Greek in Contact With English From a Teaching Perspective

Abstract

In a class situation, with students of English language background, the teacher of Greek could emphasize a number of aspects characterizing the typology of the Greek language, which can, possibly, assist with the language acquisition and learning process. The extensive language tradition of the Greek language can be a strong motive and incentive for students, since Greek is the oldest European language, confirmed in written form at least since 750 BC. Another aspect of Greek is its flexibility in the construction of sentences, as well as in word inflexion. Unquestionably, through the centuries an enormous number of Greek words, as well as prefixes and suffixes etc., have been transferred to English, especially in the terminology of sciences, medicine, arts, social sciences and so on. Equally so, a large number of English lexemes and phrases can be found in Greek, both morpho-phonemically and semantically, together with other language contact phenomena, i.e. prosody, intonation, discourse markers, pragmatic and other bicultural phenomena, a result of the long migration and settlement bilingual experience of Hellenism in the Diasporas and in particular to English speaking countries. Aspects of Greek as a second or as a foreign language, which can be emphasized in a class with English language students relate primarily to word production, e.g. diminutive words, the agent suffixes, the patronymic suffixes, the great number of the compound words and possibly of forming new compound words.