It’s all Greek to Me…
“Lemme see: e-s-t—estiatorio, restaurant and p-s-i-…p-s-a…psarotaverna—fish restaurant! And also g-a-l, gala-something. Probably a milk bar as well. They tend to have stuff I like.”
We were studying the signs along the Pebble Beach Parade in Palaeochora, looking for refreshments. The promise of a milkshake alured me, so I walked closer to the English language menu. “Oh, Fish Restaurant ‘Galaxia’… I didn’t realise that galaxy was Greek as well!”
John thought for a moment. “But of course! The Milky Way, Galaxy. From the Greek for milk.”
It turns out that we already speak a lot of Greek. There are obvious words like telephone and hippopotamus. Or parts of words such as pedi for child, chronos for time. And dentist is odontriatos. The numbers are everywhere: heptathlon, decathlon, icosahedron, pentagram etc.
Travelling in Greece, trying to decipher the signs, throws up more obscure links: ‘bus stop’ is stasi leoforioo. And ‘thank you’ is pronounced efkastisto, but it’s actually written something like ‘eucharisto’. Now I know what they meant by ‘eucharist’ back in church.
There are countless other examples which don’t come to mind right now, in addition to a whole slew of scientific terms.
We speak a lot of Greek.
Tags: Crete, Greece, Greece, Greek, Language, Palaeochora, Tag Index
Denni