Sean Jones’ thread asking for a recommendation for Greek lyric, which veered off into a discussion of the high level of classical scholarship in Italy, brought to mind a very useful and comprehensive – I would say indispensable – work in Italian on ancient Greek literary languages which I would like to recommend: Storia delle lingue litterarie greche, a collaborative effort under the direction of Albio Cesare Cassio. This book goes into detail about, among many other things, the unreliability of the evidence due to scholarly activity in the Alexandrian era and the divergence of literary languages from actual epichoric dialects. The literary languages are classified not by traditional classifications such as “Doric”, “Ionic”, Aeolic", etc., but by genre, e.g., “lyric monody”, “choral lyric”, “iambus”, “tragedy”, etc., which makes more sense. It’s a pity this isn’t available in English translation; I’m aware of nothing comparable in English.
Bill,
Do you read Italian as well? I’m impressed. This sounds like an interesting book, so may I ask how difficult you found the language? I’ve made a few modest attempts at Italian myself, and I’ve found that for me the most effective method to learn a language is to pick up an easy text with interesting subject matter and start reading. Is this too hard?
Hi, Paul! I didn’t find Italian too hard to work up a modest reading proficiency, and even to speak a little, but I already knew French, Latin and of course English. Your French and your English will help with vocabulary. French and English spellings of Latinate words are closer to Latin than Italian spelling, which is closer to Italian pronunciation, but it’s not hard to pick up Italian correspondences. French and Italian share many idioms. Verb forms might be a little more difficult to master. Clitic pronouns work somewhat differently from French, more like Spanish. (I’m ashamed to say I don’t know much Spanish, even though it’s widely spoken in my environment.)
A book on an academic subject you already know something about is bound to be easier than fiction.
Well, I’m more or less counting on my French, and the rudiments of Spanish I have! With the little experience I have, many of the apparent differences between Italian and French word forms (even verb forms) are pretty superficial and often to some extent just spelling conventions. I have a program in my phone that Google translates any text at which I point my phone camera. The translations are no good of course, but with “intelligent” use they can quite useful. With something like Italian where I sort of half understand everything, this usually spares me the trouble of looking up words in the dictionary, and the program usually also analyses grammatical forms correctly, when I can’t make them out myself.
Thanks for bringing that book to my attention, Hylander. I’ll be sure to check it out.
Paul, I think you’d find learning Italian for the purpose of reading well-written academic texts pretty easy (poorly-written texts are difficult in any language!). I found an extract from a chapter of Storia Delle Lingue Letterarie Greche written by Carlo Vessella and it’s in lovely, clear Italian. I’ve copied a couple of paragraphs below and put words in bold that I think have obvious enough cognates in English (or French, etc.) that you could guess them and I’ve underlined words that are reasonably close or are bordering on false friends. As you have French, you’ll get even more as the constructions are so similar in both languages. Most of the work would be learning to conjugate avere and essere, learning the regular verb endings and taking in some constructions that are common but not obvious (e.g. “sia … sia” = “καί … καί”, but also has other uses). The subjunctive (congiuntivo) might crop up a lot depending on the text, which can pose problems.
Standard written Italian is remarkably regular, especially in a text like this where the present and passato prossimo (passé composé) are used and you don’t have the passato remoto (historic/literary past) which is a trickier beast and has lots of irregularities. If you want to read novels or older texts, you’ll need to explore the passato remoto in more depth. Spoken Italian is its own thing - you can speak standard Italian and people will understand you anywhere in Italy but don’t expect to always understand them! There’s a strong North/South divide, but there are also strong divides region to region and town to town in some cases. The local languages/dialetti are one of the glories of the country.
La più > antica letteratura greca > è > in versi> : ma attorno alla metà del VI secolo a.C. > cominciano > a > circolare opere in prosa > e > prive > di > accompagnamento musicale> . Una > lingua letteraria non metrica > > assurge > così a > varietà di prestigio> , chiudendo un’> epoca in > cui > composizione > e > versificazione sostanzialmente coincidevano> .
Alla > nuova > > forma letteraria corrispondono > cambiamenti di > contenuto> , dovuti > prevalentemente > alle > aspirazioni scientifiche > dei > nuovi > > testi> , e ai > nuovi > > contenuti corrispondono occasioni > e > pubblico diversi > da quelli della > poesia> . La > letteratura in prosa > si > sostituisce > a > generi > che avevano avuto trattazione > in versi > (per > es. > [=esempio] la > filosofia> , cfr. cap. 5, § 10), ma è anche l’> espressione > precipua di > generi > che non avevano > entità autonoma > nella > letteratura in metrica > (> storiografia, oratoria> ), e diventa la > forma > d’> elezione > della trattatistica > scientifica> .
To add to what Sean wrote, for academic texts you really only need to know the third person singular and plural verb forms.
I already ordered the book. 
“you don’t have the passato remoto (historic/literary past) which is a trickier beast and has lots of irregularities”
This would be the case if I were learning a completely new language. However, I’m guessing that this is the equivalent of French passé simple, so I’m further guessing that many of the irregularities will be often shared between the two languages, as they are basically archaic features. Same goes for Germanic languages – learn the “irregular” verbs in one and you’ll know what they are in another, and you’ll even have a fifty-fifty chance of just guessing the forms right, sing-sang-sung, singen-singt-sang-gesungen sjunga-sjunger-sjöng-sjungit etc.
Anyway, looks like I took this thread a bit off topic…
There’s more – attorno “autour”, cambiamenti “changement”(?), trattazione (traitement). Every word more or less could be underlined or bolded here. Part of this is of course due to the fact that it’s academic writing, where the constructions are pretty much the same regardless of language, even in Finnish. I copy-pasted this to Google translate and the result is more or less idiomatic English – that would hardly work with Dante! This is also why we find ancient Greek so hard –there’s a shared “logic” in the way all modern Western languages are written, which is not shared by Greek.
Ah, Italy. I need to know you better! I was already waiting for a new Italian bike and now I’m waiting for a book as well.
Off to the dungeons with you.
I reckon Google would do alright with Dante these days - he’s very readable when you get your modern Italian to a decent level.
Edit: By way of experiment:
Dante
1 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
2 mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
3 ché la diritta via era smarrita.
4 Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
5 esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
6 che nel pensier rinova la paura!
7 Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;
8 ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,
9 dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.
Google
1 In the middle of the journey of our life
2 I found myself in a dark forest
3 because the straight path was lost.
4 Ah, what a hard thing is
5 this wild and harsh and strong forest
6 that in thought renews fear!
7 It is so bitter that little is more death;
8 but to deal with the good that I found there,
9 I will tell you about the other things that I have found there.
Longfellow
1 Midway upon the journey of our life
2 I found myself within a forest dark,
3 For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
4 Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
5 What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
6 Which in the very thought renews the fear.
7 So bitter is it, death is little more;
8 But of the good to treat, which there I found,
9 Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
Hi Paul, this worked for me when I wanted to read Italian.
https://archive.org/details/LitalianoSecondoIlMetodoNatura/mode/2up
It’s 750 pages, quite boring, but effective. You just read through it slowly once, don’t read it multiple times as the introduction advises you to, or you’ll fall asleep and abandon the project; forget about the exercises. I did, then worked through the first 6 canti of Dante, who is in fact not as complicated as you would expect.
Hi Hylander, thanks very much for the recommendation! I’ve just picked up a copy and you’re right, this is quite straightforward to read, even for someone still learning Italian. Like others here I’m coming at Italian from French (although for me French is a second language), which makes things easier although I’m still making here and there errors in conversation for that reason, e.g. in my last lesson I guessed meno di + sost. rather than meno + sost., guessing (wrongly) from French moins de…
I’d love to hear about other leading books on classics in Italian—works for which there is no English equivalent. e.g. I still do not think there is a work in English that matches Duhoux on the Greek verb (2000): does anyone know whether there’s anything like this in Italian, for any Greek or Latin topic? Thank you!
Cheers, Chad
I owe the book too, thanks to Hylander’s recommendation. It goes into great depth and I recommend it, although I am definitely not an expert.
I just wanted to tell that I’ve received the book and I’m currently reading the second chapter. The book does seem promising, just as expected. A little too early to tell, but I trust Hylander as ever.
My google translator camera method is great. I’m making a lot of progress with my Italian, now I can read even entire paragraphs without any kind of help. Thanks to Bart for the recommendation, I’m sticking to my current method as it seems to work for this purpose, but if I need some real guidance for Italian (like for a trip to Italy, or for reading a novel), I’ll definitely give it a look!
Based on your recommendations and the fact that I’m trying to read a lot of Italian prior to a trip to Sicily in the fall, I got this book (amazon.it). I’m only on the second chapter, but I’m finding the Italian easy to read. I had to stare at ‘iato’ for a while until I realized it meant ‘hiatus’.
Already I’ve found the book quite interesting. Cassio’s ‘resyllabification’ really makes sense to me, where in speech, the iota of a diphthong came to be pronounced as a ‘y’ sound with the following vowel. For example, οἷος is pronounced [ho.jos]. Cassio’s examples from Aristophanes and Menander papyri were convincing for me – as opposed to the internal correption explanation.
I’m working on Plato now, and I had been wondering, why Plato uses ὑός instead of υίός. Now understanding that the iota came to be pronounced with the second syllable (making the first one short), it’s easy to imagine how the iota came to be dropped entirely.
Mark