Comments on: Words beginning with “homo-”

By: mand

mand — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:52:34 +0000

@3. Thanx, Alexandre. Shows how badly rusty i am, using -ros instead of -ra for the genitive. I have no primer here to give me apparent expertise! Your hetero- point is a good one too.

By: Alexandre Piccolo

Alexandre Piccolo — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:26:06 +0000

No, all I’ve said about greek should be taken as “classic greek” or “the athenian dialect” (which is what we usually learn in school’s greek manual) – and I must confess that I’ve never studied modern greek.

Minutes after I’ve written my comment, I remembered that another nice way of talking about the “homo-” greek prefix is in opposition to “hetero-”, its “natural antonym”. The explanation may become clearer to some readers when using opposite words.

By: mand

mand — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:47:07 +0000

@1. Alexandre Piccolo - I was going to say exactly that; the rule of thumb i was taught is that 'anthropos' means man as opposed to god, whereas 'aner/andros' means man as opposed to woman. But you did the accents better! Out of interest, is it modern Greek in your comment?

By: Alexandre Piccolo

Alexandre Piccolo — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:12:58 +0000

A brief word just to enhance what was said:

In greek, “homos” is and works like an adjective (found in greek dictionaries in its triple form “homós, homé, homón”, i.e. masculin, feminin and neuter). In latin, “homo” is a masculin noun for “man, human being, person, individual, a member of a crew” (as Oxford Latin Dictionary quotes, found in its nominative and genitive form: “homo, hominis”). The similarity of these forms is a simple coincidence: the transliteration of the greek word (let’s recall that greek has its own alphabet…) happens to have the same written form as the latin word.

In greek, both “ánthropos, ánthropoy” and “anér, ándra” are nouns form “man”, but the first is usually used for “man kind” and the second for “man” in opposition to “woman” (in greek, “gyné, gynaikós”).