So apparently people are interested in learning Ancient Greek and since I've taken a year and a half of it and still have the textbooks, I figure that I can help people out. I have not yet been able to find a pdf of the textbook online, but if worst comes to worst I can scan any relevant pages and attach them or something. I'm not sure exactly how this will work. Probably I will explain each section in a post or two, and link to any outside sources that might help. People can ask questions and I'll do my best to answer them. I also have a shitton of charts and stuff from last year that I can scan and post as well. I don't know if greek characters work on this forum. Whether they do or not will likely affect how this works. If they do work, I'll have to figure out how to show accents and breath marks. Spoiler: testing greek letters χαιρη Basically, reply if you're interested, and I'll work on getting some basic stuff up here within the next few days. Bear with me while I figure out what I'm doing, please. Edit: It seems that the greek letters do work. If for some reason they aren't working for anyone, it's probably your problem and not mine. But this should make it simpler.
I took 5 years of Ancient Greek in Secondary School, so I might be able to help out too :) Though my Ancient Greek is very far from great :P
Always interested in learning new things, though I'm learning a couple other languages right now so hopefully I don't get things too mixed up
zaire :) this should be exciting. i'm tempted to bug [our classics teacher] about this, but that would be bringing [our classics teacher] to kintsugi so no.
Alright. I have a couple hours free tomorrow so I'll take a look and see what I can post for you guys. @Emma thanks for offering to help out :) If I need anything, I'll look to you.
*lurk lurk* The other day, I happened to pick up a book at a used book sale called "Homeric Greek" and it's apparently meant to teach it to you. So I had to buy it! I haven't had a chance to give it a good look though.
Okay so, since @wes scripserat at the very least keeps associating the wrong letters together, we'd better start with the alphabet. This link has the alphabet, both upper and lowercase, with some helpful pronunciation tips. If you scroll down, there's some more information. Ignore what it says about sigmas, though, there appear to be some typos. When a sigma appears at the end of a word, it's written ς , and when it appears anywhere else in a word, it's written σ . It barely mentions accents, so I'll explain those in more detail in a moment. What it says about breathings is pretty much it. They go over the letter with the breathing, and a smooth breathing goes this way: > and a rough breathing goes this way: < . Any word starting with a vowel must have a breathing. Additionally, any word starting with rho must have a rough breathing. What it says about iota subscripts is all there is to it. You don't pronounce them, but they're useful when you're trying to figure out a form. Keep them in mind. Punctuation is relatively simple. A period and a semicolon are both raised dots, commas are commas, and a question mark is a semicolon. (( e.g., How are you; )) Basically only proper names are capitalized, and the first word of a paragraph or a quote. Generally, the first word of a sentence is not capitalized. Accents: Technically they're supposed to indicate a change in pitch, but everyone just pretends that they're for stress. Like breathings, they go on top of whatever letter/syllable needs to be stressed. Because I don't feel like hunting down actual accents to copy/paste, I'm going to use / to signify an acute accent, \ to signify a grave accent, and ^ to signify a circumflex. This is a bit complicated so please ask me if you don't understand something. Accents can only appear on the last three syllables of a word. These are the ultima (last syllable), the penult (second to last), and the antepenult (third to last. The grave accent is simplest, because you only use it on the ultima, and only when the word is immediately followed by another word. Acute accents can appear on any of the last three syllables. They cannot appear over the antepenult when the ultima is long, and it can't appear over the penult if the penult is long and the ultima is short. Circumflex accents can appear over the ultima or the penult, and they can only appear over long vowels. Short vowels: epsilon, omicron Long vowels: eta, omega Either (will appear with a line over them if they're long): alpha, iota, upsilon That's all for now. If you have any questions, feel free to post them.
