Things Which Are Greek

The Olympic competition is not the only international thing started, thousands of years back, in Greece. Very important parts of arts and sciences in the West came from the Greece. The Book of Christian religion, though it was started in the Middle East, was in Greek because it was the international language. After the Romans took the political power and their Latin became the international language, Greek was kept as an important instrument of learning. That's why Julius Caesar, a noted head of the Roman military forces and government, gave a talk in Greek. Because it was an overseas language to common persons, some Roman in the Shakespeare's play said, "It was Greek to me."

Greek is still important in high-level universities in the West. Even at universities in Britain and the United States, where most of talks and discussion are done in English, a great number of words from Greek are still used as special words in different branches of arts and sciences. Ogden would say that all of those high-level words might be put into Basic words. But even some Basic words like "automatic," "physical", "political" were made from Greek words. "Theory" is another Basic word from Greek, and a number of theories are in fact from Greek writings. It's an important part of their knowledge base.

Learning Greek, however, is one of the hardest things to do for most of the university persons. It's a language with completely different letters and complex rules of word forms. Giving attention to details of the language gets learners tired of learning. So I. A. Richards put two of important Greek books into simple Basic-like English: The Iliad of Homer and Plato's Republic. ¶ 04:40