Philes and Phobes We owe a great deal to Greece, and I’m not referring to moussaka, delicious though it is, or even to concepts of democratic governance, momentous though they are. I have something more fundamental in mind, for insofar as language underpins human society, the linguistic impact of Greek on English is far-reaching. The Greek alphabet influenced the Latin alphabet, which many countries use today, and thousands of English words in both general and specialized circulation derive from Greek, including “alphabet,” which, fittingly, embodies the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: “alpha” and “beta.” Xenophon Zolotas, a onetime prime [...]