Forging Ancient Greek Words in Modern Times

Abstract

The vitality of ancient Greek language within modern languages occurs in onomaturgy, i.e., the making of names, especially in science, or rather in the sciences, both natural and human: with an obvious or hidden influence, either through direct or indirect loans (semantic calques) or through coinages, whether of words or of whole semantic families, made on the basis of old linguistic material. If one considers the phenomenon from the ancient language's point of view, the loans should be evaluated as true graecisms, and vice versa the coinages as graecisms. Where words that are old but have been recycled in modernity with an entirely or partly new meaning (semantic coinages), these should be considered graecisms. Two striking examples are the semantic families of anthropology and of biology . The author points out a handful of modern coinages, of various importances, but all instructive in terms of genesis and diffusion mechanisms. Keywords: ancient Greek language; anthropology ; coinages; false graecisms; indirect loans; onomaturgy; semantic families