[OT] Whence `Greece'? (was: naming schemes (was Re: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 released))
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> You're only partly right on the first count, and I'd say still wrong on
> the second. :) The word "Greece" existed in various forms in Old English
> and other earlier Germanic languages, so considerably predates your
> Founding Fathers[...].
How's *this* for topic drift? :-)
It existed in Classical Latin, too: Graecia, with the adjectival form
Graecus -a -um.
> Also, while it's true that the modern Greeks call their country
> something like "Hellas" (?), my dictionary tells me that Aristotle
> mentioned "Graikoi" as the prehistoric name for the people of that
> region.
You're pretty much right. The Greeks before Philip of Macedon and his
slightly-more-famous son Alexander weren't really much more than a
collection of `tribes' united by a more-or-less common language and
culture. The Graikoi (transliterated into Latin as Graeci) were one of
these tribes. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I think they were in
the western part of modern Greece and the surrounding area. They were one
of the first tribes the Romans encountered, and the name basically stuck.
By the golden age of Athens (roughly 475-425BC), while these various tribal
identities had not been lost, the inhabitants of the area referred to their
part of the world as Hellas and to themselves as Hellenes. (Classical
Greek is a fun language, but it requires all sorts of accents and breath
marks and other such fiddly bits that are awfully hard to represent in
ASCII, and I don't have Emacs set up for UTF-8 input.)
Richard
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