What things would you like to see in a YouTube channel for Ancient Greek (also Latin)?
I’ve just posted my first video, and have in mind for the future:
Let me know if there’s anything you think should be on that list, what you would like to see, or any demands that are undersupplied.
I would be glad to get the link to your video.
By the way, I have also posted some videos on reading Ancient Greek here:
(For both Romanian and English speaking people)
That’s great! You should package your recordings as audiobooks. I have been listening to a lot of Greek audio, but unfortunately I haven’t yet found a New Testament whose pronunciation is good. So it would be great if an audiobook with your voice came. The one I have been using is The Greek Audio New Testament: NA27 Audio | Logos Bible Software, but there’s lot’s of inconsistencies, mistakes, and unconventional pronunciation.
Here’s the link to my first video: https://youtu.be/_ZazGFlHtS0
Thank you for your video! I resonate very much with your opinions.
In addition to the videos I posted, I have prepared and published on my website some additional recordings intended to facilitate practicing reading and, hopefully, memorising inflected words, but also structures, idioms, and even relatively large passages of various texts which are deemed worth memorising, just naturally in the process of listening and repeating chunks of text several times - shorter ones first (indicated as ‘Practice 1’), and then longer (‘Practice 2’). (Attica)
I am aware that the way I choose to pronounce Ancient Greek may not be generally acceptable, but the method I use for practicing reading, as I described it, may very well be.
I quite like your pronunciation. The only difference I can tell between the way I would pronounce it is in the β, but that’s an easy one to accustom your ear to. I’m always on the lookout for listening resources, so thanks for that link! Actually, I had Xenophon’s Hellenica on my to-read list, so I think it would be nice to listen to the audio together.
What seems to work in order to get views in my experience is posting about computer engineering in Latin, like I did here: https://youtu.be/hlw72oFlKZA
In truth, the Greek and Latin videos I watch the most are songs to help me remember grammatical forms. On my last exam, one of those tunes helped me remember where the ending -σαι was. As for your theories, I have my own. I think the biggest reason why most scholars aren’t fluent in ancient Greek and Latin is because we don’t speak it in classes the way students of modern languages do. To make matters worse, our Ancient Greek knowledge comes from ancient literature and so we don’t even know useful phrases for normal life. I can greet someone in ancient Greek, but I can’t ask how they’re doing.
I agree with you about that fact that we don’t speak it in class. But the skewed corpus shouldn’t be a big hurdle. Watch this video: https://youtu.be/dilEAweI0BE?si=iyhcxm2GZ-xSwfHE
I would say, it’s not that we “don’t know useful phrases” but that they are rare given that most of our sources are literary. It just means we need more exposure to stumble across them, than would be necessary in a modern language.
We have a thread on Greek Colloquies here on Textkit. Check it out. Some may frown at the works from Renaissance scholars: your mileage may vary. Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana is from the Roman Imperial era. Arguably the best is Sprechen Sie Attisch?, which used material mostly from Plato and Aristophanes. As a shameful plug to my YouTube channel, I read my Ørbergized version here:
ἆρα Ἀττικιστὶ λέγεις;