Ancient Greek Language on the Web

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Ancient Greek Language on the Web

Ancient Greek is a fascinating language both because of its intrinsic beauty and kaleidoscopic variety of expression and because of its vast literature: even when we exclude the Byzantine period it spans thirteen centuries from Homer (8th century BC) to Nonnos of Panopolis (5th century AD), embracing both the origins of Western philosophy and science and the birth of Christianity. Understanding ancient Greek means being able to delve into the roots of Western civilization and to apply Greek critical thinking to our present day culture.

However, learning as well as teaching ancient Greek remains to some extent a strenuous job demanding much training and discipline. Fortunately, nowadays the Web is offering some relief, as you can see on this web page: here I give a listing of web sites on ancient Greek language and grammar, combined with a description of the contents and a personal appreciation (see side bar). Apart from being inevitably somewhat subjective, this appreciation is given from a scholarly as well as a didactic point of view. Students should know that some sites contain information that cannot be trusted and are to be consulted for fun and amusement only, whereas others offer unique and accurate tools for the study of the language.

Whether you are a teacher or a student of ancient Greek or simply an interested passer-by, this web site will show you that the study of this "dead language" is more alive than ever before. If you have the feeling that in your school, your university or your country, the knowledge and study of ancient Greek is being pushed aside more and more by shortsighted utilitarianism or narrow-minded materialism, take courage from this web page! All over the world people are taking effort to propagate the study of this language by the use of modern web technology, thus transmitting this irreplaceable cultural inheritance to future generations. Teachers in classics continue to initiate their pupils in the reading of Homer, Xenophon and Demosthenes, biblical scholars and students are eager to read the New Testament in the original language and even Japanese doctors apply themselves to the basics of ancient Greek as a help to understand modern medical terminology. For the use of these different audiences we have marked sites that focus exclusively on biblical Greek with , but of course many other sites are of interest for the study of both classical Attic Greek and biblical Greek. For the latter is nothing more than a further development of the former: the history of the Greek language is a continuous, well-documented and long history - from the 14th century BC to the present - the longest of any Indo-European language!