> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > By the way, can somebody tell me where the hell the word Graeci (Greeks) comes from? It doesn't sound remotely like "Hellenes." Was there some tribe or city-state at the wast of Greece, err I mean Hellas, by that name that the Romans took the word from?
That is precisely the case, as I understand it.
> <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/greece>
> From Latin Graecia < Ancient Greek Γραικός (Graekos), a character in
> Greek mythology, the son of Thessalos, the king of Fthia, whom Ἑλλάς
> (Hellas, "Greece") and Ἕλληνες (Hellenes, "the Greeks") were also
> named after.
Wikipedia gets it backwards. This mythological "Graecus" would be an eponymous ancestor, a back-formation from the name of the tribe. Like Romulus.
> Any guesses why it would be Řecko in Czech?
Sounds like the same word to me. There's a dialect variant of Graikos that doesn't have the initial gamma but does have a rough breathing. I don't know what the little diacritic over the R means in Czech, phonetically -- is it some kind of fricative?
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org