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Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

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Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#191

Post by jhanschoo »

jhanschoo wrote: post #76
quickthrower2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds very interesting. What were these obligations?

In addition to sibling comments, an author of a very recent translation has also written an article on xenia in the odyssey https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/the-ody... See also their translator's note to their translation

Oops I was mistaken; The article I linked is just a review of the book (and another book). It was Emily Watson's Introduction to her transation of The Odyssey that I was thinking about that touched heavily on xenia. You will be able to read it in the kindle sample https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer-ebook/dp/B06XKNHGN1/ .

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#192

Post by jaharios »

It is always funny to me, seeing someone speaking about the Greek Language as a dead one. Most of these terms are spoken in everyday life in Greece with the same meaning.

Old English are way harder to understand for an neo-English speaker than Homer writings, going back 3000 years, are for a neo-Greek speaker. Does this make English a dead language?

Also these terms exist in English in one way or the other, taking time to study a word gives it a lot more deeper meaning that it needs, especially when the word uses changes by time and place. Many of these Classics worshipers can be paralleled with the weird Japanese culture worshipers Weeabos.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#193

Post by fedeb95 »

ilyt wrote: post #180
fedeb95 wrote: post #177

Ancient greek (and etymology) are very interesting. I'd say ancient languages study is worth reviving, not just specific terms. Why this matters? In Italy, my country, there is much talking of eliminating a type of high school where ancient greek and latin study is central and carried out through all five years of its duration. People that haven't attended such a school fail to grasp why it may be useful to some (and…

> For the programmers or aspiring programmers out there: what most shaped my problem solving and bug finding abilities is translating ancient greek and latin in high school. The skill of "reverse engineering" an ancient language is very similar to reverse engineering a (short but difficult) program, for instance. Or, you know, we could teach that directly instead of using dead language as a proxy for it

By learning how to translate an ancient language you gain a skill that can translate (with more effort) to programming, and I'd argue, but this is of course an untested hypothesis as any opinion on this matter, that this translation is better than learning directly. But let's assume you get even a sub par skill: I'm not saying it's a proxy, even simply beacuse you also learn something else that can be useful for something else.

It's perfectly fine that schools teaching programming directly without ancient languages exist. But why eliminate the possibility for a student to learn those languages when almost all people who did are happy with it? Anyway, I won't debate the matter further: my example is merely set to say that learning doesn't always have barriers as we like to think. Learning some greek and less math doesn't mean you won't ever be a mathematician.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#194

Post by stavros »

dmreedy wrote: post #186
stavros wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more "but then", no? As in, "πάταξον μεν, άκουσον δε" ("hit me, but then listen to me")?

I never got too too far into the language, so I absolutely believe there are more layers and variances to the meaning than the basic glosses I learned! But that feels like it fits in the counterpoint/point kind of framework, I think? Just with an additional kind of "temporal" or "ordering" connotation.

It's not so much "on one hand yes, on the other hand no". It's more like "do the thing I want, but also at least do the thing I want too".

But there's also the meaning of "this and that", so you might be right.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#195

Post by _glass »

jaharios wrote: post #192

It is always funny to me, seeing someone speaking about the Greek Language as a dead one. Most of these terms are spoken in everyday life in Greece with the same meaning. Old English are way harder to understand for an neo-English speaker than Homer writings, going back 3000 years, are for a neo-Greek speaker. Does this make English a dead language? Also these terms exist in English in one way or the other, taking ti…

one of my pet peeves is to pronounce ancient greek just like modern greek, because that just makes sense. the ancient greek reconstructed pronunciation is just so wrong to do. we have a cultural tradition, continuing with the Roman empire until modernity.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#196

Post by smorrebrod »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #176
jschveibinz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greek democracy was very different, as you suggest. It was not a system of universal suffrage. Only free male citizens with military training (roughly 30% of the population) were permitted to vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy

It probably made sense to have only the educated people vote, and not all the elotes as well. The uneducated and stupid are always easily manipulated. See trump being a president of the united states for example. Or bolsonaro. Or erdogan.

That's why developed countries tend to educate their citizen for free.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#197

Post by jdthedisciple »

komali2 wrote: post #183
jdthedisciple wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obv I wasn't talking about going up to strangers and telling them to put the fork down. Furthermore: your questions are about ethics, which mine may differ from yours. I wouldn't be offended by such questions and in fact I could quite vividly debate all of them. However I may be concerned over someone's weight especially if they are close to me, for the objectively indisputable reason of health.

> objectively indisputable reason of health Sure, but will you engage the first part of my comment then, regarding degrees of healthiness, and the health choices you may not be making? I'm basically arguing both that it's not as indisputable as you seem to say, and, that you may be missing the full picture here.

Of course, regarding degrees of healthiness: If they also let me know how they think I can do better in some regard why would I be offended?

That would be normal mutual care.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#198

Post by criddell »

afunk wrote: post #115

From a fun book I have “Philosophy in 40 Ideas” Eudaimonia THIS IS AN ANCIENT GREEK WORD, normally translated as 'fulfilment', particularly emphasised by the philosopher Aristotle. It deserves wider currency because it corrects the shortfalls in one of the most central terms in our contemporary idiom: happiness. The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that…

I think happy and fulfilled are more or less interchangeable. If you ask Google to define happy, it comes back with a definition from Oxford Languages (at least for me it does) and the definitions given are:

    1. feeling or showing pleasure or contentment
    2. having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with
    3. fortunate and convenient
Contentment, satisfaction, convenient... these sound a lot like fulfilled to me.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#199

Post by onos »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #151
afunk wrote: post #115

From a fun book I have “Philosophy in 40 Ideas” Eudaimonia THIS IS AN ANCIENT GREEK WORD, normally translated as 'fulfilment', particularly emphasised by the philosopher Aristotle. It deserves wider currency because it corrects the shortfalls in one of the most central terms in our contemporary idiom: happiness. The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that…

> The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy I bet Ancient Greeks didn't constitute a hivemind and had different opinions on the matter.

+1 In fact there were many different schools of thought back there both within Athens and across city states. For me, learning about the vibrant debates between them was one of the most fun parts of studying Ancient Greece.

Re: Ancient Greek terms worth reviving

#200

Post by 4gotunameagain »

smorrebrod wrote: post #196
4gotunameagain wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably made sense to have only the educated people vote, and not all the elotes as well. The uneducated and stupid are always easily manipulated. See trump being a president of the united states for example. Or bolsonaro. Or erdogan.

That's why developed countries tend to educate their citizen for free.

It's a blessing, but it takes generations. The quality of the educational system reflects the quality of society, so it is not an easy task to undertake.
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