scholarly journals Teaching Modern Greek to Classicists

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Jerneja Kavčič ◽  
Brian Daniel Joseph ◽  
Christopher Brown

The ideology of decline is a part of the history of the study and characterization of the Greek language from the Hellenistic period and the Roman Atticist movement right up to the emergence of katharevousa in the 19th century and the resulting modern diglossia. It is also clear, however, that there is an overwhelming presence of Ancient Greek vocabulary and forms in the modern language. Our position is that the recognition of such phenomena can provide a tool for introducing classicists to the modern language, a view that has various intellectual predecessors (e.g., Albert Thumb, Nicholas Bachtin, George Thomson, and Robert Browning). We thus propose a model for the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists that starts with words that we refer to as carry-overs. These are words that can be used in the modern language without requiring any explanation of pronunciation rules concerning Modern Greek spelling or of differences in meaning in comparison to their ancient predecessors (e.g., κακός ‘bad’, μικρός ‘small’, νέος ‘new’, μέλι ‘honey’, πίνετε ‘you drink’). Our data show that a beginners’ textbook of Ancient Greek may contain as many as a few hundred carry-over words, their exact number depending on the variety of the Erasmian pronunciation that is adopted in the teaching practice. However, the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists should also take into account lexical phenomena such as Ancient-Modern Greek false friends, as well as Modern Greek words that correspond to their ancient Greek predecessors only in terms of their written forms and meanings.

Classics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Burke

The history of archaeology of Greece as we know it today begins with prehistoric investigations that took place in the 19th century. Early excavations by Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans, and Wilhelm Dörpfeld, along with Greek colleagues like Christos Tsountas, Panagiotis Stamatakis, Valerios Stais, and Antonios Keramopoulos laid the foundation for systematic, stratigraphic excavations. Research was heavily directed by ancient Greek texts, primarily the epic poems of Homer. Efforts to find archaeological truth to the legendary tales of the ancient heroes continue to be problematic, but, to a degree, early excavations revealed a rich and fascinating period of Greece’s development. Although the archaeological discoveries of Greek prehistory date to an age centuries older than Homer, the discoveries shed light on a vast, rich archaeological history, one upon which the Homeric tales were, at least partially, based. Early discoveries of prehistoric texts, especially on Crete with scripts in Hieroglyphic Minoan, Linear A (non-Greek), and Linear B (Greek), along with the enigmatic Phaistos disc, have expanded our understanding of the history of the Greek language and Greek people.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekâi Şen

Although water resources have been developed throughout the centuries for the service of different civilizations, at different scales and in different regions, their use in automation has been conceived only recently. Research into the history of water from an automation point of view has led to some unknown or hidden facts. Starting from the ancient Greek period before the prophet Christ and after about the 12th century, many researchers tried to make use of water power for working some simple but effective devices for the service of mankind. Among these are the haulage of water from a lower level to a higher elevation by water wheels in order to irrigate agricultural land. Hero during the Hellenistic period and Vitruvius of the Roman Empire were among the first who tried to make use of water power for use in different human activities, such as water haulage, watermills, water clocks, etc. The highlights of these works were achieved by a 12th century Muslim researcher, Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari, who lived in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey. He reviewed all the previous work from different civilizations and then suggested his own designs and devices for the use of water power in automation of excellent types. He even combined animals and water power through early designs of valves, pistons, cylinders and crank mills, as will be explained in this paper. His works were revealed by German historians and engineers in the first quarter of the 19th century. Later, an English engineer translated his book from Arabic into English, revealing the guidelines for modern automation and robotic designs originating from the 12th century. This paper gives a brief summary of the early workers' devices and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari's much more developed designs with his original hand-drawn pictures.


Author(s):  
Caterina Carpinato

The essay aims to outline the history of the teaching of Modern Greek at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice: it started with its foundation in 1868, with Costantino Triantafillis, and was interrupted for more than a century from 1890. This paper also deals with the history of the discipline from 1868 until today, with an eye on the connection with the political and cultural life of the country and on the relationship with other disciplines (such as Ancient Greek language and literature and Byzantine civilization). After an interval of a century classes of Modern Greek started up again at Ca’ Foscari in 1994-95 thanks to the teaching of Lucia Marcheselli Loukas. Since 1998 the teaching has been revived with a tenured professor and, in the last twenty years, it has trained graduate students and young scholars who today play a cultural and linguistic role of mediation between Italy and Greece.


1875 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-31
Author(s):  
Blackie

The Author showed by a historical review of the fortunes of Greece, through the Middle Ages, and under the successive influences of Turkish conquest and Turkish oppression, how the Greek language had escaped corruption to the degree that would have caused the birth of a new language in the way that Italian and the other Roman languages grew out of Latin. He then analysed the modern language, as it existed in current popular literature before the time of Coraes, that is, from the time of Theodore Ptochoprodromus to nearly the end of the last century, and showed that the losses and curtailments which it had unquestionably suffered in the course of so many centuries, were not such as materially to impair the strength and beauty of the language, which in its present state was partly to be regarded as a living bridge betwixt the present and the past, and as an altogether unique phenomenon in the history of human speech.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Angeliki Markoglou

Abstract Considering the concept of critical teaching, teachers should seek to ensure the active participation of students, emphasisng the adoption of student-centred and group-centred teaching methods, which will provide students with relevant motivation for learning. From this perspective the current article focuses on a teaching proposal for the course of Ancient Greek Language in Greece and Cyprus, presenting the method of jigsaw-based cooperative learning as a teaching practice which promotes both active student participation and group cooperation. According to this teaching practice, the teacher actively involves the students in the learning process, promoting higher-level cognitive, metacognitive and emotional functions. Not only is this method compatible with the broader contemporary pedagogical and didactic principles, which aim to provoke students' interest, cultivate their social skills and relationships, develop their personal self-perception, and create autonomous and fulfilled personalities, but also it is harmonised with the main aims of the Ancient Greek Language Curriculum in these countries, which are fully aligned with both their education policy and their societal needs.


2007 ◽  
Vol 135 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 606-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Markovic

In order to standardize language of medicine, it is essential to have a good command of ancient Greek and Latin. We cannot deny a huge impact of ancient Greek medicine on medical terminology. Compounds of Greek origin related to terms for organs, illnesses, inflammations, surgical procedures etc. have been listed as examples. They contain Greek prefixes and suffixes transcribed into Latin and they have been analyzed. It may be concluded that the modern language of medicine basically represents the ancient Greek language transcribed into Latin.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-208
Author(s):  
Oleg A. Donskikh

The article examines the history of the formation of several languages of science – Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic and Latin - relating to the material of four languages and corresponding cultures. Several considerations are given in favor of the need to preserve the national languages of science. The stages of formation of languages of science in the system of culture are traced. There are two types of languages that are used by scientific communities: 1) languages that are rooted in the national culture and remain firmly linked with the natural language community; 2) languages that are reserved for performing a certain function, while in parallel, national languages are fully functioning in society. The first type includes the Greek and Arabic, the scientific languages of the second type are Sanskrit and Latin. The key role of the humanitarian, in particular poetic, philological and philosophical culture for the formation of the language of science is shown. Based on the material of the Ancient Greek language, the stages of its development over several centuries are traced, which resulted in such linguistic tools that allowed not only to use abstract conceptual concepts, but also to organize the vocabulary hierarchically, and this as a result allowed to form any needed generic chains. The importance of the appearance of impersonal texts that comes with collections of written documents alienated from a particular teacher is emphasized.


2022 ◽  

The phrase “terracotta sculpture” refers to all figurative representations in fired clay produced in Greece and in the Greek world during the first millennium bce, (from the Geometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period), whatever their size (figurine, statuette, or statue), whatever their manufacturing technique (modeling, molding, mixed), whatever their material form (in-the-round, relief, etc.), whatever their representation (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic [real or imaginary], diverse objects), and whatever the limits of their representation: full figure (figurines, statuettes, groups), truncated or abbreviated representations, including protomai, masks, busts, half figures, and anatomical representations, among others. All these objects, with the possible exception of large statues, were the products of artisans who were referred to in ancient texts as “coroplasts,” or modelers of images in clay. Because of this, the term “coroplasty,” or “coroplathy,” has been used to refer to this craft, but also increasingly to all of its products, large and small, while research on this material falls under the rubric of coroplastic studies. Greek terracottas were known to antiquarians from the mid-17th century onward from archaeological explorations in both sanctuary and funerary sites, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Yet serious scholarly interest in these important representatives of Greek sculpture developed only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period were unearthed from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia in the 1870s and Myrina in Asia Minor in the 1880s. These immediately entered the antiquities markets, where their cosmopolitan, secular imagery had a great appeal for collectors and fueled scholarly interest and debate. At the same time, sanctuary deposits containing terracottas also began to be explored, but scholarly attention privileged funerary terracottas because of their better state of preservation. For most of the 20th century, the study of figurative terracottas basically was an art-historical exercise based in iconography and style that remained in the shadow of monumental sculpture. It is only in the last four decades or so that coroplastic studies has developed into an autonomous field of research, with approaches specific to the discipline that consider modalities of production, as well as the religious, social, political, and economic roles that terracottas played in ancient Greek life by means of broad sociological and anthropological approaches. Consequently, this bibliography mainly comprises publications of the last forty years, although old titles that are still essential for research are also included.


1992 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 84-109
Author(s):  
Margaret Kofod

Much has been written on Greek diglossia and the language struggle (between katharevousa and dhimotiki). Defenders of katharevousa have emphasized the importance of the language’s roots in ancient Greek, opponents of katharevousa have emphasized the idea that the Greek language should be first and foremost ‘the language of the people’.


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