Moving beyond koine

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uberdwayne
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Moving beyond koine

Post by uberdwayne »

If I were to move beyond koine greek, what would be the most gentle approach? Perhaps homer, I'd be interested in reading the Illiad or the odyssey
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C. S. Bartholomew
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Re: Moving beyond koine

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

Homer isn't particularly easy for NT greek students. It takes a few books before you get accustom to the dialect. After a few 1000 lines it gets painless. Attic narrative is perhaps a little less demanding if you don't choose some difficult author like Thucydides.
C. Stirling Bartholomew

Qimmik
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Re: Moving beyond koine

Post by Qimmik »

Homeric morphology and vocabulary would likely pose difficulties for someone whose experience of Greek has been limited to NT koine, but the syntax is easier than almost any other ancient Greek text. And, as C.S. Bartholomew notes, after about 1000 lines the difficulties iron themselves out and you pick up speed.

The Anabasis is the easiest Attic prose text I'm aware of--just for fun, I recently read the first four books (up to thalatta, thalatta!). It's more interesting than I had remembered it, and the narrative is livelier than Caesar, who is the Latin analogue, mainly because the Greeks with Xenophon actually find themselves in difficult situations--Caesar, in his telling at least, never econounters really serious obstacles.

Plato's Apology is a relatively easy text Attic text, and it's a foundational text of Western Civilization.

Speeches of Lysias are not too difficult, either, and I think they can be interesting for the light they shed on everyday Athenian life and society.

But if I were you, I'd go for the transcendent experience of reading Homer in the original--for me, at least, that has always been the most important (though by no means the only) reason to study ancient Greek. Brenner's Selection from the Iliad is a good place to start, but you may want to read more recent material about the mysterious origins of the poems, their background and history, their role in Greek civilization, etc.

Markos
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Re: Moving beyond koine

Post by Markos »

uberdwayne wrote:If I were to move beyond koine greek, what would be the most gentle approach?
1. You could work your way through several textbooks that cover Attic. JACT, Athenaze, and the Greek Ollendorff come to mind, but any and all would be helpful and at least in the beginning easy for someone who already has done some Koine.

2. Frank Beetham's book is a relatively gentle entry into Plato.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Greek-Pl ... with+Plato

3. Phillpotts and Jerram's adapted Anabasis is about as easy Greek as you can find

http://www.amazon.com/Selections-Adapte ... m+Xenophon

and if you read through it a several times you could use it to transition to one of the many school editions of the Anabasis.

4. But I agree with Qimmik that you should learn Homer. Why not the best?

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