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Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

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Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#51

Post by cafard »

Jun8 wrote: post #22

"The Greeks ate a simple healthy diet, involving bread, vegetables and fruit - none which (except potatoes - γεώμηλα -in every guise) are available at Hogwarts." Wait, Ancient Greeks didn't eat potatoes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato )!

Nor was their notion of a healthy diet quite that implied. The meals in Homer always or nearly always have meat, and the one I remember best--the suitor's lunch, shared by Odysseus after he thrashes the beggar--is goat stomachs stuffed with blood and fat.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#52

Post by ldd »

Schiphol wrote: post #44
ldd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a firm believer that one should spend at least 10 or 20 years learning French and then read Les Miserables and Le Compte de Monte-Cristo. The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish. In English, only Virginia Woolf inspires the same awe for language that these other books impregnated in me. In some sense, these authors don't use words. They let words use th…

> The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish. That's a surprising choice. Most Spanish readers would say that La sombra del viento is nowhere near an undisputable masterpiece such as 100 años de soledad, or even Neruda's poems (the literary stature of which is perhaps more contested).

It is not a masterpiece.

In terms of use of language, it is just really that good. Neruda and Garcia Marquez are Nobel winners, and they are obviously better literally speaking. But the dude that wrote La sombre del viento knows how to use Spanish to describe beautiful sceneries and moments.

Also, keep in mind that this is my subjective view on things.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#53

Post by acdha »

bhaak wrote: post #36
lips wrote: post #26

From the Amazon product page: > Age Range: 12 - 17 years This might be more relevant if HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE had a code for Ancient Greek.

ISO 639-2 defines "grc" for Ancient Greek. But I couldn't find a specification for HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE. Going by the language tag best practices every program should accept 3 letter language codes if it also accepts 2 letter language codes. But with software, you never know.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-3.1.3.1 says that Accept-Language uses a RFC 5646 language tag. That now says that the three-character ISO 639 codes are valid, although it looks like the two-character versions are preferred when available:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646#section-2.2.1

That said, it would be amusing to see how many servers and clients actually support this.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#54

Post by return0 »

cafard wrote: post #51
Jun8 wrote: post #22

"The Greeks ate a simple healthy diet, involving bread, vegetables and fruit - none which (except potatoes - γεώμηλα -in every guise) are available at Hogwarts." Wait, Ancient Greeks didn't eat potatoes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato )!

Nor was their notion of a healthy diet quite that implied. The meals in Homer always or nearly always have meat, and the one I remember best--the suitor's lunch, shared by Odysseus after he thrashes the beggar--is goat stomachs stuffed with blood and fat.

what's wrong with meat

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#55

Post by murbard2 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #48

What a great idea. When we learned Greek, we ended up translating Homer... which would have been fine, had we not spent most of the previous year reading the Iliad and Odyssey in Latin. Main reason I found myself ultimately disengaged with Greek was the subject material... that and the ultimately limited tolerance of a 9 year old's mind for endless declensions and beatings. "IMPERFECT INDICATIVE, BOY! FUTURE PERFECT…

That and ...

In all languages, regular verb conjugations are taught with some example, typically the simplest regular verb you can think of. It's "cantar" in Spanish, "to sing", it's often "parler" in French, "to talk", "amare" and "vocare" (to love, to call) are common in Latin.

In Greek, it's "λύω" (I untie), because yes, that's how common regular verbs are.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#57

Post by cafard »

return0 wrote: post #54
cafard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor was their notion of a healthy diet quite that implied. The meals in Homer always or nearly always have meat, and the one I remember best--the suitor's lunch, shared by Odysseus after he thrashes the beggar--is goat stomachs stuffed with blood and fat.

what's wrong with meat

Nothing that I acknowledge; but the quotation in the parent comment suggested that the Greeks were vegetarians.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#58

Post by madaxe_again »

murbard2 wrote: post #55
madaxe_again wrote: post #48

What a great idea. When we learned Greek, we ended up translating Homer... which would have been fine, had we not spent most of the previous year reading the Iliad and Odyssey in Latin. Main reason I found myself ultimately disengaged with Greek was the subject material... that and the ultimately limited tolerance of a 9 year old's mind for endless declensions and beatings. "IMPERFECT INDICATIVE, BOY! FUTURE PERFECT…

That and ... In all languages, regular verb conjugations are taught with some example, typically the simplest regular verb you can think of. It's "cantar" in Spanish, "to sing", it's often "parler" in French, "to talk", "amare" and "vocare" (to love, to call) are common in Latin. In Greek, it's "λύω" (I untie), because yes, that's how common regular verbs are.

Untie, eh? It was "loose" when we learned, but yeah, precisely that.

I wish that they'd involved us in it - explained the wonder of a language so ancient, so close to PIE, the tie of language to thought and semantic linking - but it was utilitarian. Latin was better as they intermingled it with roman history, but it was almost like they wanted Greek to be miserable. Our texts were printed in the 19th century - little leather bound books covered in notes on translation... In Latin. My school was such a time warp.

Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek

#59

Post by eru »

ecdavis wrote: post #28
ekidd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess another 30%. But after 10,000 pages, I was only running into unknown words every few pages, and my understanding of idioms was vastly better. The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe…

There is a technique called "Listening-Reading" that's fairly well known within the language-learning community. The idea is straight-forward: Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording. The method is…

They have interlinear translations of lots of religious texts (and surely also audiobook recordings. But religious texts are not everyone's favourite reading material.
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