1214. This week, we look at why we say, "It's all Greek to me" when we don't understand something. We trace the phrase from medieval monks who couldn't read Greek manuscripts to Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," and look at how other languages, like Czech, German, and Cantonese, express the same idea of incomprehension.
1214. This week, we look at why we say, "It's all Greek to me" when we don't understand something. We trace the phrase from medieval monks who couldn't read Greek manuscripts to Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," and look at how other languages, like Czech, German, and Cantonese, express the same idea of incomprehension.
The Greek segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about why we say something confusing is "Greek to us," and where that phrase actually comes from.
This first segment is by Valerie Fridland.
by Valerie Fridland
Watching Odysseus’s epic journey homeward following the Trojan War in Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of "The Odyssey" has introduced Homer’s poem to a new generation of fans. And though Latin may have gotten more glory for its contribution to modern English vocabulary, the movie is also a good reminder of how Ancient Greek gave us many of the words we use today to talk about modern philosophy, medicine, and science. For example, Romans actually brought a lot of Greek words into Latin, and those Greek borrowings gave us some of our most widely used medical and scientific words, such as “method,” “theory,” and “stomach,” as well as that widely used “-logy” ending, as in "pathology," "psychology," and "etymology."
But despite Greek being a significant intellectual and cultural touchstone both in the ancient world and the modern one, English speakers today bring up that specific language, as in the expression “It’s Greek to me,” mainly when describing things they don’t understand, rather than for many of the things that they do. So how did the language that provided so much toward Modern English’s linguistic roots become the language associated with incomprehension?
Well, it really started with the Romans. They might have conquered Greece in 146 BC, but their relationship with the Greeks was a bit complicated. They viewed the Greeks as inferior, at least from a military perspective, but there were also many Romans who greatly valued Greek intellectual and cultural life.
Writing in the 1st century BCE, the Roman poet Horace penned a famous line that translates roughly as “Upon being conquered, Greece captured her savage conqueror and brought arts to rustic Roman society.” The sentiment expressed here was that Greek culture had a tremendous influence on the Romans, and it's this merging of Roman and Greek culture that's been hypothesized as laying the groundwork for people to say, “It's Greek to me.”
How so? Well, during Horace’s time, many elite Romans spoke both Latin and Greek, but about a thousand years later, by the medieval period, the knowledge of Greek had waned. So when monastic scribes came across Greek in important manuscripts, they couldn't translate it and would mark the text with a note in Latin that essentially said, “This is in Greek and it cannot be read.”
One could say this is the earliest version of the expression “It’s all Greek to me,” but the saying we are familiar with today didn’t really take off until Shakespeare used it in his play "Julius Caesar."
In the play, Casca, a Roman senator conspiring against Caesar, overhears a comment the famous orator, Cicero makes after Caesar faints. When later asked by a co-conspirator what Cicero had said, Casca responds with, “But those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; But, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” What Casca meant here was that he could not understand the comment because it was literally spoken in Greek and therefore incomprehensible — something Cicero may have done to ensure that only other elites could understand his snide remark.
Shakespeare was probably not the first to use this phrase, as it is believed that Shakespeare was playing on what was already a familiar saying used when someone didn’t understand something, that is, “it was Greek,” even if Greek wasn’t actually involved.
And evidence that the use of something like “It’s Greek to me” to express a lack of understanding was around before Shakespeare comes from other early modern period writings. For example, a similar phrasing (Tis Greek to me, my Lord) is found in a slightly earlier play, "The Scottish History of James the Fourth" by Robert Greene.
What’s interesting is that many languages have expressions very similar to “It’s all Greek to me,” but which draw upon other languages instead of “Greek.” The Greeks, for instance, say “It's all Chinese” when something is incomprehensible, while the Italians think incomprehensibility sounds like Arabic.
Some expressions don’t even reference languages, but other things entirely. Czech says something like, “It sounds like a Spanish village to me,” and German says something sounds like "a Bohemian village" or a "Czech village," while in Polish one might say, “It’s all black magic.”
Like Greek, Chinese is one of the more common comparative languages used by speakers of other languages in forming the expression for things they don’t understand. Language scholars have suggested this is because for many westerners, Chinese is indeed a hard language to learn, particularly because of its non-alphabetic writing and tonal system.
So, what do the Chinese say? Mandarin speakers compare hard-to-understand things with heavenly script, but the overall winner for the most unusual and creative comparison has to be Cantonese, where languages like English that are written in cursive are said to be like “chicken intestines.”
This saying arose during Hong Kong’s colonial period under British rule when Cantonese speakers used it to refer to having a lack of English proficiency, as written English, with its squiggly cursive lines, resembled chicken intestines.
Outside of this Cantonese expression, English is rarely mentioned as the language model for something difficult to understand. Does this mean English is just so transparent a language that it rarely makes for incomprehensibility?
Probably not, since anyone who thinks English is easy has probably not had to figure out its perplexing vowel changes (for example, what happens to “sane” in “sanity” and which is it, “tomayto” or “tomahto”?) or unpredictable stress patterns (just compare pronunciations for “vitamin” and “advertisement” across British and American English).
More likely, English is less common because there is hardly anyplace left on the planet where English is not the lingua franca for trade, travel and business. The Cantonese expression grew out of the colonial spread of English as the language of government and trade in a place where many inhabitants couldn’t yet understand it, but it has since become an even more pervasive global language. In other words, too many things sound like English nowadays for English to often be held up as a model of incomprehensibility.
Ironically, Greek was not yet that dominant in Homer's day and centuries later, Greek had become a prominent global language, much as English is today, but now we use it as shorthand for something we don't understand. Does this mean, centuries from now, children will say “It’s all English to me” when encountering strange sounding tongues? Well, Greek's own history suggests that cultural and linguistic influence doesn't always offer protection, so only time will tell.
Additional Sources
https://www.firstedit.co.uk/blog/2023/05/language-of-the-month-greek/
https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-has-greek-influenced-english-language
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hi Mignon, it's Brenda. I'm calling to share a familect that was made up by my little boys. I've got three little boys, and in our home we have two categories of breakfast cereal. There's cereal, and then there's 'treat of a cereal.' As I'm sure you can imagine, cereal is the regular morning cereal that's not sweetened or not sweetened too much — maybe Cheerios, or shredded wheat, or bran flakes. And then 'treat of a cereal' is the sugary or sweeter cereal, maybe like, Froot Loops, or Honey Bunches of Oats, or Frosted Flakes.
And of course, that leads to the discussion of how you say it in plural. I'm assuming it would be 'treats of a cereal,' not 'treat of a cereals,' kind of like how we say I have a few sisters-in-law, not sister-in-laws. Anyway, enjoy our familect made up by my little boys. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye."
Thanks, Brenda!
That's such an interesting question about how to make "treat of a cereal" plural. I had to think about it for a while, but there's actually a family of phrases that are similar, and I think you'll recognize them once I start listing them off: "a jewel of a city," "a monster of a storm," "a beast of a problem," and so on. Linguists sometimes call these "binomial noun phrases" or "of-binomials" — in other words, noun phrases built from two nouns joined by the word "of."
And although it's rare to have to make them plural, when we do it, we usually make both parts plural. So we'd say something like, "Those were monsters of storms last year," and "Those are jewels of cities." So when you're making it plural with your family, I'd talk about "treats of cereals," like maybe "The treats of cereals are on the top shelf so the kids can't get them without me." And notice that the “a” drops out along the way.
Thanks for the great familect and interesting question.
And remember, if you want to call with your familect, it's easy! The instructions are in the show notes, and I'd love to hear it. And thank you to Mary, too, who just called with a nice thank-you message. I love to hear those too. Very kind of you.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; and Nat Hoopes, who went to Sevilla this summer and was inspired to buy a classical guitar.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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