Ethnic Trapeze of Greece

As my rusty Greek becomes somewhat better oiled, I've been thinking a lot about the language. It is amazing to think that as a recorded language, it has been around for 3500 years--from Linear B and Homer to the newspapers in the local periptero. Of course, a linguist might argue that modern Greek is no closer to ancient Greek than modern Italian is to Latin; but still, anyone who can read the ancient language can see traces of it in the modern language, even if the grammar and a lot of the vocabulary has changed. Take the phrase that is the title of this post--it is how a student interpreted the sign on the ATM in the plateia. It really is "EQNIKH TRAPEZA THS ELLADOS, the National Bank of Greece. But each word has a long history. "Ethnike" which now means national, comes from "ethnos", the ancient word for people. "Trapeza" means bank, and meant it in ancient times; but it also means "table" in both modern and ancient Greek, because back then, bankers were simply people who set up tables in the agora to change or loan money. And of course "ellas" is the ancient "Hellas", which has been the name for Greece since just after Homer's time (he knew of Hellas only as a small region in northern Greece). The word "agora" also has that kind of history. It was a gathering place, a market, and a political and social center. We'll be visiting the ancient Agora of Athens this weekend; and yet the little street market where we all buy our fruits and vegetables on Mondays is called a "laiki agora", a "people's market". And the Greeks still meet in central squares to shop, argue, and see each other: Syntagma is the modern version of this for all of Athens, but every neighborhood has its plateia. So the language reflects some pretty deep continuities in Greek life. I wonder if the Greeks are ever burdened by the long history of their language--at least, the ones who were paying attention when they studied ancient Greek in school. (Which they all do, I think--how many of us got through reading Shakespeare in his original language, or even worse, Chaucer or Beowulf? And those texts are way younger than ancient Greek writing.) Do they ever think, when they look at the bus stop sign that says "stasi", that this is basically the same word that in ancient times meant civil war? I don't think they think about it. In general, we are programmed to understand current meanings and nuances of words--we're generally very good at that--but we don't carry etymological dictionaries around in our heads. Still, for those of us who are ancient language buffs, every trip down the street is a revelation of the persistence of the past in our lives.