Homeric Greek
by Pharr, Clyde · first published 1920
9mentions
2recommended by
8HN commenters
2014–2026first – last mentioned
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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…
on “C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books” ↗…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…
on “Latin by the Dowling Method” ↗Hard to say. I read Homer when in college in Robert Fitzgerald's translation. After college, I learned a little bit of classical Greek, then worked my way through Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek, which takes one through Book I of the Iliad, then later worked through the Odyssey and the Iliad. My impression is that a fair number of people who went through liberal arts programs in college have…
on “The Odyssey – Alexander Pope translation (1725)” ↗…life believing in things like "self enrichment through education" or "being a well rounded person" -- the general sentiments expressed in the article -- but now I think they're meaningless. I learned Homeric Greek and read parts of the Odyssey in it, but the idea of an engineer going home after a day of work and reading the Odyssey in Greek and thinking to himself, "boy, this really makes me think; I am a well-rounded…
on “America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous” ↗Having studied Homeric Greek vocabulary for ~140 hours with Anki, the only change I found which made the experience more pleasant was to disable the card leeching. The "threat" of a card becoming a leech tended to take me out of…
on “Anki – Powerful, intelligent flashcards” ↗…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…
on “Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian” ↗…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.
on “Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium” ↗>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…
on “Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium” ↗…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”.…