Foreigners watching things Greek must have noticed that the Greek premiership passed from a Papandreou to a Papademos. Those prone to interlinguistic comparisons but unfamiliar with the intricacies of Greek patronymics may have wondered why the Greeks use papa so often in their names, where one would expect to see an affix like –son, e.g. Scarlett Johansson. Family names are often based on the name or the profession of the father or some other ancestor, not that of a descendant. However, a Google search would soon reveal that papa as a prefix in Greek names stands for papás, the colloquial Greek word for “priest”. Thus, Papandreou means there was a priest named Andrew in the family history, and Papadopoulos, the most common of Greek surnames, means “the priest’s son” (yes, –poulos is a common Greek ending for “the son of”).
Apart from the fact that there have been three Papandreous in the prime minister’s office (grandfather, father and son), there are quite a few Papa-somethings of international renown, though Greeks cannot (and should not) lay claim to Haiti’s Papa Doc (the nickname for François Duvalier, Haiti’s dictator in the sixties). With so many Papadopouloses around, we could afford to have our own “Papa Dop”. This was the nickname given to George Papadopoulos, the leader of the military government that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. More recently, Cyprus’s fifth president was the late Tassos Papadopoulos. Film buffs must be familiar with Irene Papas of Zorba the Greek, The Guns of Navarone and other worthy movies. Eurovision fans know that Greece’s only win to date was scored by Helena Paparizou in 2005. The composer known as Vangelis is a Greek whose surname is Papathanasiou. Alexandros Papadiamantis was an influential novelist and short-story writer, relatively unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. The Pap test, which has saved and goes on saving the lives of many women around the world, was invented by and named after the Greek doctor George Papanicolaou.
You wouldn’t be surprised to know that the English papa and the Greek papás are not unconnected. In fact, it all started with babies being taught to call their fathers with the repetition of the syllable pa, in the same way that such words common to many languages were formed (e.g. mama, dada, baba, nana). The word is first recorded in the vocative (πάππα φίλε, dear papa) in Homer’s Odyssey. The nominative πάππας (páppas) was then formed and was later simplified to πάπας (pápas). Πάππος (páppos) was a variant that meant “grandfather” (παππούς in modern Greek). In Latin papa was “father” in nursery language. The French brought the word to England, where the native word was daddy. Papa was used in courtly speech and remained a continental affectation until the late 18th century.
Meanwhile, the Greek word pápas was used by early Christians for “bishop”, and its Latin descendant papa was applied from the 5th century onwards to the bishop of Rome, the pope. In English the word underwent the normal medieval phonetic changes to become pope, while the derivatives papacy and papal arrived later, and kept their a.
In modern Greek, πάπας (pápas) is the word for “pope”, while παπάς (papás) came to mean “priest”. One of the major Greek dictionaries argues that the word should be spelt with a double “p”, as in ancient Greek, and in fact the Greek surname Pappas (Παππάς) is often spelt in this way. However, the thousands of Greeks whose surname begins with Papa would tend to disagree with such a change.
Apart from the fact that there have been three Papandreous in the prime minister’s office (grandfather, father and son), there are quite a few Papa-somethings of international renown, though Greeks cannot (and should not) lay claim to Haiti’s Papa Doc (the nickname for François Duvalier, Haiti’s dictator in the sixties). With so many Papadopouloses around, we could afford to have our own “Papa Dop”. This was the nickname given to George Papadopoulos, the leader of the military government that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. More recently, Cyprus’s fifth president was the late Tassos Papadopoulos. Film buffs must be familiar with Irene Papas of Zorba the Greek, The Guns of Navarone and other worthy movies. Eurovision fans know that Greece’s only win to date was scored by Helena Paparizou in 2005. The composer known as Vangelis is a Greek whose surname is Papathanasiou. Alexandros Papadiamantis was an influential novelist and short-story writer, relatively unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. The Pap test, which has saved and goes on saving the lives of many women around the world, was invented by and named after the Greek doctor George Papanicolaou.
You wouldn’t be surprised to know that the English papa and the Greek papás are not unconnected. In fact, it all started with babies being taught to call their fathers with the repetition of the syllable pa, in the same way that such words common to many languages were formed (e.g. mama, dada, baba, nana). The word is first recorded in the vocative (πάππα φίλε, dear papa) in Homer’s Odyssey. The nominative πάππας (páppas) was then formed and was later simplified to πάπας (pápas). Πάππος (páppos) was a variant that meant “grandfather” (παππούς in modern Greek). In Latin papa was “father” in nursery language. The French brought the word to England, where the native word was daddy. Papa was used in courtly speech and remained a continental affectation until the late 18th century.
Meanwhile, the Greek word pápas was used by early Christians for “bishop”, and its Latin descendant papa was applied from the 5th century onwards to the bishop of Rome, the pope. In English the word underwent the normal medieval phonetic changes to become pope, while the derivatives papacy and papal arrived later, and kept their a.
In modern Greek, πάπας (pápas) is the word for “pope”, while παπάς (papás) came to mean “priest”. One of the major Greek dictionaries argues that the word should be spelt with a double “p”, as in ancient Greek, and in fact the Greek surname Pappas (Παππάς) is often spelt in this way. However, the thousands of Greeks whose surname begins with Papa would tend to disagree with such a change.
