You will prepare and submit a term paper on Latin and Greek Classical Languages. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Latin and Greek Classical Languages. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length. Greek and Latin are often associated and both are academically classified as classical languages, with Greek evolving as the language of intellectual choice. &nbsp.The supposition that the latter derived largely from the former is a prevalent point of view and seems to have a basis in fact if one takes Diringer’s extensive analysis to heart as presented by J.B.Calvert in The Latin Alphabet, an extract of which appears below.

The Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26 letters, which was in turn derived from the archaic Greek alphabet, which came from the Phoenician. The digamma, which represented a w sound in Greek was adopted for the different Latin sound f that did not occur in Greek. The gamma was written C in Etruscan and represented both the hard g and k sounds in Latin, which was confusing. All of this reinforces the notion of Greek as the root language. Some of the old letters dropped from the Greek alphabet were also retained as numbers in the Latin. The same thing happened in Latin with a few of the Etruscan letters that did not correspond to Latin sounds. The number symbols evolved into the normal letters C, L, M and D in the course of time, though the symbol for 1000 was adapted for expressing larger powers of 10 by adding more forward and backward Cs. It is said that the L came from the Etruscan chi, but it could just as well have been half of the C symbol, as the D comes from half of the M. All these number symbols represented abacus counter columns, together with the I, V and X, so that I, C and M need be repeated no more than four times, V, L, and D no more than twice, in specifying a number. The representation of large numbers and of fractions in Roman numerals or Greek numerals are a complicated subject. Roman numerals were used for business, Greek numerals for science. The latter indicates that the use of Greek by academics in classical studies over Latin may reinforce the notion that the former is considered a more academic language and the latter a more practical linguistic choice over history.

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