Learn Ancient Greek

Introduction

The resources below are by no means comprehensive, but are a very good start indeed for anyone wanting to learn Ancient Greek. For Ancient Greek queries, you can use the fora.

A typical inhibition is the different alphabet, but this should not be an issue as one can master it in one lesson. After all, the Greek letters are fewer than the Latin ones and most of them are the same.

Moreover, Greek is much easier to read than English, or French for that matter, since it is read as it is spelled.

It should be noted that you probably already know a hell of a lot of Greek. How is that possible?

Earlier, when the Romans had conquered the East, Greek continued to be spoken there. Indeed, from the second century BC it had a great influence on Latin and consequently, directly or through Latin, on practically every other language. This was a long process, as a result of which today many of our languages can be seen as a kind of semi-Greek or crypto-Greek.^[1]

Here is a small list of Ancient Greek words you already know.

Ancient Greek Grammars and Textkbooks

PDF books

The First Year of Greek, James T. Allen
Greek Grammar, William W. Goodwin
First Greek Book, John Williams White
A Brief Introduction to New Testament Greek, Samuel G. Green
Grammar of New Testament Greek, Friedrich Blass
Greek, an Intensive Course, Hardy Hansen and Gerald M. Quinn download from kupdf
Answer Keys to H. Hansen and G. Quinn, Greek: An Intensive Course, 2nd revised ed. Fordham UP, 1992.
Greek Prose Composition, North and Hillard
Greek Grammar, Herbert Weir Smyth
A First Greek Course, Sir William Smith
First Greek Grammar Syntax, W. Gunion Rutherford
First Greek Grammar Accidence, W. Gunion Rutherford
Homeric Greek – A Book For Beginners, Clyde Pharr
A Greek Reader: For the Use of Schools, Cornelius Conway Felton
A Greek grammar for schools and colleges, Herbert Weir Smyth
An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach, C.A.E. Luschnig
Syntax of Classical Greek, Basil L. Gildersleeve html on Perseus

Web sites

Ancient Greek for Everyone, Essential Morphology and Syntax for Beginning Greek, Wilfred E. Major and Michael Laughy
A school grammar of Attic Greek, Thomas Dwight Goodell (pdf version)
Hellenistic Greek lessons, Micheal Palmer
A Digital Tutorial for Ancient Greek based on John William White's First Greek Book
Wiktionary:About Ancient Greek
Wikipedia: Ancient Greek
Greek Lexica for Students and Readers (a repository of dictionaries for readers of Ancient Greek Texts so that while reading a text they have the words readily available)

Material in Modern Greek

Dictionaries

Meta-Dictionaries on the Web

These are portals which provide search results from multiple sources.

LSJ.gr (containing English, French, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek translations as well as Woodhouse's English to Ancient Greek dictionary in a wiki format with full, diacritics-insensitive text search)
Logeion University of Chicago multiple dictionary (and corpus) lookup tool
Lexilogos Dictionaries Search forms for various dictionaries from a single page and other resources.

PDF Dictionaries

An English-Greek Lexicon, C. D. Yonge (free pdf download)
A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, R.J. Cunliffe (free pdf download)
Search Results A Patristic Greek Lexicon, G. W. H. Lampe (free pdf download)
A Lexicon to Aeschylus, William Linwood
Illustrated Dictionary to Xenophon’s Anabasis, John Williams White
Schrevelius' Greek Lexicon, (Ancient Greek <> English)
Grand Bailly, Dictionnaire Grec Français, 1935, (Ancient Greek > French, revised modern edition published in 2020, free pdf download, 2609 pages, 32 MB)

Print Dictionaries (not free)

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, Franco Montanari, £61.21 or $110 from the US. The English translation of Montanari's Italian dictionary Vocabolario della lingua greca. This is by far the most authoritative and contemporary dictionary of Ancient Greek with example phrases translated. It brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond. Download a 28 page pdf preview
A Greek-English Lexicon, Henry G. Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, Roderick McKenzie, P. G. W. Glare; £136 hardcover/£24 paperback or $187 from the US. This is the 1996 edition of the LSJ. The new Revised Supplement is a complete replacement for the 1968 Supplement containing nearly twice the size of the 1968 edition; with over 20,000 entries, it adds to the dictionary words and forms from papyri and inscriptions discovered between 1940 and the 1990s as well as a host of other revisions, updatings, and corrections to the main dictionary.
Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert Beekes, £88 (paperback version) or $125 from the US. Beekes takes full account of Mycenaean Greek, the best and most updated etymological dictionary of Ancient Greek.

Fora

References

↑ Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, A history of the Greek language from Its Origins to the Present (Historia de la lengua griega)

[1] Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, A history of the Greek language from Its Origins to the Present (Historia de la lengua griega)

[1]