Linguistic Terms of Greek Origin in English and Bulgarian.

Abstract

The Greek language has been the source of linguistic terms for centuries up to the present. Greek word-forming patterns, words and word elements were adopted and adapted into Latin (Neo-Latin) 1,500 years ago, and passed through Latin into many European and other languages, being used in the main for scholarly and technical purposes. The analytical study of language began in the second half of the first millennium BC in both Greece and India. The present day study of grammar descends from the Greek tradition and thus many Greek technical terms were converted into English (via Latin) and into Bulgarian (under more direct Greek influence — for historical and geographical reasons). The corpus of linguistic terms dealt with in this paper contains 696 English words and 248 Bulgarian words. They have been classified according to three criteria: the time they entered the language, the extent of their adaptation and the branches of linguistics they belong to.