Greek – The Language of Philosophy and Science

Languages such as Sumerian, Aramaic, and Egyptian allowed civilizations to grow into kingdoms and even empires. Greek did that and more: It helped formalize thinking itself, becoming the foundation for how ideas are built, tested, and recorded for posterity. In fields across almost all sciences, physical and otherwise, Greek can still be seen in the names of concepts and ideas – indeed, even in the names of the very sciences themselves.

Origins in the Dark

The language that eventually became Greek emerged around the third millennium BC. These Proto-Greek speakers migrated from the Balkan peninsula to the region known as Greece today. As a language, it evolved from the Proto-Indo-European language family and eventually became its own branch of the larger family of languages. It’s hard to pinpoint any one established language that led to the creation of Greek, but certainly it has influenced many of the languages of the West that followed.

By about 1450 BC, the Mycenaean people spoke what we call Ancient Greek and wrote in a script that we call Linear B, which had 87 different phonetic signs. The fall of this civilization triggered the Greek Dark Ages. From about 1200 to 800 BC, the region suffered depopulation, a lack and loss of written records, and the disapperance of advanced technology. But then came the Archaic Period (around 800–510 BC), when cities began to develop again, trade expanded, and Greece adopted the Phoenician alphabet and reintroduced writing. In this period, the first philosophers, such as Thales and Pythagoras, began investigating nature and the cosmos.

Greek, the Language of Logic

The Classical Period was about 510 BC to 320 BC. It was a golden age of expansion – both in ideals and the empire. Figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle reshaped the way Western thinkers thought. This age lasted until the death of Alexander the Great and saw the spread of Greek authority, culture, and language across the known world, including into Egypt – hence the Coptic evolution of the Egyptian language.

These great thinkers shifted from focusing on myth to rational inquiry. The Greek language – including the first vowels – increased the ability to have complex ideas by expanding the capacity to name complex ideas. By attaching multiple roots together, scholars could isolate specific schools of thought or individual phenomena. Bios (life) and opsis (view), for example, became biopsy. Bio and logia or logos (study, science, discourse, and more) became biology, and for the first time in history a separate category of thought for studying the science of life emerge.

The precise nature of the language also allowed people to express more complex mathematical ideas – even allowing for the first standardized mathematical proofs. Without this, there could be no geometry, trigonometry, algebra, or calculus. Greek thinkers could now critically debate the characteristics of the universe rather than simply accept the myth handed down from one generation to the next. This combination of expanded thought and expanded language – which were both cause and effect of the other – led to some of the most influential advancements in human history and still color the language of logic, science, and law today. You can’t discuss philosophy (philos plus sophia, or friend plus wisdom) without those Greek words and concepts meaning, loosely, “the love of wisdom.”

The Modern Connection

All ancient languages either died off or evolved over time, and Greek did the latter. Modern Greek is still spoken in the region, and the influence of that golden age of reasoning still lingers in modern English and many other languages. Greek formed the basis of the Latin alphabet, which then spread through Europe and in some form survives today. It’s why so many European languages have alphabets that seem almost identical to that used by English today.

The next stop on our journey through the history of language will be Latin. As the Greek empire faded away, the Roman empire rose up to replace it. Latin was spread across multiple continents – and, with it, the influence of Greek.

1. Greek was the first language to incorporate vowels into its alphabet.
2. Greek was a precise and agile language that allowed people to combine ideas and express mathematics in ways no language did before.
3. Greek served as the framework for Latin, influenced many of the world’s modern languages, and is still commonly used in philosophy and science.