Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 12, Early Greek, Hittite and the Trojan War.

Over the last few episodes, we've looked at the migration of the original Indo-European

tribes, from the Eurasian steps to the areas where the modern Indo-European languages are located.

We will now begin to look at each of the individual Indo-European languages,

which have directly impacted the history of English, and will begin with the early Greeks.

But before I begin, let me give a quick thanks to Lewis Hinwood and NaturalEarthData.com

for the fantastic maps which Lewis prepared for the website, historyofenglishpodcast.com.

If you haven't checked out the site recently, you might want to check out the pages for episodes 9, 10 and 11.

The maps included there are wonderful maps that fully illustrate the migrations, which I discussed in those episodes.

So, thanks again to Lewis.

Now this time, I want to introduce you to the ancient Greeks, and I want to explore the Indo-European routes of those ancient Greeks speaking people.

The Greek language is the biggest influence on modern English, outside of Latin, and of course, English's native Germanic routes.

Even if you're not interested in ancient history, you probably know that Greek culture was a major influence on Western civilization.

The Greek influence extends into many disciplines that were pioneered in Greece, including music, philosophy, politics, drama, and poetry.

All words that come from Greek, by the way.

But this is not a podcast about Western civilization. It's a podcast about English, and Greek has had two major influences on English.

The first is vocabulary. As you know by now, English is a Germanic language, but it's borrowed heavily from other languages.

The biggest source of borrowed words is Latin, including words taken from French, which is a derivative of Latin.

But the second biggest source of English-loan words is Greek.

Now, ancient Greece existed long before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, and therefore early Anglo-Saxon English didn't really borrowed directly from Greek.

Anglo-Saxon or Old English was much closer to a pure Germanic language.

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