The following article is a translation from the special set of articles on the Greek Language "La Jornada". His contribution is the centerpiece of that "αφιέρωμα":

https://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=semanal08032026&u=lajornadaonline

By Dr. Alex Kalamarides

A language like Greek, where one thing is love and another is falling in love. One thing is desire and another is longing. One thing is bitterness and another is restlessness. One thing are the entrails and another the intestines.
— Odysseas Elytis

Around four thousand years ago, some tribes of the people we now call Indo‑Europeans—groups who had settled on the steppes north of the Black Sea—moved into the hills of the southern Balkan peninsula. These tribes brought with them not only knowledge of agriculture and pottery, but also their impressive horses, their metal weapons, their wheeled chariots, and—of great importance—their religion and their legends, rich with characters and stories.

In the area now known as Greece, the invading tribes encountered an agricultural population already settled there, with its own civilization, customs, and art. Within a few centuries, through a process of invasion and conquest, they took control of Greece, preserved their tribal structure and their Indo‑European language, enslaved the local population, and intermingled with them. The process of conquest was probably something like the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

DNA analyses reveal that the Indo‑Europeans, despite imposing their language and customs, contributed only about 15% to the present‑day genetic makeup of their descendants, the Greeks. The remaining 85% comes from the original tribes of Greece, whose culture is preserved in stories, palaces, sculpture, paintings, and even their still‑undeciphered script, Linear A, found mainly in southern Greece and Crete.

Three thousand five hundred years ago, the new language—Indo‑European at its core but with indigenous elements—adopted and adapted the Linear script into the form known as Linear B, establishing Greek as the second‑oldest Indo‑European language and the longest‑lived world language in history.

Among the multitude of heroes in Greek history, the one closest to the Greek archetype is Odysseus, better known in Spanish as Ulises. Πολυμήχανος Οδυσσέας (Polymíchanos Odysseas), “the resourceful Odysseus,” who never stops, who explores the world, adapts to it, devises new concepts and solutions to the challenges he encounters along the way, leaves his mark, yet never forgets his origin, always returning to his Ithaca in Greece, the source of his nostalgia and his spiritual nourishment. What a fitting metaphor for the journey and impact of the Greek language around the world across thousands of years.

Nikos Kazantzakis, the universal Greek, represents a perfect example of the Odyssean archetype. Kazantzakis spent long periods in various parts of the world—places where, like a bee, he gathered the nectar that made possible the honey of his works. From his native Crete, to Athens, Paris, Mount Athos, Zurich, Tbilisi, Vienna, Berlin (where he wrote his famous Ascesis), the island of Aegina (where he lived through the dark days of the Nazi occupation of Greece), and eventually Antibes in the south of France, a semi‑exile where he wrote some of his masterpieces. Kazantzakis traveled always, until his final days.

 Letters and Places

What does all that have to do with the Greek language? In its journeys, over centuries, Greek—like Odysseus and Kazantzakis—became a universal language, and in that way it interacted with the world and left its deep mark in many unexpected ways.

The most famous interaction was the invention of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BC, based on the Phoenician letters that assigned specific sounds to certain Egyptian hieroglyphs: the head of a cow with its horns, pointing upward, became the letter A, preserving the original Semitic word alfa; the house became beta, B, from the Semitic word beth, meaning “house,” as in Beth-lehem or Bethlehem (“House of Bread” or bakery); the camel—just as a camel looks from afar in the desert—gave the shape of Γ, the letter gamla or gamma, preserving the original word even for the animal itself; the triangle, delta, Δ, from the Semitic word for the number “three,” thalátha in Arabic to this day; and the rest of the letters. The Greeks faithfully preserved the original shapes of the hieroglyphs; those shapes were lost in other alphabets derived from Phoenician, such as modern Arabic, Hebrew, and others. For its part, the Greek alphabet gave birth to its two immediate descendants: our Latin alphabet, and the Cyrillic alphabet of the Russian Empire.

Greek in History

Beyond the alphabet, the Greek language coined many of the words used in every language. The very word “word,” (palabra) like the verb “to speak,” comes from the Greek παραβολή (parabolí), which in Roman times was used for the discourses and sermons of Jesus Christ. Curiously, the most common word for “speech” in modern Greek is ομιλία (omilía), and that word also exists in Spanish—homilía—meaning a Christian sermon. Most Greek words do indeed exist in Spanish (sometimes half-hidden), which actually makes learning Greek quite easy, especially for a Spanish speaker.

Four reasons explain the extraordinary impact of a language spoken today by barely 0.2% of the world’s population.
The first is culture: Greece developed the structural elements of Western civilization—mathematical logic, philosophy, political institutions, history, the seven arts, and many more. For that reason, the words associated with these concepts spread across the world. Words like music, hour, theater, poetry, astronomy, geometry, physics, geology, microbiology, anatomy, but also gymnastics, character, problem, system, gastronomy, analysis, politics, oratory, and many, many more were born in Greece. A Greek Minister of Finance, Xenophon Zolotas, proudly delivered a speech to the International Monetary Fund in 1957—supposedly in English—that consisted entirely of Greek words.

The second reason has a name: Alexander the Great. The young heir to the Greek kingdom of Macedonia in northern Greece, and student of one of the most important philosophers, Aristotle, managed in 330 BC to conquer the entire Persian Empire and thus extended the use of Greek to all the lands from Greece to India. He founded a series of cities bearing his name, Alexandria. The most famous is the city of Alexandria in Egypt, but Alexandria is also the city of Kandahar, carrying the same word today in Afghanistan. Alexander was so famous and respected around the world that various heroes and kings identified with his name—from King Sikandar of Malaysia to Skanderbeg, the national hero of Albania.

Alexander made Greek the international language for many centuries after his conquests, in the periods known as the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine eras.

Despite the Roman conquest, Greek remained the international language in the time of Jesus Christ. The Romans revered Greek for its concepts and civilization, adopted many of its words into Latin, and the most educated even spoke Greek among themselves. For that reason, Christianity spread in Greek—the original language of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The translation of the New Testament into classical Latin was unsuccessful; only the 4th‑century translation into Vulgar Latin was eventually adopted, at a time when many people in Italy, Spain, France, and North Africa were no longer educated in classical Latin or Greek due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. The word Christ comes from Greek, as do church, bishop, monk, angel, devil, and so on. The name of Munich, the German city, comes from the Greek Μόναχον (mónachon), because it was originally the site of a nuns’ monastery.

From the same era come words such as: cielo (“sky”), from the Greek κοίλον (kílon); cobre (“copper”), from the name of Cyprus, an important source of the metal in antiquity; calamar (“squid”), from the Greek κάλαμος (kálamos), “reed,” because the squid bone feels like a small reed; and names like Esteban and Estefanía (Steven, Stephanie), which mean “crown.”

The third reason is its Indo‑European kinship with most of the other languages of Europe and India, which makes its structure more familiar and its words less foreign. Of course, sometimes this can lead to mistaken conclusions: for example, the original word for a cultivated field, ager in Latin, is very similar to the equivalent Greek word αγρός (agrós) because of the Indo‑European relationship between the two languages. But the word agriculture is of Latin origin, not Greek; in this case the Greek word is γεωργία (georgía): work (έργον / érgon) of the earth (γαία / gaia), which gave rise to the names Georgia and George. Moreover, Greek has an incomparable agility for forming new, precise, elegant words and creating new concepts—for example Philadelphia, the name of several cities including the most famous one in Pennsylvania, meaning “brotherly love or friendship,” a name full of message, meaning, and elegance.

The fourth reason emerges from the replacement of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, brought about by the conquest of its indispensable capital, Constantinople, by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. When the Roman Empire became a Christian empire under Emperor Constantine in the year 325, and established its capital in Constantinople—the former Greek colony of Byzantium—it was able to preserve and maintain the Roman imperial presence in the world for more than eleven centuries, despite the eventual fall of Rome in 476.

Its inhabitants, almost all Greek‑speaking, always defined themselves as “Romans,” and their colloquial form, ρωμιοί (romií), still serves as a form of self‑identification among modern Greeks today. With their base in Constantinople and the strength of the Greek language, the Romans of the East were able to preserve many aspects of the culture, civilization, and thought of the ancient Greeks, achieving a syncretism with a new dogmatic religion. In contrast, religion pushed the rest of Europe into the centuries of the Dark Ages, despite the “reinvention” in the West of Rome as the “Holy Empire” by Charlemagne and other leaders during those turbulent times.

The fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks, who established their Ottoman Empire on the ashes of the Romans, accelerated the migration of educated Greeks to Italy and other Christian countries of Europe. There they fueled the humanist Renaissance of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. As the rest of Europe rediscovered the classical era of Greece, they finally began to emerge gradually from the dogmatism of the Dark Ages. Greek became the language of the educated in Europe and soon became a fundamental part of the curricula of the universities being founded everywhere.

For example, the most famous English scientist, Isaac Newton (1643–1727), used Greek as his primary language for jotting down his ideas and discoveries in his journals and notebooks. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) translated and adapted poems from ancient Greek as part of his early works.

Greek terminology became firmly established in most langu ages, and the invention of Greek words for new concepts, places, and discoveries became standard practice. From that era come place names such as Polynesia, the land of many (πολλές / polés) islands (νήσοι / nísi); Antarctica, the land opposite (αντί / antí) the lands of the bears (the Arctic, from ἄρκτος, “bear” in Greek); the Philippines, the islands of King Philip of Spain, whose name means “fond (φίλος / fílos) of horses (ἵππων / híppon)”; Indianapolis, the city (πόλις / pólis) of the land of Indians (ινδιάνοι / indhianoi).

Also from that period come names of discoveries and scientific concepts such as electricity, the effect of amber (ήλεκτρον / ílektron); entropy, the energy “that turns (τροπή / tropí) inward (εν / en)”; dynamite, the material full of force (δύναμις / dínamis); psychology, the reasoning (λόγος / lógos) of the soul (ψυχή / psychí), and many more.

The ancient Greek colonies around the Mediterranean needed to recruit settlers who would voluntarily (because they were democratic and free citizens!) leave their homes in Greece to establish themselves in the new colonies. For that reason, they gave names to the new places that were the opposite of some unpleasant reality: the Black Sea, with its warlike indigenous peoples, was named in Greek Εὔξεινος Πόντος (Efxeinos Póntos), “the hospitable sea.”

The adoption of this practice by Europeans led, for example, to the name Greenland, “Green Land,” for a land with no trees; and eucalyptus for a useful tree whose leaves cover the ground while offering almost no shade.

To conclude, here is the inscription that adorns the entrance of my alma mater, Rice University in Houston:
“Thus it was Democritus who, as is claimed, said that wanting to find a reason for things is greater than making oneself king of the Persians,” the most powerful empire of his time.

Alex Kalamarides, born and educated in Greece, studied at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds a doctorate in Physics from Rice University in Houston, Texas. He lives between Mexico and the United States. He is also a polyglot (Spanish, English, French, German, and Portuguese) who has dedicated decades to promoting the Greek language and culture around the world.