# Ancient Greek: Study of the language



## COF

When people study Ancient Greek or any other Ancient language or form of, do they just learn to read it, or usually learn to speak it also (even though there's no point unless you somehow managed to find a way to time travel  )?


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## judkinsc

There are arguments for stress and tonal accent, but we don't really know how Ancient Greek was pronounced, so it's up in the air academically.

Usually, one learns Latin and Greek to read them, and then proceeds to mangle them with various "English/French/Italian/Germanic" accents.


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## modus.irrealis

I think there's a lot of both, but it seems to me that reading is stressed a lot more, at least in what I've read about the academic situation. But a lot of people argue, and I agree with them, that you really don't know a language unless you can hold a conversation in it and there seems to be a movement to teach ancient languages like modern ones.

But not too long ago, and perhaps still in places like the Catholic Church (for Latin), the ancient language was used as a means of oral communication so in these contexts you would need to be able to speak as well as simple read and write.

Pronunciation is a thorny issue. I disagree with judkinsc, and I think we have a pretty good idea of how Ancient Greek was spoken at certain points in time, but even then, I don't see why using a historically accurate pronunciation is necessary to gain a a command of the spoken language -- obviously it means you wouldn't be able to use that time machine of yours,  but I think being able to speak a language is necessary for mastering a language.


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## Whodunit

I'm learning Latin and Ancient Greek at school, and this is how we handle them:

We have a book and work through the units one after the other. They only consist of texts composed by some scholars, I guess, and grammar explanations.

Tests are written as vocabulary tests where the Latin words are written on the left-hand side and the translations the teacher assesses have to be written down right next to the give Latin words.

We never speak Latin or Greek in our lessons. Sometimes our teacher does it just for fun.


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## avalon2004

People tend to pronounce it in a way similar to their own language.
There aren't many occasions when you particularly need to read Ancient Greek out aloud, but if I had to do it then I would probably pronounce it like Modern Greek. Whilst this is undoubtedly not the same as the original (several sounds have been modified over the centuries and the tonal system has been lost), I think it's the nearest I'm going to get!
I suppose  linguists tend to be more interested in the written language than the spoken forms with Ancient Greek...


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## COF

So, the Ancient Greek alphabet is the same as the Modern Greek alphabet, just pronounced differently?


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## parakseno

> So, the Ancient Greek alphabet is the same as the Modern Greek alphabet, just pronounced differently?



Well, almost... Not taking into account the very "old times" when Greek was written in Linear B, for example, or the local variants (until around 380 BC in Athens, if I'm not mistaken), yes, it is the same. You can have a look here to see what I mean: http://www.ancientscripts.com/greek.html

There were some old letters that were no longer used by Classical times (digamma, koppa, san).

But the alphabet of Classical times is pretty much the same with the one we use today, except they didn't have minuscules (αβγδε...etc). which were added during the Middle Ages.


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## se16teddy

When I learned Latin at school, we spoke it nearly as much as when I learned French. No doubt there are academic arguments about the exact ancient pronunciation of Latin and Greek, especially aspects that are not recorded in writing, such as how the voice rises and falls across the whole sentence; but surely anyone who learns Latin and Greek must be curious about how they are pronounced, and must have a go at pronouncing them as best they can? This must be especially true in the cases of poetry, rhetoric, plays etc, where the text was primarily intended for speaking.  Poetry can be studied on the page, but it only lives in a voice.


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## judkinsc

The pronunciation of Latin poetry is fairly well-known: Catullus, Horace, and Virgil for instance.  Knowledge of the meter allows a fairly accurate pronunciation.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

Frankly, I've never understood why Classical Greek isn't taught with Modern Greek pronunciation, instead of the academic version that is currently taught, at least in British and American classes, and which everybody agrees is not "correct."  The modern pronunciation may not be "correct", but at least it has the advantage of being an undeniably valid way to pronounce Greek.

And the student could then use what he learns in classical Greek class to learn modern Greek as well.


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## avalon2004

This isn't very relevant but I wish that just ONE establishment would offer a university course that incorporated all forms of the Greek language, because I would really like to study both Ancient and Modern Greek at university level.

The letters of the modern Greek alphabet are the same as those from the time of Plato, though there are no longer so many accents on for vowels. 
There were indeed several other letters but they disappeared from usage long before the famous works were written.


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