Talk:Ancient Greek

Untitled
Hi folks. I jumped on this text because I think it'll be reasonably straightforward, at least in the early stages. Everyone has to learn the alphabet, definite articles, and so on, so I thought I'd get it started and hope some other folks join in.

I'm going to set up a page on the alphabet and pronunciation, which is the necessary first chapter. Then I'll worry about what comes next. Do please offer suggestions.

--George McAllister 21:02, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Is there any activity on this anymore, or just the initial creation? I would like to help. Have you thought about the structure of the wikibook?

I may be adding things as I think of them, but it would be nice to keep flow with a ToC or other pre-planned format.

--Michael Greene 12:23, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I would also be interested in helping, however, I lack the experience and knowledge to take a leadership role. I am a beginning ancient/classical Greek student with goals of studying post-grad classics. My hope is that working on a wiki like this from the early stages will reinforce my grammar studies, provide experience in shaping how the language can be taught, and learn more about the wikibook project.

As a beginner, where I might be of best use now would be in populating grammar tables and paradigms, researching examples, and other important, though time-consuming details. It could be that a more experienced Greek teacher could provide guidance about the overall arc of the course, the pace, etc., but would be less enthusiastic, as an example, about sitting down to type out tables. Perhaps that's where I can help.

Michael, I agree that a ToC is the place to start, at least one that covers the true and most unavoidable fundamentals, e.g. all parts of speech, present tense verbs, esp. to be.

To keep things moving, I typed up a table of definite articles (one of those unavoidables). I would post it but 1) I'll have to figure out how to edit/supplement the current ToC and 2) The table presupposes some other fundamentals, such as case and number, that may need to be written first.

Sorry for the dry first post, but you have to start somewhere. This could be fun (if we're already at the point of reading the AG discussion page, we must get some pleasure from studying the language, right?).

-Patrick

--Tomatosoupcake 16:13, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Anyone still coming around here to talk? I can help on a limited basis. I've done page layout work for myself and professionally. I have taught Latin and Greek at the college level part time (got the sheepskins and everything), and I have some experience with computers. One thing that will help right up front, is a resource that's been around for a long time. It's a really good web page, though my thought is that this Wikibook either needs to create a similar page, or we need to get permission to link directly to the page I am referring to.

The page has a very nice list of free and for sale Greek fonts, as well as instructions for displaying ancient Greek in a web browser and sections of test text that the viewer can use to verify that the browser is working properly. The URL is http://www.tlg.uci.edu/help/UnicodeTest.html.

The main site is for the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), which is an academic project to digitize all remaining Greek literature to make it computer usable-accessible. The project has already been around for about 20 years.

Another good source to link to would probably be the Perseus Project at Tufts University: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. They have a wicked large amount of stuff already available on the web, including pictures, grammar aids, texts, maps, etc. Though I'm thinking the text portion might best be saved until after the students of this book here are ready for more challenging Greek texts! :-)

Darklon 09:50, 15 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah, great! The unicode fonts page looks good: I've added Perseus as a general resource, though I'm not sure if we should have a section (or even a page) directed at fonts. I suppose Wikibooks predetermines most of the layout, but it's still customiseable (e.g. see the modern greek pages). I'm aware that I may have messed up the IPA for the alphas and etas on the alphabet page, by the way (I did it all from memory); I will check - the problem comes trying to work out what changes came when!
 * Anyway, what I propose be done is that in each chapter, we havbe three sections: one for technical details: grammar, morphology, and so forth, one for teaching: Greek sentences or paragraphs with English translations (possibly some vocab), and the third for exercises: parsing, translations, compositions, and perhaps comprehension exercises (perhaps vocab glossed).
 * Bearing in mind that we won't have the resources to write our own lexicon, I suspect we willl have to encourage people to use Perseus beyond the first few chapters.

--NemaFakei 13:40, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi all, I've added some material to the nouns section. Does anyone know of a way to put a line over the vowels to indicate that they're long? It'd be really helpful since accentuation depends so much on vowel quantity.

Umop Apsdn 19:03, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

down the bottom of the edit window there are a whole lot of vowels with accents and macrons etc. (macrons are what you are looking for - the line over the long vowels) if that it too laborious then you can write your edit in a word processing document with greek script and then copy it into the editing window. hope this helps Storeye 11:58, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello everyone. I was tempted to append the nouns page with a simple explanation of the second declension and modify the table that's already been posted for the first declension to include some masculine and feminine omicron-sigma stem nouns and maybe one or two neuter omictron-nu stems, but I decided I should run it by the group before I do anything (I could e-mail or post my handiwork if it sounds like a good idea to run it by everybody). I agree with a previous post that maybe it should be more divided up with some exercises, as it is an instructional text and if its present form is expanded it may just read like the wikipedia article on ancient greek. I'm only a beginner, and I study alone at that (out of Mastronarde's Attic Greek, which I only recommend for the very serious), but working with such grammars I can do quite a bit of grunt work (though my knowledge of the differences between the different dialects is severely deficient, so i can really only speak for the Attic variety). Nice work so far, hope I can be of some assistance because I'm very excited about such a project.

p.s. I don't know how to use whatever code it is that's been used for the tables and script thus far, and i've been trying to work with my character map, which takes a long time and lacks a rough breathing sign. If anyone could fill me in on the right way to do this, I'd be glad to.

Slamoureux1 22:08, 6 May 2007 (UTC)Spencer Lamoureux

Homeric, Attic, or Koine?
Well, I'm new to this site, so I'll admit I haven't looked through this much; but at a quick glance and a scroll, I haven't been able to tell just how ancient this Greek is. Will this be Homeric, Attic, Koine, or what? -Thanks.

Work on Ancient Greek
Hi people,

I was planning on doing some work on this textbook since it looks like it hasn't been modified in a few years. I'm a PhD student in classics and I thought I would add a bunch of material, but I don't want to step one anyone's toes. Let me know if I should refrain because someone is currently working on it.

Thanks.

Anyone here?
Hey folks, I am interested in seeing if i can contribute to our ancient greek pages as its something I am have been studying in university, but this looks very inactive. Just want to check if anyone is still watching the page and is interested in contributing when they can.

I also second the question above regarding what variation of greek we will be focusing on here. My experience extends to Attic Greek. Wobblywatch (discuss • contribs) 22:56, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Please do so, contribute! Attic Greek would be great. Genoskill (discuss • contribs) 01:09, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

typo
I believe that the word ἰπποπόταμος in the section Rules for Accentuation has the wrong breathing mark over the ἰ (a smooth breathing mark instead of a rough breathing mark).

My knowledge of ancient greek is very small, so I hesitated to go ahead and change it myself, but I wanted to point it out as a possible typo to a knowledgeable person DlronW (discuss • contribs) 23:19, 11 May 2023 (UTC)