Greek Language and Linguistics
Ancient Greek, mostly Hellenistic
Well… My laptop is back up and running, at least from an external drive, due to the generous work of an Apple employee. Cost for the repair: $0.00.
Now if I can just get the internal connecters repaired…
At least I can type easily in Greek again!
Εὐχαριστῶ τῷ Apple Inc.
I still like my Linux box, though.
My laptop died last night. That’s going to slow down my blogging for a while! Until I get it running again, I’ll have to get used to typing Greek using Linux!
ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἵπεν· Οὐκ οἴδατε τί αἰτεῖσθε·
And Jesus answered, “You don’t know what you are asking” (Matt. 20:22)
Well… it doesn’t look like it will be that hard, but finding some of the characters is proving to be a challenge!
I wish you all a wonderful Christmas.
The folks over at Omniglot.com provided a recording of the phrase in the title of this post that was used here from 2010 to 2015. My link to that recording ceased to function this year, so I replaced it with a recording of my own. Click the triangle below if you want to learn to say “Merry Christmas” in Hellenistic Greek.
| New audio added November 25, 2016 |
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| m4a
AAC mp3 |
Thanks to Omniglot.com for providing the audio that was used in this post from 2010 to 2015!
| A note on pronunciation added in 2014: |
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| The pronunciation from Ominiglot.com was done using Modern Greek pronunciation. While there are several important differences between Modern Greek and the way the language was spoken in the Hellenistic Period (Koine), none of those differences impact the pronunciation of καλὰ Χριστούγεννα. Of course at the time of Jesus and Paul no one would have said καλὰ Χριστούγεννα since Christmas was not yet celebrated. When it did come to be celebrated, though, early Christians would have pronounced this phrase the same as it is pronounced today in Greece. |
| A note on spelling (Added 12/15/2015) | |
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| There is one small difference in spelling of the Christmas greeting between 300 CE and the present: the system of written accents has been simplified. Contrast the following spellings. Can you see the difference? | |
| Modern: | Καλά Χριστούγεννα |
| Hellenistic: | Καλὰ Χριστούγεννα |
I spent the day today in a training seminar on teaching English to speakers of other languages. I’ll be back to working on Greek tomorrow.
I spent Monday working on the next lesson for the online grammar, dealing with the middle voice. I hope to finish it in the next few days.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything to this blog, but the end of the semester is coming soon, and I hope to be much more active in the Summer. I look forward to updating the grammar and lexicon and catching up with some of the interesting postings at a few of my favorite blogs that deal with Greek Linguistics.
I’m happy to have most of the day tomorrow to work on Greek. It’s beautiful outside, and even more beautiful now that it’s confirmed I have the day off tomorrow!
I hope to make some progress on my introductory grammar. I’ve been polishing the HTML for the past few days, fixing links, cleaning up the look of the pages, etc.