If someone ever tells you (s)he ‘knows’ Ancient Greek, just spit in their eye. Yes. Be it even a professor (no professor will ever dare affirm (s)he knows this language).
It is an abyss. I am now looking into it, standing on the brink of falling without any chances to get back alive.
Why this drama: I am preparing the program for my course. And the deeper I am plunging into my attempts to simplify and to systematize the more I realize it is a dead end.
You arrive at the point of departure: to start reading even the shortest Ancient Greek excerpts without adaptation requires one’s simultaneous knowledge of practically everything at once. [We do not discuss the possibility like ‘oh-just-comment-on-it-and-then-get-back-systematically-one-day’. That’s exactly what I need >>> SYSTEM from the first steps.]
I picked several two- and three-word quotes from Sophocles and Aristote. Understanding all the processes in them requires three modules of preliminary explanation.
Just a small example of a two-word quote: stress, change of stress, declination, change of stress in declination (stress patterns), article, long and short vowels (especially historically long and historically short).
The trouble with my approach is that in my courses I am not so interested in teaching languages for the sake of teaching languages. I need them as an instrument to start immediately with philosophy literature, art and history.
In case of Ancient Greek the instrument proves unattainable without studying it for the sake of the instrument itself. Damn.
Shoot me someone pls.
13 December 2016. — Moscow (Russia)