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/neuburgTimes/) 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/