archive: yes

Whiskers wrote:

On 2004-11-14, Noon Cat Nick <chatdemidiSPAMBEGONE@catlover.com> wrote:

The language of this newsgroup owes nothing to Greek or Greece apart from
the odd word here and there; it's a Nordic/Celtic blend [1]. The characters
used to write it derive from the Phoenicians (Semitic people who lived in
the area currently known as Palestine), as do the characters of the Greek
alphabet.

[1] I'm using 'Nordic' here to include 'Germanic'.

Indeed, the Celtic infuence is definitely there, but don't underestimate
the French/Latin impact on English. About 70% of the *modern* English
vocabulary is derived from Latin/French (and of course the terms for
technology are coined from the Grecolatin lexicon). As an example, in
the sentence you wrote up there: "language", "newsgroup", "apart",
"character", "use", "derive", "people", "area", "current/currently",
"alphabet", those are all Latin or Greek ("alphabet") words.

This is probably why "Beowulf" looks so foreign to someone who hasn't
studied Old English (apart from the grammar differences, of course).
Of course once you start learning a bit of it it's totally obvious that
the text is indeed English - even if not quite the same English we speak
today. I once found an /excellent/ free, online introductory course to
Anglo-Saxon, using fragments from Beowulf, but unfortunately I can't
seem to find it anymore :.( These websites are not so good but I found
them interesting as well:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl401/ - online Old English course.

http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/index.html - Anglo-Saxon language
and culture.