Teaching children to read by giving them unabridged Homer is like giving English speaking children Milton’s paradise lost to read. That method must have failed in many cases.
Not necessarily. At least in the classical era, I suspect that children old enough to begin reading and writing probably already had some familiarity with Homer and more generally with the language of epic and elegy, having heard recitations in a largely oral culture. They might get some help understanding what they were hearing from adults, both literate and illiterate.
Homer is by no means the most difficult Greek. It takes a little time to get used to, but once you get used to the odd-looking forms and build up some basic vocabulary, it moves along briskly. (You would like it because the sentences are relatively short, or at least are very clearly articulated into cola.) So it’s not inconceivable that children who grew up in a Homer-permeated oral environment could learn to read and write from unabridged Homer.
Homer and epic had a position not very different from what the Bible had in many European countries until a generation or two ago, when you couldn’t really avoid being acquainted with it, whether you wanted or not. Similarly children in ancient Greece were exposed to Homer and were used to its archaisms.
How schoolchildren got used to Homer’s archaic vocabulary was by writing out word lists, running glossaries—the Homeric words followed by their present-day (or merely conventional) equivalent. There are hundreds of them among the papyri. They’re medievally represented by the so-called D-scholia. If we want to know what the Homeric words meant to ancient readers (as distinct from what LSJ and modern scholars tell us they mean), that’s where to look.
Homer and his two epic poems were absolutely central to ancient Greek culture through time and space.
That is interesting in showing that what we know about children learning to Ancient Greek has firm evidence backing it up.
It doesn’t follow that the lack of books specially written for children is due to the nature of Ancient Greek language. Paul Derouda was right to say I was unfair comparing teaching with Homer to be a bit like teaching them with Milton. The King James version was such a dominant translation in the time that I was learning to read that is probably a fairer equivalent. I still have my copy of the King James version and did read it quite often as a child - in very small snippets. But the books I learned to read on were way simpler than that and the degree of repetition was vastly greater than Homer. They also used language which was far simpler than I was speaking at the time. So I still say, had I had to learn to read using the King James version I would most likely have failed.
Googling the subject it does seem that books written specially written for children only really gets going in the 18th century. The fact that by then being illiterate was seen as problem may have something to do with that.
So the lack of children’s books in Ancient Greece can’t be evidence that long sentences in Ancient Greek would not have presented problems for children who were taking their first steps in reading.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was writing a book specially for children. He used short sentences because that makes it easier to read and that is true whatever the language. Had an Ancient Greek writer written a book for children he would surely also have used short sentences.
Masked Finnish will differ from correct Greek in a different way than someone whose native language is (for example) English. Any odd idioms from a language that is not your own will more easily recognized than those of ones own language which one takes for granted. So given that native speakers of Finish are a bit smaller in number than English native speakers, yes masked Finnish is better than masked English.