Talk Like a Hellene

Author: * Demetrios Xanthippos - 5 Posts on this thread out of 995 Posts sitewide.
Date: Jan 10, 2007 - 09:25

As you look around AncientWorlds, you will often see people sprinkling their conversations with words and phrases appropriate to their world or renaming the rooms of their homes to give it a more ancient flavor. A Roman may greet a group, “Salvete, omnes” and invite you to visit his hortus privatus. An Egyptian may greet you, “Em hotep” and invite you to his per. But few Hellenes do so. Greek is a difficult language, written in a different alphabet, and not many people are ever exposed to even the most basic phrases.

This is meant to be a brief guide to help those with little or no Greek add a little flavor to their AW experience. A word of warning: like Shakespeare, I have “small Latin and less Greek” (and undoubtedly less of either than he did). This is only a starting point, and I hope our Classicists here will correct my errors and expand the list of words. Also, these are Classical Greek words and phrases. If you are interested in the Bronze Age, the Hellenistic Era, or the Byzantine Era, some or all may not apply.

Spelling it out

As I noted above, Greek is written in a different alphabet. There are a number of ways of transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet. The most common is derived from the way the Romans wrote Greek words. Key features of this system are the use of the letter c for the Greek kappa, the diphthong ae for the Greek αι and or for οι, and the suffix –us for the Greek –οσ. There is a growing trend in scholarship of transliterating more directly, that is using k, ai and oi, and –os for the examples above. Thus, the famous Oedipus would be written Oidipos, which is much closer to the original Greek. That is the system I will be using. Eta will be represented by ē and omega by ō. There are other systems that do a better job, but they are not very readable.

AW also supports the Basic Greek letter set, which you can find, for example, in Word by selecting Insert -> Symbol… this isn’t bad, but it does not offer diacritical marks for breathing, falling acents, or a combined rising and falling accent. These are often important and their lack makes the Basic Greek set somewhat less useful. There are some excellent Greek fonts out there, but you want everyone to be able to read what you have written and most people won’t have a specialized font like that. I will do the best I can with the tools at hand.

All around the house

Let’s start with our house. If you look at the top of the page on your homesite, you will see it says “The oikos of…” This is correct, though there should be a circumflex over the i like this: oîkos. In Greek, οικοσ.

The main page of your oikos is the entrance. This is hē eísodos (hē is the definite article in the nominative case) or (ή είσοδοσ. The open parenthesis here represents the rough breathing sound which should be shown by a small hook above the vowel.

Next comes the courtyard. That is hē aulē or (ή αυλή.

Then we have the library. This one is a little trickier. There isn’t really a good Classical era word for this, because no one had a whole room dedicated just to books. There are several possibilities. For instance, hē bibliothēkē or (ή βιβλιοθηκη, literally a bookcase, but this became the word for library or book store in several modern languages. Another possibility is tà biblía or τα βιβλία, which means the books. Or you might prefer tò bibliophulákion or τό βιβλιοφυλάκιον, the archive.

The last room is the study. This one is also tough. The rooms here at AW don’t really correspond to the rooms of an ancient Greek house. However, one word for a workshop also came to mean something like a study: to tekhnúphion or το τεχνύφιον. Or you might try something a little more light-hearted like the name Aristophanes gave to Socrates’ workshop: the Thinkery. That would be tó phrontistērion or τό φροντιστήριον.

You have, or you will develop, a list of friends. One friend is hó phílos or (ό φίλοσ if male, hē phílē or (ή φίλη if female (though this form would not occur in Classical Greek). A group of them are hoí phíloi or (οί φίλοί unless they are all female, in which case they are haí phílai or (αί φίλαί. If you are addressing someone as friend, you would use the vocative hó phíle or (ό φίλε. This changes only in the masculine singular.

Finally, there are the journals. A single journal is hē ephēmeris or (ή εφήμερισ. The plural is haí ephēmerides or (αί εφήμεριδεσ. Or at least I think that is the correct plural.

This has gotten long, so I will break off here and continue with some conversational phrases in the next post.