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​DEFINING PHILOSOPHY ​
IN A SYMPOSIUM OF GREEK

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DEFINING PHILOSOPHY
​IN A SYMPOSIUM OF GREEK

Greek has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language spanning at least 3,400 years of written record. It is therefore the world's oldest recorded living language and the earliest written evidence is clay tablet found in Messenia that dates between 1450 and 1350 BC. Greek derives from Proto-Greek, the first form of Greek spoken during the 3rd millennium BC. It later evolved into Ancient Greek, which was spoken during Antiquity. Modern Greek emerged after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. It is part of a family of languages native to Greece, Cyprus, Albania, other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea and is the official language in two countries, Greece and Cyprus. It is a recognized minority language in seven other countries and is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. The language is spoken by at least 13.4 million people today.

Greek is broken up into periods. Proto-Greek, Mycenaean Greek, Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Medieval Greek (Byzantine Greek) and Modern Greek. The Koine Greek period is especially notable for the birth of Christianity. The apostles used this form of the language when they were preaching in Greece and other Greek speaking parts of the world.

The core representation of the more important expressions and interpretations of life are Greek. Mythology is rich with the stories of life. Homer's epic poems the Iliad and Odyssey, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Plato and Aristotle, and even the New Testament were all written in Greek. It is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science, astronomy, mathematics, logic, and Western philosophy are composed. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the study of the Greek texts and society of antiquity constitutes the discipline of Classics.

Modern Greek, said to have started in the year 1453 AD, inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek which is the language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. Modern Greek includes a number of word borrowings from other languages. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) come from Latin, Venetian, and Turkish. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), are from French and English, are not typically inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from South Slavic (Macedonian/Bulgarian) and Eastern Romance languages (Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian).

Typically, English dictionaries have approximately 80,000 words. Despite Greek’s profound influence on English, only about 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek. Additionally, almost every English word that starts with ph (e.g., philosophy, photograph, phobia, phenomenon) comes from Greek. In addition, suffixes such ‘-ism’ ‘-ize’ and ‘-ist’ all derive from Greek.

The Greek alphabet is considered to be the earliest European alphabet (since about 9th century BC). Ancient forms used three writing systems in the course of history – Linear B (a set of 87 syllabic signs and more than 100 ideographs that signify objects with no phonetic meaning), Cypriot syllabary which is closely related to Linear B, but abandoned during the Classical era, and today's Greek alphabet which has 24 letters.
The Greek alphabet was the first to use vowels when languages before that consisted only of consonants. For example, the Phoenician alphabet, which the Greek alphabet is based on, uses only consonants. Even today, scripts like Arabic and Hebrew omit vowels entirely. Greek roots are often used to coin new words for other languages including English. The largest Greek contribution to English vocabulary is the huge number of scientific, medical, and technical neologisms that have been coined by compounding Greek roots and affixes to produce novel words which never existed in the Greek language.

SOME KEY GREEK FACTS

The first extensive works of literature in Attic Greek are the plays of the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes dating from the 5th century BC. The works of the philosophers and his student dates to the period of transition between Classical Attic Greek and Koine Greek. Greek was also the language in which many of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, such as the works of Plato (427–347 BC), including the Socratic dialogues, and the works of Aristotle (384–322 BC) were composed, as well as the New Testament of the Christian Bible (written in Koine Greek).

The ancient Greeks are often called the inventors of mathematics because they were the first to make it a theoretical discipline. The work of Greek mathematicians such as Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius lies at the basis of modern mathematics.

The first Greek philosopher is considered to be Thales of Miletus (c. 624-546 B.C.). He was the first to give a natural explanation of the origin of the world rather than a mythological one. Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander (c. 610-546 B.C.) is credited with writing the first philosophical treatise and making the first map of the known world. He can also be considered the first scientist who recorded a scientific experiment.

The first historian is considered to be the Greek writer Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.), the author of the first great book of history on the Greco-Persian Wars.

The first Greek tragedy was performed in 534 B.C. and was staged by a priest of Dionysus named Thespis. He also wrote and performed a part separate from the traditional tragic chorus, which also designated him as the first actor. In fact, the word “thespian” (actor) derives from his name

Greeks were inventors. They invented many types of technology, such as the lighthouse, water wheel, alarm clock, the Olympic Games, arch bridge, plumbing, democracy, spiral staircase, showers, streets, catapult, central heating, levers, and much more.

The Greek contribution to politics was the birth of democracy. But democracy in ancient Athens was significantly different from modern democracies. It was both more participatory and exclusive, and there were no political parties in Athenian democracy.

The Rise of Mythology


​Greek Mythology is the body of all the legends, stories and myths created by the ancient Greeks, and it used to be the basis of their spiritual and religious beliefs, and practices. Myths were created to explain the human experience. The oldest definition of the Greek word mythos comes from Homer, and it means "word," "speech," or "story.”’ Greek myths are variant and diverse; some of them are folk stories, urban legends, or simple mythical stories about gods, deities, their romances or their fights. The stories ranged from the simple and realistic to the wildly imaginative that demonstrated a command of creativity and poetic license. Some stories were based in fact and offered a realistic view of the time periods. Myth, for Homer, was a story told in the epic, while Herodotus thought that myth is a story that describes an unbelievable and idle event. Later, Plato added to the description, suggesting that myth is also a speech, a narration, something said passing from one era to another, from one generation to another. And still today, a myth is a story that describes a person, a fact, an event, an epic, or a truth. Myth is above all about fascination and imagination, creativity, ingenuity and originality. Myths by definition are not to be taken as historical accuracy even if they contain facts. They are interpretations of various components of life and told in epic or poetic format to entertain, inspire, inform and explain.

​Mythology is open to interpretation and has been an academic discipline for serious discussion and theoretical interpretation since the classical period. Because myth is so adaptable, we have no single "sacred text" or authority which tells us all the Greek myths in their definitive forms. Each myth, in fact, had no definitive form, because each storyteller, poet, and playwright felt free to shape the myth according to their interpretation of life. Relying on any one source or single authority goes against the very principles of literary expression anyway. A single authority denies us the opportunity to explore a range of interpretations and that in turn censors our own freedom to for our own interpretation.

Mythology began as an oral tradition during the Bronze Age, which was somewhere between 3300 and 1200 B.C. As time progressed, myths started to be recorded and in that manner, writers began to form the canon.
In the seventh century B.C. The poet Hesiod recorded the origin of life. Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey in the eighth century B.C. The written tradition really started to take off in the fifth century, when playwrights like Euripides and Sophocles began developing the gods and other mythological figures for the stage. Then in the first century B.C. a Roman historian named Gaius Julius Hyginus wrote the major myths down in a compilation meant to be read by average people. Remember that this was more than a thousand years after the first myths started circulating verbally, so they likely evolved bore little resemblance to the originals. The ancient texts have survived and we can read the words as they were written today.

Besides the works of the ancient Greeks themselves—including the plays of Sophocles and Euripides—writers from ancient times to the present have found inspiration in Greek mythology. Roman authors Virgil (the Aeneid) and Ovid (the Metamorphoses) used Greek stories and characters in their poems. References to Greek myths appear in the works of the medieval Italian poets Petrarch and Boccaccio and in those of the English poet Chaucer. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream contains the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as a comic play-within-a-play. Modern writers who have drawn upon Greek mythology include James Joyce (Ulysses) and Mary Renault (The Bull from the Sea). Mythology truly has impact in the way we think and the way we write. But it tells one true story and that is the story of life and everything that makes up what constitutes humanity. But isn’t that the very nature of all literature?
This site is a part of
A SERIES OF BEAUTIFUL WORDS BY KAI
The Collection Includes:
Defining the Brain: Website | Downloads (science)
A Beautiful Word: Website | Downloads (rare/obscure)
The Logophile Lexicon: Website | Book (literary)
Defining New Ideas: Website | Book (creativity)

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