attic greek 'upsilon'

[Bereta_Eder]

Also the accents were a product of the hellenistic era: Alexander the Great introduced them to help the conquered people speak and pronounce Greek correctly. In Ancient Greek marble placks there are no accents and the letters are all capitals and there is no separation (space) between the words.

[Bereta_Eder]

Greek is a fascinating and mindbonlgly! rich language. It is one if not THE richest langauge in the world. To read Greek is taking a mythical voyage to the source of meaning. Almost every word has roots descending to the original noematic essence of what it describes and most of the time what it describes is multidimensional. Greek language does wonders to describing abstract and apheretic thought. As a side note around 80% of the english verb and object vocabulary derives from Greek through Latin and French. Even the english word "love" has its roots in Greek.

love, ëáôéíéêü:love åê ôïõ ''ëÜFù'' ôï äéãáììá F ðïõ åßíáé êáíïíéêá ôï åêôï ãñáììá ôïõ Åëëçíéêïý áëöáâÞôïõ ãéíåôáé áõ óçìáßíåé ''èÝëù ðïëý''

Love, latin: love from laFw the diggama F which is regularly he 6th letter of the Greek alphabet becomes AY which means " I want very much" (necessairily crude translation).

To know Greek is to understand the essence of what you say and where what you talk about comes from.
Reccomended if a bit difficult.

[axi]

Äåí ôï Þîåñá üôé ôï ëáâ ãñÜöåôáé ìå äßãáììá...

ÌÞðùò áõôü åßíáé ðáñáêßíçóç ðñïò ôç äéãáìßá;

ÅËÅÏÓ!!!

[Bereta_Eder]

Éô éëéïõóôñåúôò äå ðïéíô!

[Drake Tungsten]

If modern Greek is useful to understand modern Turkish then I guess English will be a good guide to understand Mongolic

First of all, it's Mongolian, not Mongolic.

Secondly, Mongolia never made any English-speaking countries its *****, so it's rather silly to use it as an analogy to the Turkish language that was forcibly pushed on the weak Greeks.

[Drake Tungsten]

As a side note around 80% of the english verb and object vocabulary derives from Greek through Latin and French.

I'm gonna have to call bull**** on this one...

[Ming]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Secondly, Mongolia never made any English-speaking countries its *****, so it's rather silly to use it as an analogy to the Turkish language that was forcibly pushed on the weak Greeks.

If your intent these days is to follow paiktis22 around and try to bait him... don't even bother.

Stop your stupid trolling... or I have a better way to stop it.

[Drake Tungsten]

I'm not completely trolling. The Turkish occupation did indeed have a great effect on the modern Greek language, which is certainly a topic worth discussing. I'll stick to the serious aspects of this issue in the future, in deference to you and your banning rod.

[Bereta_Eder]

Some people

[Bereta_Eder]

Here's something that might be of interest.

It's all Greek to him
Athanasios Anagnostopoulos is compiling the biggest-ever compendium of the Greek language, with the aim of producing a work to match the Oxford English Dictionary, writes Helena Smith

Helena Smith
Friday March 1, 2002
The Guardian

In the shadow of the Acropolis, alongside the theatre where the likes of Aeschylus and Sophocles and other ancient playwrights first put on their shows, Athanasios Anagnostopoulos is hard at work.

With his erudite demeanour and wild, wavy white hair, this kindly linguist looks every bit like a modern-day Plato - a fitting resemblance for a man who has set himself the monumental task of compiling the biggest-ever compendium of the Greek language, from before Homeric times until today. In a linguistic odyssey that has taken him back over 3,000 years he has collected more than 50m words.

"Greek may be Europe's oldest continuously spoken language, and the language that gave birth to letters that signified vowels, but it is also surprisingly poorly researched," he says in his neoclassical offices at the foot of Athens' holy hill.

A surprising amount of English words - some 80% - derive from the 24-letter Greek alphabet. But, he explains, "tens of thousands of Greek words" have gone through different stages and acquired different meanings, which in part accounts for the language's supple syntax and extraordinarily rich vocabulary.

"Our goal, now, is to trace the evolution of every single Greek word from its first appearance in a written text, say in the 4th century BC, to the present."

The giant database that he has set out to create - electronically recording the entire corpus of every Greek writer on CD Rom - will not only chart the unbroken continuity of spoken and written Greek but, he says, enhance global understanding of the language's historical course.

In so doing, it will go a long way towards preserving the record of a history that helped form western civilization.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4366159-105806,00.html

I would just add that there already are a plethora of very good dictionaries both from abroad as well as Greek who do this job but another one certaintly cannot hurt. Good luck and bon courage to him I say

[The Andy-Man]

Originally posted by Zopperoni



I thought it was: al-pha, del-ta, and e-psi-lon?

But maybe my Attic Greek has sunk to basement level. More than five years have passed since I last read something Greek.

but the phi and psi are double consonants, ie, they are 2 letters.

alp-ha, not, alfa


As for pronunciation, it will have changed drasticly of course, but the educated guesses, imo, seem quite good. And i am a bit of a purist, so no 'f's for me

I have found a few good sites on this actually, its got me into linguistics a bit

[Bereta_Eder]

Actually alfa not al-pha. The mistake you may be doing is trying to interpret the language based on your current phonetic background that you have available. This could lead to wrong conclusions.
Let me demonstrate:

you say that psi is a double consonant. In Greek it is one and the same. If you want to break it apart phonetically then of course it is constituted by two consonants "p" and "s". However in the Greek language it is considered one.To understand: in the latin language so is "d" which is comprised from "n" and "t" (which actually comes from delta) ) but you don't separe it. To do that you must put an n in front of ti like so "nd" in which the phoenetic separation is achieved.


As for phi, this is one. Ö in Greek and can't be seprated phonetically either.

It's better to think completely Greek, if you can, when trying to take apart/put the language under a microscope.

[The Andy-Man]

Originally posted by paiktis22
Actually alfa not al-pha. The mistake you may be doing is trying to interpret the language based on your current phonetic background that you have available. This could lead to wrong conclusions.
Let me demonstrate:

you say that psi is a double consonant. In Greek it is one and the same. If you want to break it apart phonetically then of course it is constituted by two consonants "p" and "s". However in the Greek language it is considered one.To understand: in the latin language so is "d" which is comprised from "n" and "t" (which actually comes from delta) ) but you don't separe it. To do that you must put an n in front of ti like so "nd" in which the phoenetic separation is achieved.


As for phi, this is one. Ö in Greek and can't be seprated phonetically either.

It's better to think completely Greek, if you can, when trying to take apart/put the language under a microscope.

I am talking about anceint pronounciation. phi was pronounce as an emphatic 'P' (similar to tophat), similar with theta.

It is only from koine that they became the f and th, i beleive.

[Bereta_Eder]

About how "fat" the F was pronounced in ancient Greece I'm afraid none of us know. You only have us pronouncing it the way we do. However bare in mind that in english you have two ways of writing that sound. "Ph" and "f". In Greek there is only one way of writing it "Ö" and has been the same in the last 3 millenia. Same goes for the theta.

[The Andy-Man]

Originally posted by paiktis22
About how "fat" the F was pronounced in ancient Greece I'm afraid none of us know. You only have us pronouncing it the way we do. However bare in mind that in english you have two ways of writing that sound. "Ph" and "f". In Greek there is only one way of writing it "Ö" and has been the same in the last 3 millenia. Same goes for the theta.

But we can tell, or at least guess, how letters where pronounced from roman transliterations. why spell it 'ph' and not 'f' if it was an 'f'?

Modern greek is a different language entirley, like italian is from latin, and english is from old english.