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.

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
• 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 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)
• A Digital Tutorial for Ancient Greek based on John William White's First Greek Book
• Wiktionary:About Ancient Greek
• Wikipedia Ancient Greek

Material in Modern Greek

• Γραμματική της αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας - Γυμνασίου/Λυκείου | html
• Αρχαία ελληνική γλώσσα - Α' Γυμνασίου
• Μαθήματα πολυτονικού
• Λεξικό αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας α, β, γ, Γυμνασίου, 307 σελίδες, 4ΜΒ
• Ετυμολογικό λεξικό αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας Μαντουλίδη

Material in French

• Précis de grammaire grecque, Other Version Anne-Marie Boxus
• Grammaire portative du grec ancien, Fontaine Didier
• Grammaire de grec ancien, J.L. Burnouf
• Cours de Grec, Alessandra Lukinovich

Material in German

Griechische Grammatik pdf book (Karl Brugmann, Leopold Cohn, Albert Thumb, 1913)

• Hermidion, Eine kleine Begleitgrammatik für den Start ins Griechische
• Graecum-Grammatik, Universität Wien
• Online-Kurs Altgriechisch
• Sprachkurs für Altgriechisch, E. Gottwein
• Materialien für den Sprachunterricht

Material in Other Languages

• Ukrainian: Ancient Greek Lessons in Ukrainian

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)
• Illustrated Dictionary to Xenophon’s Anabasis, John Williams White

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
• 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

• Translatum English to Ancient Greek forum
• Translatum Ancient Greek to English forum
• Textkit
• Biblical Greek forum