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- This is good advice for Ancient Greek for the most part, although you would need to adjust your approach depending on the dialect you plan to study. Given its central place in the Greek canon, I've always advised starting with Homeric Greek. I would never advise starting with koine, even if you only plan to read the New Testament. It's limiting you to language only complicated enough to write a travel brochure (καὶ εὐθὺς ἀναβαίνων...), when you could be reading Greek in all of its beauty and complexity.
So what I would advise learning by rote is:
* The three noun declensions
* The present, imperfect, first and second aorist, perfect, and future indicative of regular verbs
* The active present optative, subjunctive, and imperative of regular verbs
* The full paradigms of εἰμί and φημί
From there, I'd pick up Owen and Goodspeed's Homeric Vocabularies and a good, generously annotated (but not translated) edition of the Iliad. Pharr's Homeric Greek could also help with a few forms like the dual that are important to be able to recognize, but far from necessary to memorize.
e: Comment formatting.
- The University of Oklahoma Press keeps Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek in print (https://www.oupress.com/books/10672205/homeric-greek). Now, in tackling it by oneself, it certain helps to have learned some Greek already, or at least to be comfortable with grammatical notions such as case, tense, voice, and mood, whether through Latin or perhaps German.
- I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.
- >it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
- I am fluent in Spanish having been born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-60s through the mid-80s, which had a large Puerto Rican and Dominican population. Being half-Irish and half-Ukrainian, I spent some time at the Irish Arts Center in NYC learning Irish in the 90s. Given there were about 200k speakers of Irish worldwide back then, and now only 68k I believe, it was more of a curiosity for me then. I spent 7 years in SE Asia, and I learned Indonesian (intermediate still), but my Indonesian wife learned English faster than I picked up Indonesian, and I gave in to speaking English. I lived in East Java for a year, and I love Javanese, which Bahasa Indonesian draws much of its influence from among the 500 to 800+ languages spoken over the 17,000 islands of the archipelago. I am currently learning Arabic, after spending 8 months there over the past 24 months. I like the script and some of the language such as the root-based, three-letter mainly, structure. Spanish has been by far the most useful to me still living in New York State, but I am trying again to push my Indonesian for the sake of my children and to better communicate with my in-laws who know Indonesian, but are more at home with Javanese. I have played with learning Koine Greek over Homeric Greek to be able to read Marcus Aurelius or other contemporaries. I wish I could be fluent in at least three more languages other than my native English and Spanish. Harold Bloom's the "Loom of Language" sent me down the rabbit hole when I was in High School. People complain about having to have learned either Latin or Ancient Greek back in the day in High School, but now literacy in math and languages, seems to be tenuous at best. What happened? I grew up poor and with strife in my neighborhood, but the curriculum seemed so much more demanding. I don't know why; it's not my field of study or interest, but I am curious.
- What I said is the position held by historical linguists focussing on early Ancient Greek, e.g. Strunk (who wrote the paper about aeolisms that are archaisms), Leumann, Meier-Brügger (Griech. Sprachw. II W 201.2 quoting Leumann “Versetzung in eine vom Alltag ferne Atmosphäre”, II F 218.3), Wachter (who wrote the grammar accompanying the latest comprehensive Greek Ilias edition), e.g. “the epic poet used non-everyday forms”, “it is true that from the point of view of its formation, ἤμαρ is more archaic than ἡμέρη, but there is no doubt that ἡμέρη, which is attested in the whole of post-Homeric Greek, particularly in Ionic-Attic, was the current form at Homer's time.” etc.
No linguist studying early Ancient Greek thinks that the poet(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey “used their own contemporary language”.
“You enjoying archaic text has zero to do with” … indeed, so letʼs not miss the argument I actually made: one of the two reasons for your view seems to be that Homer “made it sound pleasant”, “people […] liked it”. I just wanted to convey that it is a non sequitur to induce a non-archaic, contemporary style from that, particularly in the case of an epic poem about older times. This genre usually has an archaic, non-everyday style. (Two links I had included there to parallel examples were scrubbed.)
If herein you did not mean to give a reason for your view, I am sorry for the detour.
The then remaining reason for your view seems to be that the Homeric poems were “composed to be passed orally and only later on written”. But this is also no evidence for a non-archaic, contemporary language because highly archaic poems can be transmitted orally, even for centuries (cf. the Vedic hymns).
Your wording can only mean the history of the Homeric poems, but to take a look at their prehistory: the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Parry, Lord) also does not speak against archaic, non-everyday language, on the contrary, it was developed inter alia to explain the most archaic forms in the Homeric poems.
“older translations […] can be quite expansive over original. Given that this particular translation has the same length as original.” Sorry, but this is not correct, you wrote yourself “the translation is shorter then some other translations”. Emily Wilsonʼs translation has the same number of verses, as metric translations usually have, but uses the iambic pentameter instead of the considerably longer dactylic hexameter. Note that I donʼt criticize her decision. (On the contrary, I sympathize with the view that the English iambic verse may correspond a little bit better to the Greek dactylic verse. I know, in the end, Germanic metrical language and Ancient Greek metrical language are very different anyway.)
“This is kind of weird argument given there older translations you don't take issue with” … Look, I havenʼt made and donʼt intend to make any comment about any translation at all. In particular, I donʼt take issue with Wilsonʼs translation. I just wanted to corroborate the little objection made by DiscourseFan against a tiny, understandable and innocuous misconception. I deplore that the argument has rather deteriorated since then, will not engage further and wish you well.
