Ancient Greek as a "dead"language

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Sun, 23 Feb 1997 09:25:28 -0600

Surely any subscriber to this list who is really cognizant of English
usage and is not engaged in rhetorical gamesmanship knows what is meant
by a "dead" language: it is one you must go to school to learn how to
read, even if you grow up speaking a language descended from it.
English-speakers must regard "Beowulf" as written in a dead language
because they cannot understand it simply in terms of the English that
they learned by growing up speaking it; for many, if not most,
English-speakers, Shakespeare's English far from being a "living"
language. I am sure that Italians who used to attend Mass that was sung
in Latin had little idea of what the words they heard meant unless they
had specifically been taught ecclesiastical Latin, although of course
the Latin was the ancestor of their own native language. While I can't
affirm it for sure, I rather suspect that the same is true of Greeks
today who hear the NT read in the orthodox churches: unless they have
been to school and learned the Koine, they are unlikely to make more
sense of the gospel of Luke than will of Homer or Aeschylus.

Matt Neuburg, who has left behind his post as professor of Greek at New
Zealand's University of Canterbury to become a journalist and Macintosh
computer programmer (no doubt improving his income thereby) still
maintains a web site

(http://web.xplain.com/friends.net/neuburg<fontfamily><param>Times</param><b=
igger>/)</bigger></fontfamily>
whence those interested may download his Mac programs that accompany
the Cambridge _Reading Greek_ course and that offer text and commentary
on a couple Platonic dialogues as well as a colorful hypertext
arrangement of the paradigm of the Greek verb; curiously the graphic
atop his site is a tombstone with a bird (phoenix?) above it and a
motto underneath it, "Lingua mortua lingua optima." That, of course,
expresses the paradox: any language that was a medium of a literature
that can be and still is worth reading and actually is read is not
really "dead." Homer is as much worth reading--and hearing chanted
aloud in hexameters--today. I'm sure that when read aloud in modern
Greek schools, the Iliad and Odyssey are sounded in the vowels,
diphthongs and consonants of today's Dimotiki: MININ AIDE, QEA, PILIADW
AhILLAIWS, rather than MHNIN AEIDE, QEA, PHLHIADEW ACILLEWS. I'm sure
these hexameters read in the Erasmian pronunciation are not an awful
lot closer to the original pronunciation of the 8th c. B.C. than when
they are read in today's Dimotiki, but I think that they have more of
the richness and diversity of the original vowels and diphthongs.

Carl W. Conrad

Department of Classics, Washington University

One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130

(314) 935-4018

cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com

WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/