To What Extent Was Classical Latin Affected by Classical Greek?

Question

To what extent was Classical Latin influenced by Classical Greek in areas such as pronunciation, grammar, literature, etc.? I would appreciate a quick overview of the list of influences Greek had on Latin and a few examples of those known influences.

Answer 1

This is only a partial answer.

The most obvious area of influence is vocabulary. There are a fair number of words that were loaned into Latin from Greek. There are also some terms that were "calqued" from Greek. You can see explanations and examples in this paper: "An Overview of Latin Morphological Calques on Greek Technical Terms: Formation and Success", by Eleanor Detreville, 2015.

I would say that there was fairly little influence in pronunciation. Loanwords from Greek could use a few sounds that didn't originally occur in Latin, but from what I recall none of the foreign sounds borrowed from Greek into Classical Latin left a lasting mark on the sound inventories of the languages that developed from Latin. (For example, French rythme, from Latin rhythmus, is pronounced [ʁitm], the same as if it were spelled *ritme. Greek th and y aren't associated with unique sounds in French, nor in any other Romance language that I know of.) It is thought that even in the time period of Classical Latin, some speakers may have replaced foreign sounds in Greek words with a similar Latin sound.

Many meters used in Latin poetry, such as dactylic hexameter, were taken from Greek.