Ancient Attic Greek

Sobre este curso

hello this is my introductory video to my new serial and oral attic Greek course now this course is in the restored classical plantation of ancient Greek and I know that this arouses

strong sentiments especially strong nationalist sentiments among Greeks who feel that this is a slight on their culture by particularly by Erasmus who was trying to discount the continuous

progression of Greek culture and civilization within Greece I don’t think that’s particularly the issue here I see it more like somebody reciting Shakespeare in restored a Shakespearean

pronunciation or reciting the Beowulf in the restored old English pronunciation which is quite different when you say things like aha instead of old and things like that

a parallel air instead of April so we’re going down that route I think the reason for going down that route is twofold one there’s very little academic dispute about how ancient Greek was pronounced

certainly in the time so about 5th century BCE 4th century BCE we have quite a good description and this very little dispute among the scholars about how to go about doing this I’m relying

on a couple of authorities one is Sturtevant the pronunciation of ancient Greek and Latin and the other is Deitz and of course there’s Allan walks graeca so all of these together have informed

my pronunciation so it does differ quite substantially from modern Greek in terms of pronunciation but once you get past that if you were to learn this and then you were to pick up kwaini

or modern Greek you wouldn’t find it a very big leap and is this matter of a different pronunciation I see a quite similar to myself with Hebrew I can read and understand Hebrew in the Ashkenazi

pronunciation and in the Sephardic and in the sub Sephardic translation of my own synagogue which is the Spanish and Portuguese which is different yet again from the standard Sephardic

pronunciation this is the Western Sephardic pronunciation which is almost extinct so be that as it may this course is also a serial and oral method in other words it’s primarily oral will be

learning Greek through a spoken method slowly building up step-by-step to give you a basic grounding in the language as though you were learning it as a speaker of ancient Greek now this is something

that’s not done very often with attic Greek it has been done with Latin for a number of years now but Greek was never treated this way ancient Greek anyway was never treated this way although we

do have Roman texts from the second century that do teach Greek in this way the Minamata so here we go that’s mate reduction so no nationalistic slights intended to modern

Greece I don’t think is a problem with acknowledging that Greek culture as it exists now it’s a direct continuation of ancient Greece but of course the language over the thousands of years has

mutated and changed the vowels have elided into each other and consonant sounds have changed etc and not to mention the fact that the tonic accents are no longer used although in modern

Greek does preserve largely the position of the accent so that’s one good thing that both of them have in common if you come in from modern Greek to the ancient pronunciation then you at least know

most the time where the accent force and the word even though you may not know the vowel lengths that’s where we are and I hope you enjoy the course this is the third attempt at

recording and this time around I’m going to introduce some visual aids some pictures one sorry I’m speaking to your Latin by