Hello everyone, I'm translating some Homer and having trouble with this clause:

"μάλα γάρ τε κατεσθίει, εἴ περ ἂν αὐτὸν σεύωνται ταχέες τε κύνες θαλεροί τ' αἰζηοί·" (Iliad III, v. 25-26)

I'm specifically having trouble rendering εἴ περ ἂν. I looked around but could only find close expressions like εἴπερ and ἐάνπερ. σεύωνται is also subjunctive.

In translations I found of the corresponding passage I saw it was mostly rendered with a concessive: expressions like "even if", "even though" etc. (that is, in the French translations I found).

Could anyone enlighten me?

What is the correct greek word for the word eternal?

Does anyone have a pdf for volume 2 of the Italian version of Athenaze with English glosses at the bottom?

That would be me. I'm used to grammar-translation method and using it in highschool I learned Latin and am now able to even speak it. However, this natural method for Greek is terrible for me now--I don't learn as much as I would like to and I think it would take enormous amount of time to even crawl to such a level as I am in Latin. Have in mind that we are learning only 3 semesters for both Latin and Greek. Greek grammar is bigger/harder than Latin, so I cannot comprehend how am I going to be familiarised enough with this new language for me. I'm panicking a bit...

Why is there Ionic οἰκηιεῦνται (Herodotus 1.4.4)? CGL lists οἰκηιόω as the Ionic form of οἰκειόω. So then for the third-person plural of the present middle, I would expect uncontracted οἰκηιόονται. Then according to my favorite wikipedia article, οο contracts to ου in Ionic, just like it does in Attic, so it should be οἰκηιοῦνται.

The εῦ looks like what you normally get in Ionic -έω verbs, e.g., ποιεῦνται, since in Ionic εο contracts to ευ. But this is an -όω verb, so what's going on? Is this just some Attic scribe whose brain is hypercorrecting and trying to over-Ionicize the word, like people who say "octopi" and "virii?"

Hey guys, so I use the Greek keyboard on my laptop a decent bit for class and also I had a software project in mind that i want to make soon, however the windows keyboard layout for accent and breathing marks is super confusing and i can never remember it. I’ve tried it on Linux and it’s much easier to remember and makes a lot more sense, I’ve attached a picture of what the layout looks like. I was wondering if anyone had found an alternative windows keyboard that works the same way as this one?

Conjucated: ἀπεσιώπησα
Lex: ἀποσιωπάω

Aor-Mid-Part-Fem-Nom-S
Aor-Mid-Part-Neut-Nom/Acc-Pl

Those look correct?

Would you be able to give me any pointers on what comes across as not making much sense? It seems that I struggle with matching aspect and gender, often with participles. Thanks in advance :)

πλανηθείς δὲ διὰ τὴνδε πολὶν ἀπόπροθεν ἐν ἄρκτῳ καὶ αἰεὶ κρύερον․ παρὰ τοὺς πολλοὺς λιθοστρώτους ὁδοὺς ἐκεῖσε κἀκεῖσε εἱλισσομένους περιπατῆσαι ἀναμνῄσκομαι ˙ ὁ δὲ αὐτὸς τρόπον Ἑλλήνων ἔδειμε․ πολλοῖσι μὲν δὴ κίοσιν κοινῇ οἰδε ὥς γε τὰς Ἀθήνᾱς τοῦ ἄρκτου˙ λέγεται δὲ πρῶτον φῦλον Κελτῶν Οὐοταδίνους ἐποικησάμενους παλαίοτερον κεῖθι καὶ ἆρα κεῖθι μένεσκον ἕως ἄν ἶφι τοῖσι Ῥομαίοισι νῑκηθῶσιν․

My intended translation is as follows: Having wandered through this city, ever cold, and far in the North, I recall walking along the many cobblestone roads, winding hither and thither. The city itself was constructed in the style (manner) of the Greeks. With its many pillars it is known commonly as the Athens of the North. it is said that the first tribe, whom settled here long ago, were the Votadini of the Celts. They consequently remained here until by the might of the Romans, they were vanquished.

Wikipedia says that the sound [a:] was written with /ᾱ/.

However, I haven't been able to find that character in any ancient greek text i've came across. So, is it valid to say that [a:] was writtent with /ᾱ/, or was it just written as /a/?

Greetings!

Has there been any work to estimate the average number of words in an average Ancient Greek persons vocabulary.

As an indication, the average for English is around 20K words for a high school graduate, for modern Greek I have seen others state 100,000 in a subreddit, but that seems a bit of an exaggeration to me unless a native speaker can shed more light.

Google AI stated that Aristotle and Plato had 60K words in their works, but that is literary Greek and probably not the speaking vocabulary of an average person.

I am taking an Ancient Greek course at the university, and while I have been doing relatively well so far (1st and 2nd declension), verb conjugations, the vocabulary, etc, I feel, that I need something more intuitive. And yeah, I am already falling behind on the third declension.

I have previously studient classical Latin on my own, mostly by reading LLPSI (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata), but also practiced the grammar to a lesser extent. This method has helped me immensely, and while I might not be able to tell the exact rules of Latin 3rd declension, I can do 99% of them intuitively, without ever having memorized them.

Are there any similar books for Ancient Greek?

Are there modern languages that have phonemically distinguished long and short diphthongs, like Attic ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ vs αι, ει (genuine), οι (before /ei/ became /e:/)? It would be helpful to hear what minimal pairs sound like from a native speaker.

Would you be able to give me any pointers on what comes across as not making much sense? Also where would be the best place to put the ἄν?

νοέοι τις μόνον ἄν Ῥομαίοισι αἰσθομένους ὡς ἄνω βλέποντες πρὸς μέλανας ὀροὺς ὑπὲρ ὁμίκλην τε καὶ νεφέλην σταμένους θρασέως

Herodotus 1.1.3:

ἐξεμπολημένων σφι σχεδόν πάντων

their merchandise having nearly all been sold

I'm confused by the participle. Smyth 453-454 discusses the fact that ἐμπολάω comes from a compound noun ἐμπολή, and therefore the augment doesn't split it into ἐνεπολα- in the imperfect. LSJ gives the perfect middle as ἐξημπόλημαι, which makes sense, because the reduplication comes before the second preposition, in the same way that Smyth describes for the augment.

So far so good. But then the form that Herodotus uses looks like it's had its reduplication removed. Why is that? When I first looked at ἐξημπόλημαι, my brain saw the η as an augment, and then it would make sense that you would not use the augment when forming the participle. But it's not an augment, it's a reduplication, so why isn't the participle ἐξημπολημένων? E.g., for ἐρέφω, I think the perfect participle would be ἠρεμμένος (that's what Wiktionary lists), not ἐρεμμένος.

Maybe I'm just groggy because I haven't had my third cup of coffee yet.

wikipedia says that correption in greek poetry "is the shortening of a long vowel at the end of one word before a vowel at the beginning of the next" and per se it is easy, but i'd like to understand why that happens. is there an explanation to this or is it mere convention?

Text: ἀνανήξηται
Lexical: ἀνανήχομαι
Parsing: Aor-Pass-Subjunctive-3S

Does this look right?

I have no idea what this is and can't find anything!

DK 3: ...τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.

If we take the infinitives to be articular because of τὸ at the beginning, then it would go:

... for, thinking and being is the same.

If we just take τὸ as "the thing", then the translation would become more literal:

... for it is the same thing to think and to be.

I do not understand why Burnet renders the verbs in passive:

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

Hello. How is ἄτομος formed?

1. ἄ-(a-) + τόμος(tómos) 'slice, piece' (noun)

2. ἄ-(a-) + τoμός(tomós) 'sharp' (adjective)

3.  ἀ- (a-) + τέμνω (témnō) 'to cut' (verb)

4. other? please explain

Does the text here say “the all is one?”

Thanks!

How did people know where to stop for like commas and stuff like that?

Did something like the comma exist in ancient greek?

i'm studying compensatory lengthening and the book from which i'm studying distinguishes in first, second and third type of cl. i'm having troubles understanding the third type (which is the type of cases like for example ξενFος>ξεινος). in particular my problem is that my book says that this type of cl is directly linked to an ancient syllabication of words (so, not ξε-νFος, as we would expect, but ξεν-Fος). but why is the ancient syllabication so important? why the cl does not happen when the syllabication is the normal one?

I teach Attic/Koine Greek to middle schoolers, and I'm writing some supplemental stories for them to read. One thing I've been stuck on is when to use articles with proper nouns, especially names. I know this isn't the most important thing to focus on, but I'm trying my best to create something as "authentic" sounding as possible.

I'm most familiar with New Testament Greek. A cursory search seems to indicate that nominative/dative nouns are almost always articular (or have some other kind of determiner), but genitive/accusative nouns are about 50/50. This Smyth link (which I found here) is helpful, but I'm wondering if anyone has any more insight.

I learned that for Genitive Plural the parsing basically always had -ων as their ending, but I'm noticing that sometimes Feminine can sometimes have -αν as their Genitive Plural (which I learned as only being the Feminine Acc S).

Is there an explanation for this? [Background is basically Koine at a Seminary]

|| || |σοφισθέντες|Aor-Pass-Part-Masc-Nom-S|σοφίζω|

Mainly need to know if σοφιζω is the lexical form here