And/or is there a dictionary (preferably on-line) providing direct answers to such questions?
Thanks in advance.
I don’t think there is an exact equivalent in Classical Greek. “Thank you” is very bland and meaningless, and where we might say “thank you,” the Greeks would be more exaggerated and direct about their praise.
Xenophon:
τὴν μὲν σὴν πρόνοιαν ἐπαινῶ
Plato:
καὶ καλῶς γε ὑπέμνησας
ὡς ὤνησας ὅτι μόγις ἀπεκρίνω ὑπὸ τουτωνὶ ἀναγκαζόμενος
Herodotus:
τὸ μὲν εὐνοέειν τε καὶ προορᾶν ἄγαμαί σευ
How about χάριν οἶδα σοι?
There’s Woodhouse’s English-Greek dictionnary that might be helpful.
https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/
You can also do reverse searches in the TLG LSJ.
Wow… Thanks a lot! But how to do a reverse searches in the TLG LSJ ? When I go in TLG to “LEXICA”, it gives me just one place to enter my input (under “LEXICOGRAPHICAL RESOURCES”), and then does not allow to enter anything in English but demands that I select from a drop down menu of Greek words.
For convenience, here is the entry from Woodhouse:
Thank, v. trans. P. and V. χἀριν ἔχειν (dat.), χάριν εἰδέναι (dat.). That they may have this too to thank you for: P. ἵνα καὶ τοῦτό σου ἀπολαύσωσι (Plat. Crito, 54A). No thank you: use Ar. καλῶς (Ran. 888, cf. Ran. 508).
Woodhouse, S. C. (1910). English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (p. 864). London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited.
Page with THANK from A copious phraseological English-Greek lexicon;
by Frädersdorff, J. Wilhelm. [from old catalog]; Arnold, Thomas Kerchever, 1800-1853, ed; Browne, Henry, 1804-1875, ed
and from
An English-Greek Lexicon
By Charles Duke Yonge
Harper, 1890
Unfortunately nobody has made searchable versions like those in
If only somebody wrote a simple, public-domain, software for dictionaries exactly like that! I’m not qualified since I’m familiar with parallel Fortran using MPI 
How much would it cost to hire a programmer to do it?
Definitely do not say εὐχαριστῶ σοι – that would mark you as an ignorant boor, according to Phrynichus Arabius, a 2d c. CE grammarian in Bythinia. You would not be considered one of the δόκιμοι.
Say instead χάριν οἶδα σοι.
Scroll down to p. 18 (a long way because there are lengthy prefaces in Latin):
deleted
Very interesting, as it places in the boor-category not only the New Testament but also all the Byzantine authors writing in their wake. LSJ, however, gives the following:
“to be thankful, return thanks, Decr. ap. D.18.92, IPE12.352.14 (Chersonesus, ii B.C.); “τοῖς Α᾿θηναίοις” Posidon.36 J., cf. Phld. Ir.p.92 W., al.; ἐπί τινι or περί τινος for a thing, Plb.4.72.7, D.S.16.11, etc.; esp. to the gods, ἐπὶ τῷ ἐρρῶσθαί σε τοῖς θεοῖς εὐ. UPZ59.10 (ii B.C.), cf. LXX Ju.8.25, 1 Ep.Cor.1.4, etc.:—Pass., to be thanked, “ηὐχαρίστηται κεραυνοῖς” Hp.Ep.17; to be received with thanks, 2 Ep.Cor.1.11.”
p.s. No less interestingly, Younge gives it as the primary meaning, whereas Woodhouse does not list it at all.
Your topic title is ‘How to say “thank you” in Classical Greek’ – not “in Koine Greek.” εὐχαριστῶ σοι is a post-New Testament usage. It’s perfectly appropriate to anyone not trying to write Classical Greek. In fact, I think that it’s even the modern Greek term.
Xenophon using χάριν οἶδα:
τὴν μεγίστην χάριν οἶδα ὅτι μοι Κλεινίαν ἀναφαίνουσιν
I think this is another example of a Greek usage that says more than a simple “thank you” in English. Would Xenophon have used it in return to someone bringing him a glass of water? (Trick question. A slave would have brought him the water.)
That’s what I thought. What I found interesting is that a grammarian in 2d c. CE still considers it boorish.
He did not write about popular usage, but about Attic usage. And what he said was:
Εὐχαριστεῖν οὐδεὶς τῶν δοκίμων εἶπεν͵ ἀλλὰ χάριν εἰδέναι.
See page 69 of Rutherford’s New Phrynichus.
I believe that the entries in Pollucis Onomasticon on page 299 contain a few examples of the variety of popular usage.
Thanks. Does he mean by δόκιμοι the writers of the past (given that he uses aorist)?
He means authors of the Classical period, already well in the past from his point of view. They all wanted to imitate classic authors, and so looked down on the common Greek spoken at the time (though they probably spoke that same Greek for daily, ordinary communication – they just saw it as unfit for literary consumption). However, if you read carefully authors of that period, you can see that their style and usage sometimes strays a bit despite how careful they try to be.
He wrote a manual of Attic usage in the second century CE, about 500 years after Attic had evolved into the koine, so that contemporary authors could avoid what he considered non-Attic usage. This was during a period when some authors went to great lengths to write pure Attic Greek.
From his dedication:
Ἡμεῖς οὐ πρὸς τὰ διημαρτημένα ἀφορῶμεν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰ δοκιμώτατα τῶν ἀρχαίων
So in particular, the best Attic authors.
But he’s telling you how to speak δοκιμως. See the beginning.
The entire dedication is on page 54 of the above. Perhaps I don’t understand it fully, but the last part seems discussing the issue of people citing ancient witnesses for their mistakes. To correct for this, he says, one should instead use the “better part” of witnesses, instead of all. However, I’m not sure what his criterion for “better” was. Perhaps he was talking about manuscript corruption and forgeries, and not reputation, as I thought at first.
Phrynichus is prescriptive – how to write “correct” Greek – not merely descriptive of how Greek was written 500 years before his time. The proscribed usages are “errors” that speakers and writers of Greek were making in his own era, not manuscript corruptions or forgeries.