To appear in M. Loporcaro et al. (ed.

), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance

Languages. Oxford University Press.

Greek in contact with Romance

Angela Ralli
University of Patras
[email protected]

List of abbreviations and glosses

AG = Ancient Greek
Arm = Aromanian
ByzGr = Byzantine Greek
Cy = Cypriot
FEM = feminine
Fr = French
Gr = Greek
Gre = Greko
Gri = Griko
Hpt = Heptanesian
IMPF = imperfective
INF = infinitival form
It = Italian
ItR – Italo-romance
JS = Judeo-Spanish
Lt = Latin
Lesb = Lesbian
MASC = masculine
MedGr = Medieval Greek
NEU = neuter
OFr = Old French
PERF = perfective
Prv = Provençal
Sal = Salentino
SC Southern Calabrese
SMG = Standard Modern Greek
Sp = Spanish
Tr = Turkish
Ven = Venetian

Summary


I am indebted to the following colleagues (in alphabetical order) whose precious expertise with the
bibliographical sources has assisted me for the realization of this work: Stamatis Beis, Franco Fanciullo,
Brian Joseph, Io Manolessou and Symeon Tsolakidis. I am particularly grateful to Io Manolessou for her
significant comments on a draft copy of the paper.
In the course of its long history, Greek has experienced a particularly multifarious
and profound contact with Romance, in a wide geographical area which spreads from
western to eastern Europe and also covers part of the once hellenophone Asia Minor.
The beginning of this contact is difficult to delimit since their ancestors, Ancient Greek
and Latin, were already in interaction even before the Roman period of the Greek
speaking world.
This article offers a sketchy picture of contact situations where Greek and
Romance (Italo-romance, Gallo-romance, Aromanian and Judeo-Spanish) act as donor
or recipient, depending on the case, and delineates the historical and appropriate socio-
linguistic circumstances which triggered or facilitated linguistic borrowing. It shows
that a significant number of lexical items (roots, affixes and words) were transferred
from one language to another, while phonological and structural transfers have also
occurred in areas where Greek has been in constant and long contact with Romance, as
for instance, in South Italy. It also deals with the formation of Greek-based scientific
internationalisms in Romance, as well as with the relatively recent adoption of Romance
terms and term-forming affixes in Greek.

Keywords: Contact, Greek, Latin, Italo-romance, Gallo-romance, Aromanian, Judeo-

Spanish.

1. Introduction
Greek and Romance have been in constant and undisrupted contact for a very long
period, the beginning of which is difficult to delimit since their ancestors, Ancient
Greek and Latin, were already in interaction even before the Roman period of the Greek
speaking world.1 It is generally accepted that contact between Greek and Latin is very
old, since the foundation of Rome itself, but became profound with the conquest of
Magna Graecia in the 3rd c. BC, and with that of Greece in the 2 nd c. BC. This work
focuses on the relation of Greek and Romance, mainly Italo-romance, although it is
difficult to determine with accuracy the end of the Latin linguistic period and the
beginning of the Romance one, due to lack of sources as well as to the historical and
socio-linguistic diversity of the areas in question. Moreover, it is not always easy to
establish whether the Greek loans in the Romance languages had an intermediate Latin
phase, or were directly borrowed from Medieval Greek. Among the Romance varieties,
Greek has entered in intense contact with certain Italo-Romance dialects (e.g. Venetian,
Genoese, Corsican, Salentino and Southern Calabrian), although Standard Italian,
Gallo-romance (Old French, Provençal and Standard French), Aromanian and Judeo-
Spanish have also been in interaction with it, but to a lesser extent.

2. Contact with Latin

The undeniable influence of Greek on Latin can be seen through the various
occurrences of Greek words which penetrated as loans into Latin and were adapted to
its phonology and morphology. Traces of contact with Greek can be found in Latin
from two sources of contrasting social status: (a) from hellenophone speakers who were
brought to Rome as slaves (Adams, 2003) and (b) from the cultivated upper society
who had learned Greek as a language of high prestige (Dubuisson, 1992). The
translation of Greek scientific treatises (philosophical, medical, etc.) into Latin is

1
In this work, Ancient Greek will refer to the language before our era, Hellenistic Koine to the language
of the Hellenistic period (ca. 3rdc. BC – 3rd c. AD), Byzantine Greek or early and late Medieval Greek to
that of the Byzantine period (till the mid-15th c.), Modern Greek to the language of modern times, while
the term “Greek” will denote the Greek language in general.
another source of (mainly technical) loan vocabulary and of derivational suffixes
forming innovative (technical) terms (Fruyt, 1987a; Biville, 1990-1995, 2002). Among
the earliest loanwords on may cite camera ‘room’, nauta ‘sailor’, poeta ‘poet’ from the
Ancient Greek kamara, nautēs and poiētēs, respectively, and during the Roman period,
the vocabularies of philosophy, arts and sciences included many Greek words, such as
grammaticus, rhētōr, musica from the Ancient Greek grammatikos rhētōr, mousikē. In
derivational morphology, a well-studied example of this influence is the formation of
Latin verbs in -issāre or -izāre (from the 1st c. AD onwards, e.g. citharizāre ‘to play the
lute’), resulting from the Greek verbs ending in -izein (e.g. Lt citharizāre ‘to play the
lute’ < AG kitharizein, see, among others, Dardano, 2008; Tronci, 2017). A similar case
is the Latin adjective forming suffix -icus (e.g. Lt bellicus ‘warlike’ < Lt bellum ‘war’),
deriving from Greek -ikos (Fruyt 1987b). Interestingly, Greek influence may also be
claimed on the level of structural evolution. For example, Coleman (1975, 2007: 794)
mentions the emergence of demonstrative pronouns as definite articles in Vulgar Latin
and the rapid expansion of participial syntax in Classical Latin.
Crucially, several Latin words of Greek origin survived into Romance and
passed on to western European culture. In addition, the progressive discovery and study
of Classical Latin in the ages of Renaissance and Humanism became a basic source for
the insertion of many Greek words and formatives in western European languages. As
Adrados (2005: 256) notes, it is not always easy to determine how and when hellenisms
passed into Latin and the languages that derived from it. Basically, he proposes two
routes: the route of Classical Greek into Latin and that of Byzantine Greek into late
Latin. Although knowledge of Greek in the West during the early Middle Ages seems
to have been rather limited (cf. the well-known phrase “Graecum est- non legitur”), it
still had a high prestige thanks to the study of the Greek philosophy through Latin
translations, the influence of Byzantine art, its residues in the liturgy and the copying
of bilingual Bibles (for an overview, see Ciccolella, 2008, ch. 2).
According to Coleman (2007: 799), the influence of Latin on Greek was less
pervasive than that of Greek on Latin. However, as Kahane and Kahane (1982: 128)
observe, the transfer of Latin elements was a process of long duration and certain
latinisms are still in use in Modern Greek. It started before our era with the early
contacts between the two cultures, continued with the Roman conquest of the Greek-
speaking world and increased during the creation of the Eastern Roman Empire,
following the foundation of Nova Roma, that is Constantinople, in 330 AD, where Latin
was the official language of the state, without Greek losing its prestige as language of
culture and education. Latin prevailed in the imperial army service, administration, the
law, and public life in general (Dickey, 2012). Its linguistic impact began to regress
around the 5th century, due to demographic developments, the religious schism between
the East and the West, which had already started at the end of the 5th century but was
completed in 1054, and the Slavic invasions of the Balkan peninsula. The regression of
latinisms after the 6th century was due not only to the general increase of hellenophony
in the Byzantine Empire, but also to the 10th century puristic movement of the upper
levels of society to de-latinize terms in administration, the army, public and private life,
by replacing them with words mostly taken from the classical language (Kahane and
Kahane, 1982: 133).
Nowadays, Latin influence on Greek is attested by the existence of a number of
common words2 in the current standard vocabulary, such as porta ‘door’ (< Lt porta),
spiti ‘house’ (< Lt hospitium ‘lodging’), kavalaris ‘horseman’ (< Lt caballarius), palati

2
Greek words from the Hellenistic period onwards will be given in a broad phonological transcription.
‘palace’ (< Lt palatium). Latin influence on Greek morphosyntax has been argued for
in a number of constructions, such as future and perfect periphrases (Browning, 1969;
Coleman, 2007; Markopoulos, 2009, but cf. Horrocks 2010: 345-349). According to
Kahane and Kahane (1982: 135) the conservatism of institutions and the church, as well
as that of provincial life contributed to the preservation of certain latinisms and kept
them alive into Modern Greek (Psichari, 1892; Meyer, 1895; Dieterich, 1901;
Andriotis, 1974; Katsanis, 2007), particularly in the Modern Greek dialects (e.g. Pontic
δar ‘daily ration, portion of food’ < Lt diarium ‘daily ration’, Chiot paxto ‘rent for a
farm’ < Lt pactum ‘contract’). For their integration in the Greek linguistic system, most
Latin lexical borrowing were adapted to Greek phonology and morphology. Thus,
beside the Greek pronunciation, nouns, adjectives and verbs display Greek inflection,
while a Greek-based derivational suffix sometimes appears between the Latin root and
the Greek inflectional ending (e.g. Lt defendo ‘to defend’ > MedGr δifenδ-ev-o).3
Among the Latin suffixes which have been integrated in Greek morphology, it is worth
mentioning the very productive today -ura (e.g. Gr θolura ‘opacity’ < Gr θοlos
‘opaque’) and -aris (e.g. Gr perivolaris ‘gardener’ < Gr perivoli ‘garden’, ziljaris
‘jealous’ < Gr. zilja ‘jealousy’).

3. Contact with Italo-romance

3.1 On Italian soil
The first Italo-romance varieties which Greek entered in contact with were those spoken
in South Italy, namely in Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, that is, in
those territories which, starting mainly from the 8th c. BC, were extensively colonized
by Greek settlers, to the point that these areas were collectively called by the Romans
“Magna Graecia” (see Bartonek, 1975; Consani, 2017 for an overview). In these areas,
the Greek language was continuously spoken since ancient times (Rohlfs, 1974) and
was revitalized due to the Byzantine rule of the area (till the 11 th century) and the
massive settlements of Greek-speaking people, especially from the Peloponnese, after
the 15th century, who moved to South Italy, mainly to Salento (Puglia), to escape the
Ottoman Turks (Fanciullo, 2005-2006; Manolessou, 2005).4
While in ancient times hellenophony comprised large parts of Calabria, Puglia
and Sicily, nowadays, it is confined to two varieties (recognized as minority languages
by the European Union), Griko and Greko, commonly called “Italiot” or “Grekanico”.
They are spoken in dialectal enclaves in the Salento area of Puglia (Griko), the so-called
“Grecia Salentina” (villages of Calimera, Castrignano dei Greci, Corigliano di Otranto,
Martano, Martignano, Melpignano, Soleto, Sternatia, Zollino), and in the exteme south
of Calabria (Greko), on the slopes of the Aspromonte massif (villages of Amendolea,
Bova, Bova Marina, Condofuri, Gallicianò, Roccaforte and Roghudi nuovo). However,
historical testimonies from the 16th, 17th and 18th c., as well as the toponomastics of the

3
For the adaptation of latinisms to the Greek system from the 6th to 13th century, see Psaltes (1913).
4
Alternative hypotheses on the origin of the Greek language in South Italy have been formulated: a) The
continuity hypothesis, according to which Greek never stopped being spoken in South Italy (Rohlfs,
1974, 1977; Caratzas, 1958); b) the Byzantine hypothesis, which proposes that the origins of the language
are to be found in Byzantine Greek (Battisti, 1927; Parlangeli, 1953); c) the revised continuity hypothesis,
following which the archaic features of the language support the continuity hypothesis, but Greek and
Romance in this area were in a situation of bilingualism resulting to an osmosis of the two languages
(Fanciullo 1996, 2008). Today, the position accepted by most scholars is that Griko and Greko are
essentially dialects of Modern Greek which emerged from the Hellenistic Koine, participated in the
evolution of the language till the late medieval period, but the number of archaic features in their
vocabulary and structure attest the uninterrupted presence of Greek since ancient times (Ledgeway, 1998;
Manolessou, 2005; Horrocks, 2010).
area, cleary show that the Greek-speaking area was much more extensive in the
relatively recent past. Griko and Greko display internal micro-variation, share many
similarities, but have developed independently (see, among others, Rohlfs, 1974;
Profili, 1983; Katsoyannou, 1995; Karanastasis, 1997; Manolessou, 2005; Stamuli,
2008; Baldissera, 2013; Squillaci, 2017).
A long-term contact with the surrounding Romance dialects, that is, Salentino
for Griko and Southern Calabrian for Greko, as well as a strong interaction with
Standard Italian in recent years (mainly in the 20th century), and the local variety of
Standard Italian (Italiano regionale) have considerably affected the two systems. 5
Under the socio-linguistic pressure of the more prestigious Italian, and because of
historical and economic factors, the two varieties are being slowly abandoned by their
speakers, even by those of the older generations.6 Today, they are critically endangered,
especially Greko, while Griko seems to be resisting more strongly. Historically, the
first blow against hellenophony in South Italy came in the 16th century in Calabria (17th
century in Puglia), when the Catholic church banned the Christian orthodox rite of the
Greek-speaking communities under the threat of excommunication. Another blow
occurred in the first half of the 20th century, when Mussolini’s fascist regime adopted a
particularly negative policy towards all dialects in Italy, but as Squillaci (2017: 9) points
out, “the shame of speaking a dialect has been prevalent since the very creation of the
Italian state”. Economically, the areas were and still are the poorest in Italy, leading a
large part of their population to migrate to the rich north or to other countries in search
of work. In the second half of the 20th century, the two dialectal varieties underwent
radical changes: immigration, together with the spread of media and compulsory school
education conducted in Italian contributed to their rapid regression.
Striking features of contact with Italo-romance can be seen in the Griko and
Greko vocabulary (see mainly Karanastasis, 1984-1992), but also in phonology and
morpho-syntax. Among the most typical phonological changes, one should note the
change, in some varieties, of the Greek fricatives [θ], [ð], [ɣ] and [x] into stops realized
as [t], [d], [g] and [k], respectively (e.g. Gr θelo ‘want’, δromos ‘road’, γlosa ‘tongue’
erxome ‘come’, versus Gri telo, dromo, glossa, erkome), the loss, in most contexts, of
Greek word-final [s] from inflected words (e.g. Gr kreas ‘meat’ versus Gri krea), and
a proliferation of double consonants, even in contexts where there is no Ancient Greek
predecessor (e.g. Gr zvino ‘quench’ vs. Gri zvinno). Italo-romance words abound in the
vocabulary, and interestingly, most are integrated in the two varieties following the
rules of native morphology. As a result, inflection and gender are assigned to nominal
loans (1), while verbs appear inserted via the indirect insertion strategy (2), that is, with
the use of an integrating element, which is the Greek verbal suffix -ev-7 (Ralli, 2012a):
(1) Gri a. gualano < Sal calanu ‘peasant’
b. devotsiona < It devozione ‘devotion’
c. fioro < It fiore ‘flower’

(2) Gri a. cekeo < Sal čikare ‘blind’

5
As noted by Fanciullo (2008: 174), Greek in South Italy entered in contact not only with Italo-Romance
varieties but with Gallo-Romance as well, because from the second half of the 11th century, the area was
under Norman rule.
6
For a concise and informative overview of the reasons leading to the extinction of the two varieties, see
Manolessou (2005).
7
For reasons of clarity, the derivational suffix is usually mentioned as -evo. However, the derivational
part is -ev-, -o being the personal inflectional ending. Note that in Grekaniko [v] is deleted in intervocalic
position (Karanastasis, 1997).
 b. nutrikeo < Sal nutrikare ‘feed’
c. spendeo < It spendere ‘spend’
All nominal loans inflect in both singular and plural, while gender is assigned
on semantic, phonological and morphological criteria (Ralli, 2002; Ralli et al., 2015).
Thus, (1a) has become masculine following the general Greek rule which relates
grammatical gender to sex, in that human male nouns acquire masculine grammatical
gender and female ones become feminine; (1b) is characterized as feminine since nouns
in -a belong to the most productive category of Greek feminine nouns; finally, (1c)
being inanimate, is inflected following the native neuter nouns in -o. With respect to
verbs (2), it is worth noting that they receive as integrator the most productive verbal
suffix in Ancient Greek, -ev-, contrary to Cypriot verbal loans originating from Gallo-
romance, which accept the integrator -iaz- (Cy protestiazo < Fr protester ‘to protest’,
see section 4) and those of other source languages, e.g. of Turkish provenance, which
appear integrated with the verbal suffix -iz- (e.g. the Asia Minor Aivaliot kazadizu ‘to
become rich’ < Tr kazanmak, Ralli, 2012b).8
However, contact with Romance has affected structure as well. For instance, in
Griko noun phrases, the word order between nouns and adjectives follows a Romance
pattern (3), and there is no overtly marked aspectual opposition of the +/-perfective
value on verbal forms preceded by the complementizer na (4), as opposed to Standard
Modern Greek (SMG), which has built its entire verbal system on this aspectual
opposition. For illustration, consider the following examples, taken from Filieri (2001):
(3) spiti mea (Gri) vs. meγalo spiti (SMG)
house big big house
krasi kalo kalo krasi
wine good good wine

(4)a. θelo na fonazzo9 (SMG) vs. θelo na fonakso (SMG)

*telo na fonazzo (Gri) telo na fonaso (Gri)
I.want to I.call.IMPF I.want to I.call.PERF
‘I want to call’
Nevertheless, contact has also operated in the opposite direction, since there are
many cases where Greek has affected the Italo-romance varieties. As Fanciullo (1996:
51-52) points out, southern Calabrian dialects display a substantial number of Greek

8
Note though that, similarly to Grekanico for Romance loans, Pontic, another Modern Greek dialect,
also employs -ev- as integrator for loans of Turkish origin (see Ralli, 2016).
9
Modern Greek does not display overtly realized infinitives. This loss is also observed in Griko and
Greko, where infinitival forms can be found only as complements of a restricted number of control verbs,
as for instance, after sonno ‘can’ (ii) (Rohlfs, 1969, 1977; Baldissera, 2013). As discussed below, with
some variation, the loss of infinitival forms has been transferred to certain Romance varieties in South
Italy, as for instance in Bovese (Squillaci, 2017):
(ii) den ene aliθia! den sonno dulezzi (Greko)
not is true! not I.can work.INF
‘It is not true! I cannot work’
(iii) speranu mi partinu vs. *speranu mi/di partiri (Bovese)
they.hope to they.leave they.hope to leave. INF
‘they hope to leave’
Infinitival loss is a well-studied phenomenon (see, for instance, Joseph, 1983). It started in Koine Greek
with verbs such as ‘say’, ‘believe’ etc., progressed to infinitives with verbs of wanting, ordering, being
able to, etc. and by the 15th century, the only infinitival structures remaining were “final” infinitives with
obligatory subject control (of the type ‘I can do’). With some variation from language to language, the
phenomenon spread to other Balkan languages as well. For example, Albanian has completely lost its
infinitive.
common words (e.g. SC pappu ‘grandfather’ < Gr papus, SC dromo ‘street’ < Gr.
δromos), show Greek names (e.g. SC Niceforo < Gr Nikiforos) or surnames (e.g. SC
Paleologo < Gr Paleoloγos), and in South Italy, there are many toponyms of Greek
origin (e.g. Panaia < Gr Panajia). The significant amount of Greek influence on Italo-
romance is mainly sustained by the fact that the Italo-romance varieties underwent
some structural changes due to contact with Greek, since, according to Thomason
(2001) and Thomason and Kaufman (1988), syntactic structure belongs to the last and
most difficult sectors to be affected, following intense contact and extensive
bilingualism. Crucially, Rohlfs (1969) has highlighted a number of cases in the
Romance dialects spoken in South Italy, where the vocabulary is basically Romance,
but the structure is Greek. He discusses, for instance, the use of a genitive form instead
of dative (5), the use of an aorist instead of the present perfect (5), the absence of non-
finite complement clauses instead of the finite ones (6). Consider the following
examples, taken from Squillaci (2017: 3-4):
(5)a. Ora ora nei desi u regalu da figghiola (Palizzese)
b. Arte arte tis edoka to kaloma ti miccedda (Greko)
Now now of.her I.gave the gift of.the girl
c. Ho appena dato il regalo alla bambina (Standard Italian)
I.have just given the gift to.the girl

(6)a. Vogghiu mi vaiu (Palizzese)

b. Telo/θelo na pao (Greko)
I.want to I.go
c. Voglio andare (Standard Italian)
I.want go.INF
In (5-6), Palizzese, a Southern Calabrian Romance variety, behaves in the same way as
Greko, in that it employs structures involving genitive, aorist and a finite form
following the complementizer, as opposed to Italian which selects a dative case, a
periphrastic perfect and an infinitival form. The overt realization of the definite article
with proper names, similarly to Greko and Greek in general, in neighbouring Romance
varieties (e.g. u Ntoni lit. the Anthony ‘Anthony’, Squillaci (2017: 15)) is another
indication that Greek in South Italy has been not only a target but a source language as
well.
This section would have been uncomplete if there was no mention of Greek
loans introduced in the Venetian vocabulary during the Medieval period when, due to
the Byzantine religious center of Ravenna (till 751 AD, see Lazard 1986) and the
commercial relations of Venetians and Genoese with the Byzantine Empire, one can
find cultural (e.g. Ven ancona < Gr ikona ‘icon’) and maritime terms (e.g. Ιt arcipelago
< Gr arxipelaγos ‘archipelago’) and names of imported products (e.g. Ven anguria <
Gr anguri(a) ‘cucumbers’, Ven palamia < Gr palamiδa ‘type of fish’) (see Cortelazzo
1970 for an extensive list). Moreover, Greek-based anthroponyms (e.g. It Nicola < Gr.
Nicolaos, Ven (San) Todaro < Gr Θoδοros ‘Theodore’) have become particularly
frequent not only in Venice or Genoa but in other areas as well, Florence, Siena, Milan,
etc. Generally, with the establishment of trade relations, Greek, provided terms in
popular speech. Finally, the influx of loans was significantly increased after the fall of
Constantinople in 1453 (section 3.2) and the settlement of Byzantine scholars on Italian
soil (see section 7 below).

3.2 On Greek soil

Undoubtedly, the longest and constant contact between Greek and Romance has been
in South Italy, where, as shown above, both languages have interchangeably assumed
the roles of donor and recipient language. Nevertheless, they also entered in contact in
the eastern Mediterranean region, more precisely since the 12th century, when the
“Francs” or “Latins” (as they were termed by the Greeks of the period), following the
path of the Crusades, conquered the lands of the Byzantine Empire (see Tsougarakis
and Locke, 2015 for an overview). In 1195, Cyprus became a French kingdom under
the house of Lusignan, and Constantinople itself, the capital of the Byzantine Empire,
fell in the hands of the crusaders in 1204. The conquest of Constantinople lasted only
till 1261, but there were significant repercussions on several levels, economic, political
and linguistic.10 During the 13th century, many Byzantine territories were governed by
the Francs, most of whom were Venetian and Genoese, who also handled the trade in
the eastern Mediterranean sea. 11 As a result, in Cyprus, Peloponnese, the Aegean and
Ionian islands, Crete and Rhodes, many Italo-romance words were introduced into the
language and some still survive in Modern Greek (e.g. Gr tramudana ‘north wind’ <
ItR tramontana, Gr kontis ‘count’ < ItR conte, Gr armaδa ‘navy’ < Ven armada) while
the French rule in Cyprus and Peloponnese is responsible for a number of Gallo-
romance loans, to be examined in the next section of this paper. For some areas, Latin
control ended soon after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks (1453),
as in the case of Lesbos island, ruled by the Genoese until 1462. However, in other
regions Romance rule lasted longer, especially in those controlled by Venice. For
example, Crete was conquered by the Ottomans in 1669, while in the Ionian islands and
Cythera the Venetian dominion ended as late as 1797, when these islands were ceded
to Napoleonic France.
Only a small proportion of the population of these areas were of western
European descent, the vast majority belonging to the Greek ethnicity.12 During the first
years, populations were kept distinct, mixed marriages were avoided and cadastral
registers continued to be composed in Greek (Jacoby, 1989; Luttrell, 1989). With the
years though, and with some differences from area to area, a rigid separation between
governors and governees was reduced, linguistic exchanges increased (Balard, 1989;
McKee, 2000), but crucially, Greek did not shrink, probably due to its traditional
prestige and the significant support it had by the orthodox church (Fanciullo, 2008).
Nevertheless, on the linguistic level, in all regions controlled by Venetians, Genoese,
or French, Romance exerted an undeniable influence, depending on the length of
contact, the socio-political situation of each region and the degree of bilingualism. It is
noteworthy that bilingualism among the ethnic Greeks was restricted to a small
proportion of people, those belonging to the upper class (Fanciullo, 2008: 171). This
had an impact on the type of linguistic transfer which, however, has been mostly
restricted to lexical borrowing (vocabulary and morphologically-relevant items), that
is, to a relatively easy type of borrowing on the borrowability scale (Thomason and
Kaufman, 1988), as compared to the transfer of syntactically-relevant structures
(Manolessou, 2008). It is worth noting that independently of the specific origin of the
10
It is important to specify that by the 13th c. Greek had to a large extend already acquired its modern
form. However, tracing the precise development of Modern Greek is difficult, and inevitably only
approximate, because of the traditional linguistic uniformity and purism in written language, which had
dropped a heavy “curtain” on the spoken language. For an overview of sources and evolutions see Holton
and Manolessou (2010).
11
Amalfitans, Catalans and Aragonese had also a brief sojourn in Greek territories but did not leave a
significant mark on the language.
12
In 1395, on the island of Chios according to Luttrell (1989: 147), Westerns are estimated not to have
exceeded 10% of the entire population.
western rulers, the language predominantly used was Venetian. Tangible proof of this
is offered by the dialectal varieties of the Aegean islands of Lesbos and Chios, which
display many Venetian-based loans, although the islands were governed by Genoese
families before being captured by the Ottomans.
Interestingly, Italo-romance influence on Greek never faded in the areas
subjected to western rule in the late medieval period, even in those which experienced
an undisputable linguistic influence of Turkish during the Ottoman occupation. A
considerable number of Italo-romance items can still be detected in the Modern Greek
vocabulary, particularly in that of certain dialects, as for instance, Chiot, Cycladic,
Cretan and Cypriot. Travellers’ testimonies (cf. Banfi, 1985), provide an interesting
picture of the linguistic situation of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean areas, long after
the Ottoman conquest. According to Cortelazzo (1989: 111) this type of language was
not exactly the Venetian variety, since from the 16th century onwards there is a kind of
diglossia in Venice, where Venetian was reserved to oral communication while a type
of standard north Italian was used for writing (on this see also Fanciullo, 2008 ). In fact,
due to this type of diglossia, it is difficult to detect the exact origin of many Italo-
romance loans in the Greek language, that is, whether they come from Venetian or
Italian.
In more recent years, namely in the 18th and 19th centuries, the effect of Italo-
romance on Greek was further facilitated by the fact that many Greeks studied in Italy,
mainly in Padova, and kept practicing Italian even after their return to their homeland
(Cortelazzo and Paccagnella, 1992: 242). As noted by Fanciullo (2008) and Krimpas
(2017), the heavy impact of the Venetian heritage on the Greek language is particularly
confirmed by many hellenicized last names (e.g. δanδοlos < Ven Dandolo) and certain
loan suffixes that are integrated in Greek derivational morphology. These suffixes are
-ez(os)13, producing ethnic nouns (Ven -ese, e.g. Gr cinezos ‘Chinese’, Gr lonδrezos
‘Londonese’), the adjective forming -ozos (e.g. fasariozos ‘noisy’ < fasaria ‘noise’, see
Katsouda 2016) the noun forming -aδa (Ven -ada, e.g. Gr kokinaδa ‘of red colour’, Gr
portokalaδa ‘orange juice’), -aδor(os)14 denoting professional nouns (Ven -ador, e.g.,
Gr balaδοros ‘talented footballer’), and the verb forming -ar(o) (Ven -ar, e.g. Gr
voltaro ‘walk, stroll’) with its slightly different form -ern- (e.g. Lesb vulternu ‘walk,
stroll’), as realized in the islands of Lesbos, Crete and Cyprus.
As already seen for Grekanico, gender assignment and inflection to nominal
loans are mainly subject to internal properties of the Greek language. Moreover,
phonological coincidence of certain endings between Italo-romance and Greek also
governs loan noun accommodation and indicates that the role of certain properties of
the donor language cannot be neglected. The following Heptanesian examples
(Heptanesian is the dialect of the Ionian islands), taken from Ralli et al. (2015) illustrate
these claims:
(7) Hpt ItR
a. imbresarios.MASC impresario.MASC ‘agent’
b. abitantes.MASC abitante.MASC ‘inhabitant’
c. arkivistas.MASC archivista.MASC ‘archivist, file clerk’
d. insenianta.FEM insegnante.MASC/FEM ‘female teacher’
As proposed by Ralli et al. (2015), when a +human Italo-romance item is
transferred to Greek, it undergoes a reanalysis into a stem in order to adapt to Greek

13
Greek inflectional suffixes are put in parentheses in order to be distinguished from derivational ones.
14
As Fanciullo (2008: 186) correctly observes, -aδoros has become a productive suffix in Greek only in
recent years. Before the 19th century, it was of limited productivity, mostly used in Italo-romance loans
of the Ionian islands.
inflection, and it is assigned masculine or feminine gender, depending on whether it
denotes a male or a female entity. Then, it is incorporated into a Greek inflection class,
most often on the basis of a form matching between its own ending and the final
segment of a corresponding Greek item. Generally, +human male loanwords are
accommodated as Greek native masculine nouns in -os, -as, -es, depending on the form
of their endings in the source language, while +human female ones are integrated as
feminine in -a (7d), the form of which is the most productively used for feminine nouns
in Greek. Interestingly, when a -human Italo-romance noun is transferred to Greek, it
becomes subject to an old tendency of Greek to assign neuter to -human nouns
(Chatzidakis, 1907), sometimes operating against the dynamics of the phonological
matching between the endings of the donor and those of the recipient, which play a
predominant role into gender and inflection-class allocation. For an illustration,
consider the following examples, taken from Makri (2016):
(8) Hpt ItR
a. soδisfatsio.NEU Ven. sodisfazion.FEM ‘satisfaction’
b. kaparo.NEU caparra.FEM ‘down payment, deposit’
c. beladzi.NEU/beladza.FEM bilancia.FEM ‘weighing scale;
d. burlo.NEU/burla.FEM burla.FEM ‘trick, joke’
With respect to verb borrowing, it is worth stressing that it gave birth by
allogenous exaptation to a new verb-forming derivational suffix in Greek, -ar(o),
originating from the Italo-Romance infinitival marker -ar(e).15 The change of this
inflectional marker into a verbalizer is corroborated by the fact that, in SMG, it
productively creates verbs out of foreign bases in general, both nominal and verbal, not
necessarily Italo-Romance (9a-c), while, more rarely, it also combines with Greek bases
(9d):
(9) SMG
a. makij-ar-o < Fr maquiller ‘to make-up’
‘to make up’
b. film-ar-o < En film or to film
‘to film’
c. jux-ar-o / juxa-iz-o < Tr yuha ‘bronx cheer’
‘to hoot, to boo’
d. luf-ar-o < Gr lufa ‘loofah’ < MedGr lofazo < AG lōphō
‘to lie low, lie doggo’
Ralli (2016) has proposed that this situation probably started in Heptanesian,
the dialect most heavily affected by Venetian, and ultimately passed to Standard
Modern Greek, since Heptanesian, together with the Peloponnesian varieties, served as
base for the development of the official language of the Greek state. As further argued
by Ralli (2016), -ar- must have resulted from a structural reanalysis of the Italo-
Romance infinitival loans into stems, so as to be combined with the appropriate Greek
inflection. Since many Greek verbal stems are morphologically complex, consisting of
a stem and a verbalizer (e.g. Gr xor-ev-o ‘to dance’ < Gr xor- ‘dance’ + verbalizer -ev-
+ INFL), Ralli has suggested that -ar- has been reinterpreted as a verb-forming suffix.
Recategorization of the Italo-Romance infinitival marker into a Greek derivational
suffix was facilitated by the existence of certain noun-verb pairs in the donor language,
like the It arrivo ‘arival’ - arrivar(e) ‘to arrive’ or It protesta ‘protest’ - protestar(e) ‘to
protest’, where the basic formal difference between the noun and the verb is the
15
See Gardani (2016) for the notion of allogenous exaptation in borrowing, according to which there can
be a functional change of a borrowed grammatical element, in the -ar case, a change from the inflectional
to derivational status.
infinitival marker -ar(e). Comparing these pairs with some corresponding Greek
examples, such as those listed under (10), it is not hard to understand how -ar(e) could
be interpreted as having the same function with the Greek verbalizers: in the Italo-
Romance pairs, the only structural difference between the verb and the noun is the -
ar(e) suffix:
(10) Gr suffix Gr verb Gr noun
a. -iz- zoγraf-iz-o zoγraf-os
‘to paint’ ‘painter’
b. -on- kikl-on-o kikl-os
‘to cycle’ ‘cycle’
c. -ev- xor-ev-o xor-os
‘to dance’ ‘dance’
d. -iaz- periδrom-iaz-o periδrom-os
‘to eat a lot’ ‘too much food’
e. -en- ftox-en-o ftox-os
‘to become poor’ ‘poor’
As already mentioned, the last Venetian dominion ended in 1797, but Italo-
romance continued to influence Greek language via dialectal varieties, such as
Heptanesian, which benefitted a prestigious status in the formation of SMG.16 After the
second half of the 19th century, Italo-romance as a principal source of loanwords
conceded its place to French (see section 7). However, the Italian effect on Greek
remained on the dialectal level, as for instance, in the Ionian and the Dodekanesian
islands -the latter being under Italian control from 1912 to 1947. Moreover, a number
of Standard Italian words have been inserted in the Standard Greek vocabulary during
the 20th century for various reasons, mainly socio-political17, such as finetsa (< It.
finezza) ‘finesse’, studio (< It. studio) ‘artist’s office’, biskoto (< It. biscotto) ‘biscuit’,
lotaria (< It. lotteria) ‘lottery’, etc. (see Krimpas, 2017).

4. Contact with Gallo-romance

As already mentioned, around the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th centuries,
the Franks conquered many territories of the Byzantine Empire, among which the
Peloponnese (Moreas) and Cyprus. In public administration, law and epigraphic
records, the latter used Gallo-romance, a type of French Koine, the so-called “français
d’outremer”, which was the official language of the crusader states (Baglioni, 2012:
346). Gallo-romance left its traces on Greek, but it is worth specifying that, very often,
a distinction between italianisms and gallicisms is not clear, mainly for two reasons: a)
a frequent overlap of forms between the two Romance varieties and b) the adaptation
of loans in the Greek morpho-phonology which shadows the original forms. Gallicisms
are detected in chronicles, versified and in prose, as well as in lawbooks. The first well
known texts are the Chronicle of Morea (ca.1380), which narrates the French presence
in Peloponnese and whose author is most probably bilingual - and the Cypriot lawbook
of Assises (14th century) as well as the Chronicles of Machairas and Boustronios (15 th
c.).

16
One of the causes is the fact that Italian remained the official language of the Ionian islands until 1820
(Vitti, 1971: 138), that is, long after the termination of the Venetian regime.
17
Some of the reasons evoked by Fanciullo (2008) are the traditionally good relations between the people
of the two countries -despite occasional conflicts, as for instance, the declaration of war to Greece by the
fascist Italian government in 1940- the settling of many Greeks in Italy during the dictatorship in Greece
(1967-1974), or the fact that in the second half of the 20th c. a considerable number of Greek students
were enrolled in Italian universities.
 In the Chronicle of Morea (Spadaro, 1961; Kahane and Kahane, 1982), one may
find Gallo-romance terms of warfare (e.g. MedGr. kugesta < Fr conquête ‘conquest’,
MedGr. amantizo < Fr amender ‘to make amends’), feudal administration (e.g. MedGr
fie < OFr. fié ‘fief’, MedGr rovolevo < OFr reveler ‘to rebel’), titles and offices (e.g.
MedGr misir < OFr misire ‘Mister’, MedGr tsambrelianos < OFr chambrelain
‘chamberlain’), as well as common words (e.g. MedGr revestizo < OFr revestir ‘to
undress’).
The French impact on Cyprus followed the long dominion of the house of
Lusignan (1192-1489). For almost three centuries, French was the official language of
the administration, being the language at court, until the middle of the fifteenth century,
when it was replaced by Venetian (see, among others, Menardos, 1900; Dendias, 1925;
Davy and Panagiotou, 2000; Baglioni, 2012). As in the Peloponnese, French terms
transferred to Cypriot depict the feudal society and its value system (e.g. Cy aplazirin
< Fr plaisir / Prv plazir ‘pleasure’, Cy trizorin < Fr trésor, Cy δisfamiazo < OFr.
disfamer ‘defame’, Cy ziniazo < OFr. engignier ‘to cheat’, Cy tzambra ‘King’s room’
< Fr chambre ‘chamber’, Cy perrunin < OFr perron 'stoneblock for mounting the
horse', Cy dzanpiunis < Fr champion). Many gallicisms are found in the 14th c. Cypriot
translation of the original 12th c. French lawbook of Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois
(Hadjiioannou, 1964), describing the usages and customs, which were embodied in the
civil and criminal law practiced in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as in the 15th
century chronicles by Leontios Makhairas (who presents the history of the age of
Lusignans, Dawkins, 1932) and that by Boustronios (Sathas, 1873). According to
Baglioni (2012: 355) some of the phonological irregularities shown by several
borrowings, such as the presence of [ε] instead of the French [wa] (e.g. Cy tever < Fr
devoir ‘must’), and [u] instead of the French [œ] (e.g. Cy kuvernuris < Fr gouverneur
‘governor’) can be explained by the local variety of French koine spoken on the island.
Nowadays, the existence of gallicisms remounting to late medieval period is shown by
several toponyms (Dawkins, 1934), found in both Peloponnese -mostly in the regions
of Achaia (e.g. Gr Klarendza < OFr clarence ‘clearness of water’) and Corinth- as well
as in Cyprus (e.g. Cy Santeni ‘field name in the district of Morphou’ < Fr Saint Denis).
Similarly to the integration of Italo-romance loans, nominal items receive
gender and inflection following the patterns of native Greek words. Some exceptions
are loans for certain titles (e.g. Cy misir < OFr misire), place names (e.g. Cy Santeni <
Fr Saint Denis) and abstract terms whose endings do not coincide phonologically with
the native Cypriot endings (e.g. Cy tever < Fr devoir). Interestingly, while Italo-
romance verbal loans end in -aro (or in -erno), that is, they preserve the infinitival
Romance form (see section 3.2) by adopting the direct insertion strategy, Gallo-
romance ones receive an integrating element, -iz- (Cy revestizo < OFr revestir) or
principally -iaz- (Cy δisfamiazo < OFr. disfamer), that is, a native derivational suffix,
but different from the -ev- which has been used by Grekanico (see section 3.1). Ralli
(2016) has attributed this discrepancy between Italo-romance and Gallo-romance
verbal loans to both the time that contact has occurred as well as to socio-linguistic
reasons.
Generally speaking, compared to Italo-romance, the Gallo-romance impact on
Greek was much more limited due to the smaller geographical area dominated by the
Frankish knights and to a shorter stretch of time (till the end of the 15 th century). Yet,
it is important to note that the gallicisms of Cypriot are more than those found in
Peloponnese and show a stronger resistance towards extinction. This is probably due to
the fact that Cyprus, being an island, is more isolated that mainland Greece.
5. Contact with Aromanian
In Greece, Aromanians (called also Vlachs) live in the central and northern parts of the
country. Their language descends from Vulgar Latin, it is in many respects similar to
Romanian18 and is heavily marked by contact with the surrounding Balkan languages,
especially with Greek.
There are few studies addressing contact between Aromanian and Greek and no
data or studies related to the influence of Aromanian on Greek at other levels besides
vocabulary, that is at the levels of phonetics-phonology, morphology and syntax. The
effect of Aromanian on the Greek vocabulary, especially on that of the dialects of
Northern Greece, can be mostly seen in toponymy as well as in family names
(Bousboukis, 2005; Katsanis, 1994), and only a small number of common loans of
Aromanian origin have been identified in dictionaries of SMG (e.g. Babiniotis, 2010).
The latter relate mainly, but not exclusively, to livestock-farming terms (e.g. Gr gavos
< Arm gavŭ ‘blind’, Gr kakaradza < Arm găgăreatsă ‘excrement of animals’, Gr
klapatsa or xlapatsa ‘forfeit’ < Arm gălbĕatsă ‘animal fascioliasis’).
Athough the most pronounced effect of Greek on Aromanian concerns the
vocabulary (e.g. Arm aroi̯ δă < Gr roδi ‘quince’, Arm curοmbulu̯ < Gr koromilo
(Κοltsidas, 1998), an influence can also be traced on other levels, as well. In some
dictionaries, the percentage of Greek words appears even higher than that of Romance
words, without the Romance character of the language being altered. For example, in
Nicolaides (1909) there are 3.640 Greek loans, that is, 52% of the total Aromanian
words of the dictionary. Today, this percentage has substantially increased with many
neologisms related to abstract concepts and modern cultural reality, such as Arm
airodhromiu < Gr aerodromio ‘airport’, Arm tileorase < Gr tileorasi ‘television’, etc.
At the phonetic-phonological level, the use of the fricatives [ɣ], [ð], [θ] is considered
to come from Greek (Caragiu-MarioTeanu, 1968: 49), while at the structural level, the
disappearance of the morphologically-realized infinitive and its replacement by a finite
subordinate clause is also of Greek origin19 (e.g. Arm voiu să mincu lit. I.want to I.eat
‘I want to eat’ (Sandfeld, 1968 [1930]: 156). An important Greek effect on Aromanian
is the use of the particles să, va(s), as, which replace each other in the same position
and are combined with the same verb forms denoting the attitude of the speaker toward
the message, just like the respective particles na, θa, as of Modern Greek (e.g Arm să
află lit. to (s)he.finds ‘to find’, Arm va(s) află lit. will (s)he.finds ‘(s)he will find’, Arm
as află lit may (s)he.finds ‘(s)he may find’ (Beis, 2000: 330-334). According to Beis
(1993) Aromanian is nowadays on the way to extinction, a process shown by a more
intense effect of Modern Greek at its structural level, a phenomenon which is typical of
situations of language death.

6. Contact with Judeo-Spanish

Chronologically, the last instance of contact between Greek and Romance is that
provided by Judeo-Spanish, a Romance language spoken by Sephardic (from the
Hebrew word Sefarad which identified Spain) Jews who were expelled from Spain and
Portugal following the Alhambra decree in 1492 (Harris, 1994). Many of these Jews
went to the Ottoman Empire and settled in cities like Constantinople, Smyrna and

18
According to Galdi (1939: 86), there was an introduction of about 278 Greek words in Romanian, due
to the Greek speaking Phanariot rule under the Ottoman Empire (1711-1821), from which only a total of
150 words were still in use in late 30’s.
19 As mentioned in section 3.1, due to contact with Greek, the same phenomenon has occurred in other

Balkan languages, as well as in dialects of South Italy.

Thessaloniki, where there was a relative religious tolerance. Although there are no
accurate population statistics of the beginning of the 20th century, it is estimated that
about 75.000 Jews lived in Thessaloniki in 1905, and 50.000 people in Constantinople.
From those populations, very few remain today (about 1500 in Thessaloniki), since they
suffered almost total annihilation by the Germans in the Holocaust, before and during
the Second World War (Joseph, 2016).
There are no data (or studies) on Judeo-Spanish loans in Greek20, but borrowings
from Greek, as well as traces of convergence with other languages participating in the
Balkan Sprachbund, are not absent in Judeo-Spanish itself (see, among others, Danon,
1922 for vocabulary items and Friedman and Joseph, 2014 for structural loans, as well
as for loans rooted in conversation needs). Words like JS anginara < Gr aginara
‘artichaut’, JS tifla < Gr tifla ‘blindness’, JS nekotchera < Gr nikokira ‘howsewife’, JS
na < Gr na ‘here it is’, etc. appear in the vocabulary (Danon, 1922). There is also
phonetic-phonological evidence about the effects from intense contact with Greek. Sala
(1976) attributes to a Greek influence the pronunciation of diphthongs such as [aw],
[ew] and [iw] as [av/af], [ev/ef] and [iv/if] (with [v] or [f] governed by voicing of the
following segment) in Judeo-Spanish of Thessaloniki, and Friedman and Joseph (2014)
mention the existence of the afficates [t∫] and [dʒ], typical of certain Northern Greek
varieties, which are absent from most continental Spanish dialects.
At the morpho-syntactic and syntactic levels, there are several phenomena due to
contact with Greek which have been described in detail by Friedman and Joseph (2014).
For instance, unlike modern or old Spanish, Judeo-Spanish shows both a protasis and
an apodosis in a conditional sentence with an indicative perfect, as in Modern Greek
(e.g. Gr. an ebenes ton evlepes ‘if you were to go in you could see him’, Friedman and
Joseph, 2014). Furthermore, as Wagner (1914) observes, also due to Greek,
reduplicated object pronouns occur more frequently in Constantinople Judeo-Spanish
than in Spanish.

7. Contact in modern times - internationalisms

The influence of Greek on the Romance languages (as well as on the other western
European languages) did not end with the Byzantine era (mid-15th century). According
to Adrados (2005: 269) there is a “steady escalation in the numbers of hellenisms
entering European language, which continues all the way up until the present day”.
Ancient Greek roots, affixes and word-formation patterns, the so-called “hellenisms”,
have been a fertile source for creating new items. Beside the existence of medieval
hellenisms transferred from Latin to Romance languages, there is an influx of Greek
cultural and scientific terms beginning with the 13th century. Adrados (2005: 271, 277)
provides a significant number of these terms in Spanish (e.g. alegoría ‘allegory’,
geometría ‘geometry’, bálsamo ‘balsam’, bufalo ‘buffalo’), in French21 (e.g. basilique
‘basilica’, église ‘church’, hérétique ‘heretic’, idée ‘idea’, paradis ‘paradise’) or in
Italian (e.g. antropofago ‘cannibal’, tetragono ‘square’, autentico ‘authentic’). In the
period from the 14th to 16th centuries, with the age of Renaissance, hellenisms were
introduced in the European languages in massive numbers, mainly through Italian
(where humanistic culture was particularly elevated) or French, with the intermediate
of Latin, or even directly from Greek literature. With some variability in their

20
This may be due to two reasons: first, a marginalization of Judeo-Spanish with respect to the Greek or
the Balkan in general linguistic social hierarchy. Second, the fact that while Jews learned other languages,
speakers of other languages did not learn Judeo-Spanish (See Friedman and Joseph, 2014 for details on
the socio-linguistic situation of the Jewish community in the Balkans).
21
Many French hellenisms were carried into English after the Norman conquest.
assimilation, these hellenisms were adapted to the morpho-phonological requirements
of the particular languages, while some of them underwent a semantic change. In the
following centuries, with the growing interest and development in science, technology
and the arts, Greek and Latin served as a huge deposit of words which could be used
for the expression of new concepts. For an illustration, suffice to mention the huge
number or terms introduced in the vocabulary of botany, zoology, medicine,
mathematics, geography, chemistry, grammar, literature, politics, and culture in
general.22 With the adoption of Greek words, roots, suffixes and prefixes became also
popular and started being used independently, in combination with non-Greek items
(e.g. 14th c. Fr historien < AG histori(a) + Fr -en).
During the next centuries, borrowing from Greek continued to grow in scientific
and educated language. New waves of Greek-based terms were supplied to express
scientific concepts and many neologisms were created, some of which with a change in
the suffix, the category or the meaning (e.g. 18th c. Sp heterogéneo ‘heterogeneous’ <
AG heterogenēs, 18th c. Sp polémica ‘discussion’ < AG polemikē ‘war-like’, Adrados,
2005). More specifically, in the last two centuries, hellenisms are constantly introduced
and nowadays, basic abstract concepts of western civilization and science are expressed
with Greek words, such as ‘theory’ (Gr theōria), ‘democracy’ (Gr dēmokratia),
‘politics’ (Gr politikē), ‘philosophy’ (Gr philolophia), ‘criterion’ (Gr kritērion),
‘method’ (Gr methodos), ‘problem’ (Gr. problēma), ‘synthesis’ (Gr synthesis), etc.
Even the name of Europe comes from Ancient Greek (Eurōpē). Scientific terminology
relies heavily on the use of Greek formatives (roots, suffixes, prefixes), which cover
the demands of new scholarly disciplines (e.g. informatics) and currents of thought, and
constitute a boundless source for the creation of neologisms which tend to be
international (internationalisms) passing from language to language, with slight
differences in form or meaning, due to the characteristics of the particular languages,
or even to errors in the transcription (Adrados, 2005: 285). In western European
languages, they are parts of a specific stratum of the lexicon, different from the native
one. A considerable number of them are compounds, usually called “neoclassical
compounds”, or hybrid forms, and sometimes re-enter the Greek vocabulary as calques,
in order to express the concepts which they were created for (Munske and Kirkness,
1996; Lüdeling 2006). For instance, the Αncient Greek words astēr ‘star’ and nautēs
‘sailor’ gave the term astronaut, which was adopted and integrated in Modern Greek
as astronaftis (following actual pronunciation). It is important to specify though that
internationalisms are consciously formed and, as such, they differ from loans which
enter a language via contact.
A stratum of Romance lexical items exists also in Modern Greek, which comes
from the second half of the 19th c. onwards (Contossopoulos, 1978). During this period,
Greek adopted a considerable number of French words expressing mainly cultural and
technological concepts. Some of them kept their original French morphology, but were
adapted to Greek pronunciation (e.g. Gr maneken ‘model’ < Fr mannequin, Gr sofer
‘driver’ < Fr chauffeur, Gr ansabl < Fr ensemble), while others were integrated in the
Greek morphology with the addition of a native inflectional ending (e.g. Gr zardinjera
‘window box’ < Fr jardinière). Today, there are hundreds of French words belonging
to specialized vocabularies, such as those of fashion (e.g. Gr manto < Fr manteau),
decoration and furniture (e.g. Gr skabo < Fr escabeau), food and cooking (e.g. Gr
22
For a list of hellenisms and their approximate appearance in several European languages, see, among
others, Adrados (2005), who also provides an extensive list of Greek-based prefixes, prefixoids, roots,
suffixes and suffixoids used in many western European languages.
kruasan < Fr croissant), entertainment (Gr dokimanter < Fr documentaire), athletics
(e.g. Gr turnua < Fr tournois), technology (e.g. Gr asanser < Fr ascenseur), and arts
(e.g. Gr galeri < Fr gallerie).23 According to Anastasiadi-Symeonidi (1994), the main
reason why French became the principal source of loans after the second half of the 19th
c., replacing Italo-romance, was the high prestige with which this language was
endowed in culture and diplomacy. For about one century, and up to the end of the
Second World War, French became the foreign language ‘par excellence’. It was taught
at school, and was also used by the upper classes for communicative purposes. During
this period, many French literary texts were translated in Greek, and French expressions
(e.g. Gr anfan gate < Fr enfant gâté, Gr anfas < Fr en face, Gr alakart < Fr à la carte,
etc.) entered everyday language. The influx of French words stopped in the second half
of the 20th century, when English loans started being abundantly introduced, because a
shift of interest to American culture and technology.

8. References
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Adrados, Francisco Rodriguez. 2005. A history of the Greek language. From its origins
to the present. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Anastasiadi-Symeonidi, Anna. 1994. Νεολογικός δανεισμός της Νεοελληνικής
[Neologism borrowing in Modern Greek] Thessaloniki: Institute of Modern Greek
Studies.
Andriotis, Nikolaos. 1974. Lexicon der Archaismen in Neugriechischen Dialekten.
Schriften der Balkankommission: Linguistische Abteilung.
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Dictionary of Modern Greek]. Athens: Centre of Lexicography.
Baglioni, Daniele. 2012. Some methodological remarks concerning the study of
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and Harald Hendrix (eds.) Cyprus and the Renaissance (1450-1650), 345-356.
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Balard, Michel. 1989. The Genoese in the Aegean (1204-1566). In Benjamin Arbel,
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Baldissera, Valeria. 2013. Il dialetto grico del Salento. Elementi balcanici e contatto
linguistico. Ph.D. Diss., Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca’Foscari.
Banfi, Emanuele. 1985. Quattro ‘lessici neogreci’ della Turcocrazia. Notizie di
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Battisti, Carlo. 1927. Appunti sulla storia e la difusione dell’ellenismo nell’Italia
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Béis Stamatis. 1993. Les fonctions syntactiques en aroumain. Les Travaux du S.E.L.F.
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Béis Stamatis. 2000. Le parler aroumain de Metsovo. Déscription d’une langue en voie
de disparition. Ph.D. Diss., Université Paris V- Sorbonne.
Biville, Frederique, 1990-1995. Les emprunts du latin au grec. Approche phonétique.
2 vols, Louvain: Peeters.

23
See Contossopoulos (1978) and Anastasiadi-Symeonidi (1994) for an extensive list of French-based
terms in Greek.
Biville, Frederique. 2002. La dimension grecque de la dérivation latine. Interférences
et emprunts. In Chantal Kirchner-Durand (ed.), Grammaire fondamentale du latin,
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