The official Greek Thread "Feta Cheese"

[Vengeful Blademistress]

Έχω κάμποσο καιρό να δω αυτό το συγκεκριμένο forum... Βρήκα κάτι άλλο εδώ στο Gaia, και ξεχάστηκα... Τι να κάνουμε;
Επίσης, άλλαξα και το όνομα χρήστη μου. (Η Crazy jello Thief είμαι, επίσης γνωστή ως Σοφία.)

[Shizuka Mizu]

Hello all!
I'm a complete doof when it comes to modern Greece; I've studied everything about the ancient world of Greece (who hasn't these days, really?), and I realized I know next to nothing about you in the modern world and how you live today. So I'd really like to know! That said, I have a question or two for you all.

First, why is it that sometimes I see you all writing Greek with the Latin alphabet? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose, I'm just curious as to why one might choose to flip-flop between the two alphabets. I'd also like to say that I think the Greek alphabet is much prettier than the Latin one, so I hope no one is going to say "it's becoming used less and less" or something like that. I don't want to see it go.

Second question! I've studied ancient Greek way more extensively than the modern variant. I was curious as to how far it goes when it comes to native Greeks and if they can understand it. When I read modern Greek, I can recognize words and such, but the idea of the sentence is usually lost on me; I can't understand modern Greek from the ancient Greek perspective. I'm certain that it doesn't necessarily work the same way looking at ancient Greek from a native modern Greek's perspective, though, so I can't just assume that it doesn't work because I, a not-Greek person, cannot understand it.
So let's throw out a random phrase. I want you Greeks to tell me how much of this you understand, and please, be as detailed as possible. Do you recognize words? Is the word order the same? Is the grammar similar? Are there words you don't recognize? Are you unable to make heads or tails of this gibberish? Or can you completely understand the entire thing? Does it sound like something really old-fashioned if you can understand it? So on and so forth. Here's the phrase:

Εἰ λέγοι τὴν ἀλήθειαν, πράσσοι ἂν καλῶς. Λέγοι ἀεὶ τὰ δίκαια.

[Papakis]

a) "greeklish" as we call it is simply faster. When you do everything else on the web using the latin alphabet then it's just needless work changing back and forth. Also to add that some of us 'older' internet greek folk are used to it cause back in the day sites rarely displayed greek letters correctly.

b) The words are the easiest part to understand. Some (like the one you posted) are easy to read while others are WAY harder. The grammar was more complicated and 'ancient greek' refers to a spam of a at least 2 thousand years (so not all ancent texts use the same grammar or words)

[Veeconia]

Καλησπέρα και πάλι! Εγώ ξεχάστηκα εκτός gaia >.< αλλά τώρα επέστρεψα, αν και μάλλον έχουμε όλοι μεταξύ μας περίεργο τάιμινγκ και δε συναντιόμαστε στη φέτα xp

hello Shizuka! welcome to our thread!

Papakis has answered your questions, the only part i would like to add is give you the exact translation of the phrase you gave, so you can see for yourself how different it is, even if you don't understand modern greek (i'm not using a translator, i will just translate it as i see it):

Εἰ λέγοι τὴν ἀλήθειαν, πράσσοι ἂν καλῶς. Λέγοι ἀεὶ τὰ δίκαια.

'Οποιος λέει την αλήθεια, αν πράττει καλά. Λέει πάντα το σωστό (το δίκαιο).

if i haven't done any mistake, i'm just happy ^^ so, if i'm correct, you can see that the phrase is fairly easy to translate in modern greek, but as Papa said, there are other eras that ancient greek is totally different that the modern one.

[Shizuka Mizu]

biggrin
Thanks for putting up with my nooby questions.
I'm glad to hear that. I mean, that the Greek alphabet isn't going to disappear.
As for the second part, I should've been more specific myself. I studied Hellenistic Greek. More specifically, Ionic Hellenistic Greek.
So that answers my question, and now I have another. Can you think of an example of when translating Hellenistic Greek would be much more difficult, like what was mentioned?

[Veeconia]

anytime, feel free to ask whatever comes to mind and we will try to answer you :3

in fact, i have a small book that has quotes from the works of our tragic poets (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and i chose one that will show you how different ancient greek (ionic dialect) to the modern one. unfortunately, our keyboards don't have the polytonic system, so i won't be able to use all the tones in every word - but since you have studied it, you'll know what i've kept out wink

"Μή τί σε θυμοπληθής δορίμαργος άτα φερέτω."

the above is the original quote, and below is the translation, as it's given in the book:

"Τύφλωση ξέφρενη διψασμένη για πόλεμο μη σε ξεσέρνει."

[Shizuka Mizu]

Veeconia

anytime, feel free to ask whatever comes to mind and we will try to answer you :3

in fact, i have a small book that has quotes from the works of our tragic poets (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and i chose one that will show you how different ancient greek (ionic dialect) to the modern one. unfortunately, our keyboards don't have the polytonic system, so i won't be able to use all the tones in every word - but since you have studied it, you'll know what i've kept out wink

"Μή τί σε θυμοπληθής δορίμαργος άτα φερέτω."

the above is the original quote, and below is the translation, as it's given in the book:

"Τύφλωση ξέφρενη διψασμένη για πόλεμο μη σε ξεσέρνει."

That is perfect! Could you give me the title of that book so I may look into purchasing a copy of it myself? surprised

[Veeconia]

unfortunately, you will not be able to find this little book, since it was a publication of a private school here in Greece, but if you look up your local bookstores or libraries, i'm sure that you'll find a similar one :3

[Shizuka Mizu]

Veeconia

unfortunately, you will not be able to find this little book, since it was a publication of a private school here in Greece, but if you look up your local bookstores or libraries, i'm sure that you'll find a similar one :3

Bah! That's alright. I'll find one somewhere. I love that kind of stuff. Finding a text that's both in Hellenistic and modern Greek would be cool and probably help me learn the modern variant pretty quick.

[Seren Noreen]

Επιτέλους ένα ελληνικό φόρουμ στο gaia blaugh

[Papakis]

Kalws tin cool

[Seren Noreen]

Papakis

Kalws tin cool

Eίμαι αρκετό καιρό στο gaia άλλα δεν περίμενα να βρω έλληνες mrgreen
Καλησπέρα Papakis 4laugh

[Papakis]

Etixes se arges periodous tou thread. Alla oti 'ntopio' koutsompolio 8es na mirasteis/sxoliaseis , eleu8era

[occult android]

Shizuka Mizu

Hello all!
First, why is it that sometimes I see you all writing Greek with the Latin alphabet? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose, I'm just curious as to why one might choose to flip-flop between the two alphabets. I'd also like to say that I think the Greek alphabet is much prettier than the Latin one, so I hope no one is going to say "it's becoming used less and less" or something like that. I don't want to see it go.

Hi Shizuka.
Nowadays, greek teens use more the latin alphabet than the greek one, because they have to, while they are surfing on the internet or talk to people around the world via internet. Most of them know english and use many english words too for their everyday communication, and even greek tv shows or greek ads promote this bad habbit and make it look modern and super...Also, greek teens feel comfortable when using the latin alphabet, because they can easily avoid "grammarrrr" mistakes... Plus you can ignore any spelling rules by doing that.

It is very well known, after all, that the greek language is much harder than the english one.
You should be proud of learning ancient greek, for sure.

I appreciate the fact you find the greek alphabet pretty, but I have to inform you that most Europeans do not. It's been a huge pain for all of them, as they would love us to leave behind our own alphabet and start using officially the latin one, like most of them do. It's hard for them, and I don't doubt about it, to just understand some greek letters whenever they try to read them... That is a big issue for the European Union, and many discussions have been started about that the last three decades. Some people from other countries, like Germany for instance, think that greek letters look like chinese... I don't blame them, they are barbarians, what else could they say, lol. pirate Perharps our debt and its endless problems will be soon a good reason to start thinking seriously about unlinking ourselves from the European Union, so everyone would be happy at the end, lol, we will see...

Shizuka Mizu

Second question! I've studied ancient Greek way more extensively than the modern variant. I was curious as to how far it goes when it comes to native Greeks and if they can understand it.

This is an interesting question of yours. Well, experts admit that almost 50 out of 100 words, are the same...
Cool statistics, aren't they? I mean that the ancient greek vocabulary still lives inside the modern version, which we all use today, and that is pleasant. Grammar has changed much though, as experts again admit our ancient language used to be much more complicated and much more "special" than the current one. This automatically means, of course, that our language is becoming poorer and worse, sadly. After all, we survived from some big wars as a nation, and this certainly made us stay behind, as we say here.. Maybe ancient greeks were smarter than us, so that explains much too...
Truth is that most of the neo-greeks have a very poor vocabulary and tend to just have fun and only care for their "facebook status" or their brand new shades that will make them look like kings in the closest beach, for example, lol...

[Shizuka Mizu]

I don't know how to do all that fancy quoting stuff you did, so I hope you get this just because I clicked the quote button. Enjoy my inexperience!
First of all, I suppose we experience the same thing with the whole chatspeak thing in English, and that bothers me too. Alas, I fear that both our languages will inevitably recede into something less eloquent than what they are/used to be at some point in the future. Blah.
Second of all, that's a crock of bologna. I've studied Chinese; the Greek alphabet could not be further from that. It's an alphabet, which Chinese does not have; Chinese is a logographic system of non-phonetic characters. I suppose that's just people trying to troll you guys into switching to an "understandable" or "readable" alphabet and babbling about how different the two systems are won't get anyone anywhere. Still, I think that analogy is particularly out there. Unless you've lived under a rock for your whole life and never seen Chinese before, then you can probably see the difference between the two even at just a glance.
Lastly, I love finding etymology and roots and stuff. Happens in English quite a bit with Latin, and obviously to a larger degree with whatever Romance language I happen to be studying. Therefore, I naturally run into this a lot when looking over modern Greek, and I really like when that happens. The most recent pair I stumbled over were:
γυνή, γυναικός =modern=> γυναίκα
ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός =modern=> άντρας
So naturally the modern variant just utilizes the stems of the old words in these two cases, which I think is cool. I see the roots.
Anyway, I've babbled on quite enough. -runs off-