Hi everybody,
This is my introductory post. I am learning Attic Greek with a goal of reading Homer and the historians. I am also interested in getting a feel for the tone accent that ancient Greek preserves from the proto-Indo-European tongue. Foreign languages that I have previously learned to an advanced level include German and Mandarin Chinese. I was a math major in college and now work as a computer programmer.
I’ve been teaching myself ancient Greek for a while. The most concentrated period of study was in the summer of 2013. I’ve focused on the activities of reading aloud and grammatical analysis.
For grammatical analysis, I’ve gone through about half the exercises in Hansen and Quinn, labeling every noun and verb form for tense, mood, voice, person, number, case, gender; identifying every syntactic construction by a shorthand label.
For reading aloud I’ve put a lot of time trying to do the reconstructed Attic pronunciation as accurately as possible, pronouncing long-short vowel distinctions and tone accent, a three-way distinction for stops (voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated), and joining words together very smoothly with consonant assimilation, elision and crasis. I spent a lot of time with word lists, trying to perfect my pronunciation of two- and three-word phrases before I started reading complete sentences aloud.
I’ve recorded several hours of myself reading exercises and readings from Hansen and Quinn, Pharr’s Homeric Greek, Athenaze Second Edition, Rouse’s A Greek Boy at Home, Xenophon’s Anabasis, Plato’s Apology, and the Iliad. I think that every distinction indicated in the orthography is audible in my recordings, and my version of the accent sounds more natural than any of the other attempts at Greek tone accent that I’ve found online.
Looking forward to starting dialogue with the community!