The phonemic Interaction between the Greek and the English Language. Dr. Alexandros Papanis Democritus University of Thrace

The juxtaposition of English and Modern Greek phonemes in terms of their points and modes of articulation illustrates the potential points of linguistic borrowing from Greek to English. To such an aim greatly contributes David Seaman’s work “Modern Greek and British English in Contact” where the consonantal and vowel phonemes of English and Greek are presented in detail, helping the readers compare and contrast the two languages. Comparing the phonemic inventories of the two languages one may realize that there are quantitative as well as qualitative differences in the two systems: there are twice as many vowels in English compared to the Greek ones, whereas for the consonants the opposite is true. It is also worth mentioning that all language changes take place anywhere, not necessarily under the influence of other languages. At any time, in any language in contact with another there may be both inter -and- intralinguistic force. In general, when attempting to predict linguistic borrowing between English and Greek, linguists now generally agree that “the greater the number of similarities present between the foreign sound and the native phoneme in both articulation and distribution, the more difficult the mastery of a particular foreign sound or sequence of sounds will be” (Koutsoudas 1962 p.207). My experience as a native speaker of Greek would strongly corroborate that statement.