Learn Ancient Greek

From LSJ
Revision as of 17:38, 17 November 2019 by Spiros (talk | contribs)

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

Web sites

Material in Modern Greek

Material in French

Material in German

Material in Spanish

Material in Italian

Material in Other Languages

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

Print Dictionaries (not free)

Fora

References

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