The Greek Tongue - Ammon U (s2e3)

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This is for the few 1000 people in the largest Ancient Greek course ever.
Your numbers are huge!
Ancient Greek has never had such a following
What you're a part of is a gorgeous thing
Good morning!
Welcome back to the gymnasium.
This is a class where you haven't paid to be here
Which means we can speak with Bacchic freedom
Let's learn some Ancient Greek

Assignment

Was to read the introduction.

Pontic Greek

You're in classical Greek
Look up Pontic Greek

• Pontic Greek - language spoken along the Black Sea, near Turkey. A sister of Hellenistic Greek. You're studying the language that dominated the planet.

Beowulf - olde English.

• Ancient Greek spans 2000 years. Your English is in its early form after 1000 years... take a look at Beowulf's olde English...

When you have a modern Greek speaker tell you about Ancient Greek, they're not comprehending, it's like reading Shakespeare, or Beowulf... do we understand older English? Hell no... Anglo Saxon bog trotting bar bar bar... weird letters, weird grammar, weird vocab... familiar words were pronounced differently... Lay people slaughter it, and modern Greeks are lay people to the Ancient Greek, just like how modern English speakers (that's us) are to olde English...

With classical Greek, when we hear someone step forward with modern Greek and hack and slash and misunderstand the Ancient Greek...

...they have no eidos. These people have no eidos...

• eidos - shame

We're talking about Greek over a 2000 year period. If we just go 1000BCE to 1000CE; and you're talking about development over that time - we'll give you texts that can be 2000 years apart and you're going to have to read them.

Do you understand what a classical philologist is? Do you understand what you're getting into?

Here's an additional problem. Ancient Greek is musical. There is a melody generated from speaking. English is stress-accented. Greek has pitch. As you spoke mother Greek in antiquity, you pick up not only rhythm but also melody. It's not just pitch accent, it's melody. All of the vowels are doing this. What are the vowels in Greek? They're notes accented tonally in order to create rhythm and melody.

Are we going to be able to go there? No. Our operating systems don't allow it. There's a bridge or a patch we can use though. We can observe them through our bar bar operating system. We have to learn to march. The stress march. This is what we do in English. This Greek is an advanced operating system. See how difficult it is to impress an advanced operating system to impress on our own? So we have to patch ourselves... to make advancement...

Get started

(Todo: Continue from 14:38 in)
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