Name of Greece


The name of Greece differs in Greek compared with the names used for the country in other languages and cultures, just like the names of the Greeks. The ancient and modern name of the country is Hellas or Hellada
, and its official name is the Hellenic Republic, "Helliniki Dimokratia". In English, however, the country is usually called Greece, which comes from the Latin Graecia and literally means 'the land of the Greeks'.

Origin

The English name :wikt:Greece|Greece and the similar adaptations in other languages derive from the Latin name :wikt:Graecia|Graecia, literally meaning 'the land of the Greeks', which was used by Ancient Romans to denote the area of modern-day Greece. Similarly, the Latin name of the nation was Graeci, which is the origin of the English name :wikt:Greeks|Greeks.
Those names, in turn, trace their origin from :wikt:Graecus|Graecus, the Latin adaptation of the Greek name :wikt:Γραικός|Γραικός, which means 'Greek', but its etymology remains uncertain. It is unclear why the Romans called the country Graecia and its people Graeci, but the Greeks called their land Hellas and themselves Hellenes. Several speculations have been made.
William Smith notes in his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography that foreigners frequently refer to people by a different name from their native one.
Aristotle was the first to use the name Graeci, in his Meteorology. He wrote that the area around Dodona and the Achelous River was inhabited by the Selli and a people, who had been called Graeci but were called Hellenes by his time.
From that statement, it is asserted that the name of Graeci was once widely used in Epirus and the rest of the western coast of Greece. It thus became the name by which the Hellenes were known to the Italic peoples, who were on the opposite side of the Ionian Sea.
According to Hesiod, in his Catalogue of Women, Graecus was the son of Pandora and Zeus and gave his name to the people who followed the Hellenic customs. His brother Latinus gave his name to the Latins. Similarly, the eponymous Hellen is supposed to have given his name to the Greeks, or Hellenes.
In his Ethnica, Stephanus of Byzantium also states that Graecus, the son of Thessalus, was the origin of the name Graeci for the Hellenes.
The name Yūnān, came through Old Persian during the Achaemenid Empire. It was derived from the Old Persian Yauna for the Ionian Greeks, on the western coast of Asia Minor and were the first Greeks to come into contact with the Persians. The term would eventually be applied to all the Greeks. Today, words derived from Yūnān can be found in Persian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Indian languages, Pashto, Laz, Indonesian, and Malay.
The eastern part of the Roman Empire, which was predominantly Greek-speaking, gave rise to the name Ῥωμανία. In fact, for a long time that started in Late Antiquity, the Greeks called themselves Ῥωμαῖοι. Those terms or related ones are still sometimes used even in Modern Greek: Ρωμιός, Ρωμιοσύνη.
There was tension with Western Europe on how Roman the western and the eastern parts of the Roman Empire really were. The historian Hieronymus Wolf, after the Eastern Roman Empire had ceased to exist, was the first to call it the Byzantine Empire, the term that later became usual in the West. However, because it lasted almost 1000 years longer than the Western Roman Empire, Persians, Arabs, and Turks, all in the East, used and sometimes still use terms from Rhomania or Rome, such as Rûm, to refer to its land or people.

List of names in other languages

Graecia-derived names

The first major form of names derives from the Latin Graecus and Graecia or their equivalent forms in Greek whence the former derive themselves. These terms have fallen out of use in Greek.
The second major form, used in many languages and in which the common root is yun or ywn, is borrowed from the Greek name Ionia, the Ionian tribe region of Asia Minor. In Greek, these forms have never normally been used to denote the whole Greek nation or Greece.
In Sanskrit literature in India, the word यवन yavana is derived from this origin. It was used specifically for Greek people until 250 BCE while Indian kingdoms often traded with Greece. After Alexander's invasion on western borders of India, the word took a new meaning as foreigner or invader. The word यवन yawan, meaning 'foreigner,' is still in use in languages like Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam.
The third major form, "Hellas" and its derivatives, is used by a few languages around the world, including Greek itself. In several European languages in which the normal term is derived from Graecia, names derived from Hellas exist as rare or poetic alternatives.
The Georgian name of Greece is derived from the Georgian word "brdzeni", with the meaning "wise people's country".
From its establishment after the outbreak of the Greek War of Liberation in 1821, the modern Greek state has used a variety of official names, most often designating changes of regime.