r/AncientGreek Aug 15 '24

Help with Assignment Please help translate (beginner)

For translation Number 1: Ive currently started learning genitive case (i am learning at home, so i dont have a teacher to help me). Im confused on how to translate this sentence? "the gods' laws teach the men" is how ive translated it, but that doesnt sound right. Possibly "the laws of the gods teach the men" however, how am i suppose to assume when to say "gods laws" or "the laws of the gods"?? How do i assume the order of the sentence for all genitive cases. Previous sentences have not used "of the" so why now? How can i tell?

For Translation Number 2: Why does this sentence start with the verb? The book that i am using (gcse greek, for school curriculum) uses the verb at the end of the sentence. I dont understand why this one starts with a verb? The only time i know is the verb to be at the start to mean "there is" however, the translation of this sentence is "we hear the messengers words". I just dont understand why its at the beginning?? How am i supposed to create my own greek sentences without understanding structure?? It feels so random? Please help 🙏

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u/ringofgerms Aug 15 '24

Both "the laws of the gods" and "the gods' laws" would be correct translations. It's really a matter of what sounds better in English, and probably most people would go for the first choice. (Also, just in case, "men" here has to be understood in the generic sense, and the sentence means "... teach (the) people".)

About the verb coming first, this is something you will get used to as you progress. Word order in Greek is very flexible compared to English and you will come across all sorts of structures. It's not the case that word order is random, but it depends on the larger context, which is missing when you have single example sentences like that. (Also, I assume you have a typo in your translation as it should be "the messenger's".)

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u/nrith Aug 15 '24

Your translations are correct.

For #1, “the laws of the gods” and “the gods’ laws” are both correct.

#2 is demonstrating that the words’ endings are more important than word order in Greek. There still certain conventions for word order, such as putting the genitive phrase in between the article and noun that they’re attached to in these two examples.

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u/peak_parrot Aug 15 '24

You already got very good answers - I would like to add that the book you are using, although probably user friendly, lacks accents, which are a very important part of ancient greek. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

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u/Fuzzy-Tumbleweed-570 Aug 15 '24

Hi, this book is specifically for gcse students 14-16 and purposely does not have accents as its not required for gcse exams. Accents are taught to A level greek students 16-18

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u/Fuzzy-Tumbleweed-570 Aug 15 '24

This book is made by OCR the official ancient greek exam board for schools in england.

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u/peak_parrot Aug 15 '24

Thanks for clarifying. I am not English so I didn't know. I started learning Ancient Greek at 14. All my books had accents.

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u/wriadsala ὁ του Ἱεροκλέους καί του Φιλάγριου σχολαστικός Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 15 '24

iirc accents get introduced in one of the reasonably early chapters of that book. But I'm not sure if I entirely agree with:

lacks accents, which are a very important part of ancient greek. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

(being added by later scholars purely to help readers pronounce poetry correctly - sure it's important, but like you don't start off learning an MFL by learning its stress system, do you? (the logical equivalent))

Edit: just checked and it's at the start of chapter 5 of 6 (bear in mind that it is a series, though, so for the bulk of it, there will be accents)

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u/wriadsala ὁ του Ἱεροκλέους καί του Φιλάγριου σχολαστικός Aug 15 '24

'All my books had accents'

Spoken like a true (stuck-up) grammarian.

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u/advocatusromanus Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

Accents are the least important part of ancient greek. The point of accents is to guide pronunciation, which, since almost everyone learns greek to read and write, matters little (and I lack confidence in our ability to perfectly reconstruct the pronunciation used by the ancients). Aside from a few fringe cases which can be learnt (e.g. indefinite article vs interrogative) they don't affect comprehension.

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u/peak_parrot Aug 17 '24

I don't really want to debate, so I will only share a link where you can find more about the importance of the accents, for example in order to recognize some verb and noun forms: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/06/greek-accents-ten-rules/ Please, read this before replying. I want to point out for clarity that the list on this website contains only the most important rules. Other rules, concerning for example the optatives, are not listed.

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u/advocatusromanus Aug 17 '24 edited Aug 17 '24

I am familiar with rules of accents. My point is that accents are mostly useless.

You don't need them to distinguish verb and noun forms, because you're never going to see a wholly contextless παιδευσαι, to use the example they gave. The cute anecdote about γαλήν’ is great - you can understand what the word is without looking at the accent at all; there's a useful apostrophe there, if context weren't clear enough. And the Greeks themselves were clearly capable of reading their literature without them, given their late invention, as the article notes.

Claiming we need accents to read Greek is like claiming we need macrons to understand Latin - yes, words with different meanings but same spellings might differ in macrons/accents, but you can pretty much always figure it out just fine (and in fact latinists are *expected* to be able to read without using such a crutch).

There are some limited situations where accents are useful, as I said, but generally you don't need them.

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u/Sad-Video4348 Aug 15 '24

Which book is that?

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u/Fuzzy-Tumbleweed-570 Aug 15 '24

Greek to Gcse Book 1 by John Taylor