Wait… Is my phone Greek?
While people are aware they use a lot of Greek words in their everyday life, most of them believe that these words are mainly found in the fields of medicine, maths and sciences. Few people realize that Greek is a lot closer to them than they think and that is because Greek is heavily used in the field of technology as well. And technology is everywhere. Hence, Greek is everywhere…
- First of all, the word technology itself. Technologia in ancient Greek meant the systematic treatment of grammar. Made up of the words techne (art) and logia (words, explanations) it started being used by all European languages to describe the organization of knowledge for practical reasons. Today the term has become wider and wider since everything around us seems to be technology-related. The word used, however, remains Greek to its very core.
- Is your phone an android or ios? Did you understand which character was an android in the movie? Whether you are talking about an operating system or a robot in a sci-fi movie, android is without a doubt a word you use or hear a lot. Androides was a compound word made of aner (man, person) and eides (form, shape) and was used to describe something designed to look like a man. Ancient Greeks loved predicting and inventing future concepts indeed.
- You may say phone, but the full word is telephone. You definitely say telescope and television. The prefix “tele” meant at a distance, far off. So if you combine it with phone (sound, voice) it is the perfect word to describe a device that helps you speak from afar.
- And since we are talking about devices, the Greek word for device is mekhane or makhana in doric Greek which became machina in Latin and then machine in English. The word was used in doric Greek to mean “that which enables” and of course is now used by most European languages to describe a device that controls energy to produce a certain effect.
- Graphics. If you have or are a teenager this is a word you use quite a lot, especially if you are into video games. From the Greek word graphicos, of or for writing, the word is either used in English to often mean something that is visually descriptive, or in concepts like a graphics card. There the word means writing, drawing, painting.
It seems like technology is everywhere and it loves to use Greek words to describe complicated concepts that we all use everyday. Maybe this is why the Greek LOL students are so great at learning Greek; because they are already used to the combination of the language with technology which is the basis of the Greek LOL method.
