ancient-greek-tutorials

by http://www.reddit.com/user/Nanocyborgasm

The Greek Alphabet:

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============= ========================================================== manager some title ============= ========================================================== generic Provides abstractions for the reader, its books, and their annotations. Planned to be useful for all Sony ereaders, but this has not been tested.

prst1 Fills in the PRS-T1 specific parts of generic.

pdfannotation Create PDF annotations and add them to PDF files.

pagetext Get the location of each character on a PDF page, and get bounding boxes that contain certain characters.

pdfdice Cut the pages of a PDF file into subpages.

pdfcontent Adds content to PDF pages. Includes a very simple SVG-to- PDF converter. ============= ==========================================================

Simple tables

A simple table looks like this:

Author Name First Book to Read Genre

Larry Niven The Mode in God's Eye SF James Lovegrove Worldstorm Fantasy China Mieville Perdido Stree Station Fantasy You can use the positioning of the dashes below the headers to set the column alignment to right, left or centered. So, if I decide to align the first column to the left, the middle column in the center and the right column on the right, I’d do this:

Author Name First Book to Read Genre

Larry Niven The Mode in God's Eye SF James Lovegrove Worldstorm Fantasy China Mieville Perdido Stree Station Fantasy Multiline tables

If you need to put multiple lines in your table cells, then you’ll want to use a multi-line table. It will look something like this:

Author Name First Book Genre to Read

Larry Niven The Mode in SF and Jerry God's Eye Pournelle

James Worldstorm Fantasy Lovegrove

China Perdido Street Fantasy Mieville Station

Enclose the whole thing in a line with lots of dashes, put dashes below the headers and put empty lines between the rows.

Grid tables

If you use Emacs and are used to table mode, then this will be useful to you. If not, you can probably ignore this.

Uppercase Lowercase Name Value Α α alpha “Ah” Β β beta “B” Γ γ gamma “G” Δ δ delta “D” Ε ε epsilon “Eh” Ζ ζ zeta “Dz” Η η eta “Ey” Θ θ theta “Th” Ι ι iota “Ih”/“Ee” Κ κ kappa “K” Λ λ lambda “L” Μ μ mu “M” Ν ν nu “N” Ξ ξ xei “X” Ο ο omicron “O” Π π pei “P” Ρ ρ rho “R” Σ σ/ς sigma “S” Τ τ tau “T” Υ υ upsilon “Ue” Φ φ phei “p-h”/”f” Χ χ khei “k-h”/”kh” Ψ ψ psei “PS”

Ω ω omega “Oh” The alphabet contained both vowels and consonants, but their expected values are not necessarily what one would expect. Greek, after all, was a different language from English, and certain nuances of pronunciation were regarded as more vital than others by the Greeks. Much of the pronunciation of Classical Greek is conjectural, but we have reasonable ideas on how the language was pronounced. The consonants are easier to understand. Many resemble the Latin alphabet, and so are familiar to English speakers. Let’s look at them in detail. Β β (beta) is pronounced like “b” in boy. Γ γ (gamma) is pronounced like “g” in girl. Δ δ (delta) is pronounced like “d” in dog. Κ κ (kappa) is pronounced like “c” in calendar. Λ λ (lambda) is pronounced like “l” in large. Μ μ (mu) was pronounced like “m” in mother. Ν ν (nu) was pronounced like “n” in not. Π π (pei) was pronounced like “p” in park. Ρ ρ (rho) was pronounced like “r” in ram, but was a rhotic R, meaning that it was pronounced with a breath at the end. Σ σ ς (sigma) was pronounced like “s” in same, but had two lowercase forms. The second one was used only at the ends of words, while the first was used everywhere else. Τ τ (tau) was pronounced like “t” in tame. The letter Ζ ζ (zeta), despite appearing like the letter Z, was not pronounced that way. It was pronounced like “dz”, perhaps something like “ds” in suds. Because of the initial “d” it tended to be group with dentals (to be discussed later). There were also two double consonants. They were formed by the fusion of two consonants into a new letter. They were Ξ ξ (xei) = Κ+ Σ, which was pronounced like “x” in sex, and Ψ ψ (psei) = Π+Σ, which was pronounced like “ps” in saps. Finally, there were several consonants that were formed by combining them with breathings (see below) to produce consonants that were pronounced with a breath. These were Θ θ (theta), pronounced like t-h, Φ φ (phei), pronounced like p-h (perhaps like tophat), and Χ χ (khei), pronounced like k-h. At some point, perhaps as early as the Classical Age, these aspirants began to shift to be pronounced as fricatives, such as “th”, in thorn, “f”, and “kh” (hard H). A special rule applied when the letter gamma was followed by another palatal (kappa, another gamma, khei, or even xei). When this occurred, the first gamma was pronounced like “ñ” in Spanish señor. The second consonant in this group was pronounced normally. Example: ἄγγελος (añgelos), means messenger. Vowels are more problematic. Greek vowels can be divided into two types – short and long. The difference between them is not what one would expect from English. Short and long vowels were not pronounced differently. Rather, long vowels simply were pronounced longer than short ones, and any pronunciation differences were solely incidental to the time spent saying them. Some vowels had a short letter and a long letter companion, but not all. Let’s see how this works out. Short Long Sound α α “a” as in father ε η “e” as in fed, “ey” as in hey! ι ι “i” as in hit, “ee” as in feed ο ω “o” as in ton, “o” as in tome υ υ “u” sound like German “Müller“ As you can see, alpha, iota, and upsilon can be long or short, but the lengths of the other vowels are indicated by different letters. A Greek was expected to know when a letter was long or short if it had no unique letter attributed to length. You will come to recognize when these vowels are long or short with certain clues that appear, such as accents and declensional patterns. Sometimes, it’s not important to know. For now, just take it on faith that these clues will become apparent as we review more aspects of grammar. Finally, with vowels we have diphthongs. Diphthongs are combinations of two different vowels. Greek only allowed diphthongs to be formed if the second letter contained one of the two closed vowels, which were iota and upsilon. Any combination of the other letters with those two was possible, whether the first was long or short. Examples of short vowels with iota: diphthong sound αι sounds like "i" in "hi!" ει sounds like "ay" in "say" οι sounds like "oy" in "soy" υι sounds like "wi" in "win" Examples of long vowels with iota: diphthong sound ᾳ like αι but longer ῃ like ει but longer, and sometimes interchangeable ῳ like οι but longer Notice how, when the initial vowel is long, the iota that follows is placed underneath, in a process called the iota subscript. Finally, we have diphthongs with upsilon: diphthong sound αυ sounds like "aw" in "saw" ευ sounds like "ewwww!" ου sounds like "ou" in "soup" ηυ sounds about the same as ευ, and the two were often interchangeable There were two characters not strictly part of the alphabet that were nonetheless used. They were the two breathing marks. The smooth breathing mark looked like a circle open on the left, as in the first alpha of ἀγορά. It had no pronounced value. The rough breathing mark was a circle that was open to the right, as in ὥρα. It was pronounced as a soft "h". There was a rule in Greek that any word beginning with a vowel had to have a breathing mark, so if there was no "h" sound, then there was smooth breathing, and if there was, a rough breathing. Furthermore, all words that began with an upsilon had a rough breathing, and that upsilon was always long. Example: ὕλη (forest). Also, because rho was rhotic, every word that began with rho had to have a rough breathing on the rho, even though it wasn't a vowel. Example: ῥίς (nose) Accents: I won’t go into much detail about accents, as there are lot of rules about them that will only make sense after we review nouns and verbs. For now, suffice it to say that there are three accents: Acute (ά) Grave (ὰ) Circumflex (ᾶ) The acute accent indicated that the stress that fell on that vowel required the speaker to raise his tone of voice when he pronounced it. The grave indicated a lowering of tone. The circumflex indicated a raising and then lowering of tone. Elision: There was a non-mandatory rule in Greek that if a word ended with a short vowel, and was followed by a word that began with any vowel (even one with a rough breathing), that final short vowel could be dropped and the two words combined into one, with an apostrophe between them. Example: τὰ χρήματα ἀγοράζει ὅπλα. = τὰ χρήματ'ἀγοράζει ὅπλα. (Money buys arms.) When elision occurs with a word that begins on a vowel with a rough breathing, the last consonant of the first word is modified into its aspirant. Example: τὰ χρήματα ὅπλα ἀγοράζει. = τὰ χρήμαθ'ὅπλα ἀγοράζει. (Money buys arms.) Here the tau has become apposed to a rough breathing, turning it into a theta. EDIT 6/25/12: Many alignment and justification fixes. Also added the note about rho and its rough breathing. 6/26/12. Changed guttural to palatal. Thanks to arapiles. EDIT 7/28/12: Placed a complete table of the Greek alphabet. Gave a better example of rough breathing.

arushijain94/ancient-greek-tutorials

ancient-greek-tutorials

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China Perdido Street Fantasy Mieville Station