Looking for a memrise collaborator.

Hello everybody

Remember this book Sprechen sie Attisch? "It was discused previously here: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/greek-english-phrasebook-sprechen-sie-attisch/9738/18 "

Well, I don´t know if you are familiar with memrise app, in any case I think it´s a very useful app to memorize, learn, and in our case I really find it useful for example to learn the principal parts of verbs, and so on. I think that app is really good stuff to get familiar with greek, to memorize the main meanings of particles, prepositions_(at least I speak from my own experience, the courses in the app makes you to get much more familiar and to learn vocabulary and main verbs, I think it´s a good stuff to neophytes in antique languagues)_

Well, I made from the book -Sprechen sie Attisch- a memrise course, which I think could be really useful to memorize the vocabulary, the expressions and so on. What I´m looking for here is a collaborator, a friend who help me to correct mistakes, to add, for example, alternatives answers, to correct accents and so on and so forth, maybe to add audio files, and comments in general.

On the other hand I take advantage to promote the course and to make much persons study it, and memorize it.

Thanks and hope your answers.
M.

Hi, there. Welcome to the Textkit community and enjoy your stay.

What did you name your course? I can not find anything under Sprechen sie Attisch at Memrise.

Thanks, the course is here https://www.memrise.com/course/2204032/sprechen-sie-attisch-english-an-ancient-greek/ idk why it does not appear, it happens several times

Okay, I found it using the link you provided. But I still can’t find it using the search box. I don’t know how Memrise orders the titles of its courses. Perhaps there is a FAQ that I’ve been too lazy to find.
A trivial point perhaps, but in the title of the course, English should be capitalized as I have just typed it, and “an” should be “and”: → Sprechen Sie Attisch? (English and Ancient Greek)
Note that word has it on another forum I belong to that Memrise is going to put community courses like yours at another location. Here is the site with that information: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=10133 I myself am signed up at Memrise, but I never received that email. Nevertheless I assume it is true that Memrise will move the user-made courses.
At any rate, best of luck with the course you constructed. I know it took a lot of time and effort.

I have briefly looked at your memrise course. I commend your industry but the translations into English are hardly idiomatic. “Well, Hello there!” has quite a different meaning in England than you might imagine. “How goes it” a literal translation of the German but utterly unidiomatic. ‘Very nice” is so bland in English that I am not sure it really captures “οὐκ ἄχαρις“.

Have you translated German into English or Greek into English?

This exemplifies the difficulty of translation. Whether you are satisfied with the result will depend on the goal you are seeking to achieve.

Good luck!

Hallo, No I don’t, I don’t make any translation. I just take the translations that were proposed in the link I pasted formerly. Yes, you are right the translations seem to me so rigid (I’m not a english native speaker)and yes, I’m looking precisely for a collaborator to correct them and make more vividly those translations. I would add that this memrise course just taked me one entirely evening to maked it so you will see that It has more mistakes than virtues (My task was only to organize the info and tabulate it in an excel presentation then to upload it), but I think it´s an approach to learn this book, and yes I agree with you in the “οὐκ ἄχαρις“ for example, and in really other phrases that need to be explained (maybe gramatically and sintactically) but not only that but also comments that make complex the translations and not so flat, so yes I think what I did was just the first approach, but the course absolutely is to be made.

Here is my proof-reading of 15 lists (42 - 57). I suggest you check what I think are mistakes against your other references:

Title: english an Ancient Greek → English to Ancient Greek

43.1: παυτηνί → ταυτηνί
43.7: νὲ Δία → νὴ Δία
43.22: Andshe’s → And she’s
44.27: εἰσελήλυϙεν → εἰσελήλυθεν
44.6: καῖ - καὶ
45.6: grls → girls
46.16: you → you?
47.13: tought → tough
50.3: εῖρασατο - εἰργάσατο (perhaps)
51.3: English is wanting
51.4 Hat warnt have you vor that? → What warrant have you for that?
54.9: ἐσι → ἐστι
57.1: hat’s → what’s

Woww, really apreciate your help. I’m going to put my hands on work, thank you. If you will continue to check mistakes can would like to suggest you something it´s that I prefer you focus your attention in greek more than in english, just because english answers are going to be re written at all.

I have a question for you, what do you think is the most acurrate expression in english that could express the force of the οὐκ ἄχαρις. Thanks.


In general I’ll correct two things

  1. Adjust the translation. It means I will favor an english translation easy to remember than an idiomatic one.
  2. Correct and check the greek answers with the ones that original book get, https://archive.org/details/sprechensieatti00johngoog/page/n27 this to correct any greek mistake I could copy from the versions I take.

My numbering is off by 1. For example, 43.1: παυτηνί → ταυτηνί is actually in 44:1.

I misread the layout of the Memrise page, i.e. I read “<43” as the beginning of a sequence “<43 … />”, ie “The following contains list 43”, rather than “<43” as meaning “43 is to the left”, ie “43 in the previous list”

Hallo, I haven’t reach in my revision to these parts yet, but I take note of what you said to me.

On the other hand your anotation was right but as I modify and duplicate levels (to intensify the phrases have been already learned) your anotacion in relation with the levels of the course gets unsettled, but your anotations are easy to follow since are the same ones that the original book follows.

In today´s revision I reached level 31 (called: wait) from the actual course ie: https://www.memrise.com/course/2204032/do-you-speak-attic-greek-sprechen-sie-attisch/

In relation with this last part I´m afraid if the english translations I propose are more flexive and less rigid than the idiomatic ones, what do you think? I apreciate if you take a look.

Thanks and Regards

M.

Due to censorial policy where I live, we don’t have access to archive.org, so I won’t be able to check the Greek against J.'s book.

For the translations, I don’t think it matters too much how good your English translations are. Pedagogical fashions have changed greatly. It is unlikely that beginners or lower intermediate students will use a resource such as what you are preparing. Grammatical rules are taught in abstract then applied to reading these days, rather then learning Greek by learning example sentences. I think that the expected modern users will be those with an intermediate level or higher, who want to improve the idiomaticity of their Greek compositions. How do you envision this memorise list being used - will people be memorizing your English renderings, or just the Greek?

That being said, in the list you asked for comment on, I think the force of the μῶν would be better expressed by a tagged sentence, “I didn’t …, did I?” or by some other culturally appropriate negative politeness marker, for example, “I hope, …”.

There is a lot of odd stuff going on here.

The translator himself comments: “I think it’s more important that the English and Greek express the same idea, even where the English idiom doesn’t work the same way as the German.”

Here’s the source for the translations and the comment - http://www.letsreadgreek.com/phrasebook/greekenglishphrasebook.pdf. I presume the OP is simply making a Memrise course of this, so let’s not abjure his idiom.

But setting aside the language used, many of the translations seem not to quite sit well - and it goes beyond how natural or otherwise they sound in English. Just one example - “ἴθι χαίρων” (I am looking now at just one page of the Memrise - Level 7) does not mean “Be happy!” when it is used in Attic Greek. Nor is that the usual sense of “χαῖρε πολλά” (again, same page of Memrise).

Regarding “well, hello there!”: “ὦ χαῖρε” in Attic doesn’t simply mean “hello” (to which “χαῖρε” alone would be pretty close) but rather something a bit different. It is often (to try and find something closer in English) “hail” (cf https://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-multiple-meanings-of-hail/ “hail, fellow well met!”, which is pretty much it). It could be that the translator is trying to express that, or at least convey that the phrase means something more than “hello”. I’m not sure how exactly you read the tone of the “Well, hello there!” exclamation - if it’s the same as me then yes, obvs this has implications in English that the Greek does not have. :laughing:

I agree that “very nice” is a horrible translation of “οὐκ ἄχαρις”, and as discussed above, I think the problem goes beyond the English idiom. It doesn’t capture the sense correctly. Maybe you said all that needs to be said on that one.


Quite apart from all that, the Greek itself seems dubious to me sometimes. Just one example is “εὐψύχει!” for “farewell!” (and I am choosing that from the one page I am looking at, the same one as above). No one writing a book called “Sprechen sie Attisch” should be using “εὐψύχει” rather than the obvious and famous “ἔρρωσο”. (Nor does the writer offer “ἔρρωσο” anywhere else in the book, according to a search of the PDF.) I was doubtful of “ὑγίαινε!” too but at least it’s used before the 1st century AD (once; by Herodian in a pretty corrupt passage). It is possible I am missing something here regarding the author’s intent but I have found a few more such problems glancing through just a small selection of the Greek.

Besides all this, even if the book had perfect Greek and (somehow) perfect English translations, I’m not sure what the point is. Learning to say “hello” and “goodbye” is facile and is almost certainly not the key to your understanding Greek better. You (OP) talk about using Memrise to memorize useful things like principal parts - why spend your time on something like this?

For the record, I am not opposed to work like this book or to their aim; but in my view the matter of rounding off someone’s efforts at spoken Greek by supplying them with otherwise hard-to-reach colloquial phrases is something that should follow a very strong command of the rest of the language, not precede it. Ask yourself, simply, how often a lack of knowledge on any given point would be a barrier to understand the Attic you read.

Is that a misprint? Or a wrong transcription?

In Demosthenes On the Crown (18).78 Philip’s quoted letter has the valediction εὐτυχεῖτε. Moreover, some papyri I have read read use εὐτύχει.

The translation, “Fare well” seems a reasonable abbreviation for “Enjoy good fortune in all that you do”, “Best of luck to you”.

Yes εὐτύχει is also a good Attic valediction along with ἔρρωσο. It should have occurred to me really; thanks for pointing it out.

Unfortunately I am unconvinced this could be a simple mistake of printing/copying. See LSJ:

II. εὐψύχει farewell! a common inscr. on tombs, _IG_12(2).393 (Mytilene), etc.

And then in the 1st century AD it started to be used in this sense in (non-Atticizing) literature. There should be no doubt then that the book-writer meant what he wrote.

Note also that not even in the above citation from LSJ does it sound like a standard valediction. Grave inscriptions and letters are very different (let alone face-to-face conversation). My guess is this has a very different tone from the good-bye with which you would wave off a friend after dinner.

Has anyone read Eleanor Dickey, “Greek Forms of Address: From Herodotus to Lucian” 1996? It might prove helpful.

My earlier contribution was intended to be light hearted and also to underline the difficulty of translating and transposing 5th century Attic into a present day idiom and context, a problem of sociolinguistics.

The OP says :I have a question for you, what do you think is the most acurrate expression in english that could express the force of the οὐκ ἄχαρις. Thanks

The answer to that will depend on the context of the Greek and the purpose of the translation. I regret I can’t find any enthusiasm for contributing to this project but I am very interested in following the various contributions that have been made about Attic use.

To add some difficulty to this enterprise: If you read the introduction to Sprechen sie attisch? (not translated), you’ll find that he went out of his way to find examples of colloquial German, and part of what makes the book fun is that it is so colloquial.

However, those are the German colloquialisms of 100 years ago. Many of them sound fairly strange in German today.

Thank you Joel. I had wondered about this. So 5th century Attic to 1900s German to contemporary English. Better to ignore the German completely.

Hello to everyone, this is going to be very simple.


1.

Why spend my time? Well I haven´t spent so much time in this memrise course, at least in the making and edition. Second I absolutely agree with you when you criticize the translations. But I do agree by the reasons Seneca did (the partner of the blog) all translations have to be observed under the cultural and social, psychological and historical views, so almost everybody with a little interest in Greek culture might intuit arbitrarity of translations and poorness of the translations the ones of the book I based to make the course, and also in the course itself because, that´s what happen with all translations ,they have a mantle of suspicion over each phrase that where poured from one language to other, I recognize the book have more faults than virtues, because it´s not a properly method to teach how to speak attic but a method to incorporate Greek in daily life, it´s to can express something happening in daily life in a language that almost is seems as an exotic language, in this view this course and this book I think are just born from a little dilettante joke. So there´s not a utility on its own but almost just a vague interest.
In any case I don’t think 15 minutes a day trying to learn some -not all- of these phrases could be consider a spend of time.
Have you ever try the official memrise courses? They work in the same way as the book and the course I did work. How? just simple you memorize one or two phrases at day, I know that approach never can replace any other approaches on the learning of a new language but I recognize also some advantages on this approach, first you get familiar with the language and you can say useful phrases for every day, second you learn vocab, you put your memory at work, eventually, you learn some verbs and how to conjugate them, and what seems more fantastic to me you can think how to say something in that language and you use what you have memorized and put them on work, it´s also the way some books as Assymil or books like those work, you learn some things and then you can eventually create and use what you learn to say what you want, more than this, this course will always take no more than 15 minutes in a day, the ones you can spend procrastinating in any other thing. In an estimated calculation of the benefit of the course and the time that is invested in the day to day (study and learning), I believe that the benefits are greater than the losses.
The translations are almost poor, I know that too, I think the course will must be study with an advisory, that almost all the Greek phrases are poor translations and that they have big nuances that dictionaries and linguistics in general make and that the course can´t because what the course offers is only the most simple function that this phrase did, but the learner have the responsibility to put flesh on that emptyness, to reincarnate these phrases, the learner have to reconstruct how Greeks used it and to make the nuances between one and another phrase, I think that in this way shows the only utility that I see in the course it´s that you can approach to a daily life, and to use those phrases you learn on composition and stuff like these.

As I don´t speak Greek I think learn some phrases will be useful in the tryings of learn to speak attic Greek.

I apologize for my english.

M

Forms of address only really make sense within a society. I call my son “boy”, like my dad called me, but in another cultural context that form of address would have certain uncomfortable undertones. Taking offence, feeling honoured or simply confirming the status quo of the social power relations that we live in is a highly nuanced topic that a (time-travelling) “tourist” with a phrasebook is not going to readily pick up on. Knowing when to use ω or not, and being able to choose correctly between, κυριε, επιστατα, φιλε, εταιρε, διδασκαλε, αδελφε, νεανισκε, κτλ. in the right context is a great social skill to have, no doubt, but it is a lot more dynamic than the fixed phrases given in the book we are considering.

Not that I agree with many of your particular choices of example (while others are spot-on) but certainly wrt. the overall issue you raise, the book to which seneca2008 refers is exactly what you would want: a robust piece of scholarship that makes an effort to analyse such matters. I personally came to the book first precisely to understand ‘when to use ω or not’ e.g. in Plato.

It goes without saying that Dickey could have gone much further with her analysis. But a contribution like hers nonetheless furnished an important desideratum and should be regarded as necessary reading for any student of the language who cares about addresses in Greek.

Of course addresses are only a tiny portion of the domain of the book which this thread was intended to address. On that basis you could dismiss seneca’s suggestion as above the remit of the topic of this thread. (And you would probably not be wrong to do so.) But I personally like seeing academically rigorous and relevant material being recommended, even if only tangentially useful to the OP.