For anyone who cares to play catch up: you can start here in May, where this site was stuck for a little over a month, and scroll up. Afterwards, if you’re not sick of it yet, continue through June.
9:36:47 PM  #  comment []

What was I saying? Oh, right, I promised a confession. Nothing earth-shaking, really. I’ve been trying to learn classical and/or koine Greek in my spare time, about ever since the war started.

I mean, I’ve wanted to for a long time. It started in freshman year of college. Carolyn Dewald was the teacher of an interdisciplinary class, and she encouraged me to go into Classics, which I completely flubbed. Or actually perhaps before that. I have some old stationery, which places the time somewhat before 1990, tucked inside a Greek book of translations edited by Lattimore. Plus when I was eight or so I was very much into astronomy (eight? nine?). And of course there were Gene Wolfe’s novels of Lucius/Latro.

More recently though, the itch came upon me about a year and a half or two ago, when I was in Washington DC learning from the OPNET folks how to use their software. Two guys sitting next to me was Greek, and I told them that I was interested in learning ancient Greek, and asked how different it was from modern Greek. He told me that modern Greek was a tongue bastardized through bad influences, and gave me examples. Thus daunted,...

Meeting Doc Weevil finally brought it up again. That, and Sappho, last year, and my continuing hunt for Nossis of Locri. I still can’t find a decent copy of the Greek Anthology on-line, but I found this Italian site with Nossis’s epigrams (see below).

Well, anyway, it’s been going well, in fits and starts. My vocabulary needs development, my composition skills are horrible, and my grasp of the grammar is weak.
9:28:53 PM  #  comment []

From the Greek Anthology, compiled by various sources.

Nossis’s first epigram:

I

Ἅδιον οὐδὲν ἔρωτος · ἃ δ’ ὄλβια, δεύτερα πάντα
ἐστίν · ἀπὸ στόματος δ’ ἔπτυσα καὶ τὸ μέλι.
τοῠτο λέγει Νοσσίς · τίνα δ’ ἁ Κύπρις οὐκ ἐφίλασεν.
οὐκ οἴδεν κήνα γ' ἅνθεα ποῐα ῥόδα.

—Νοσσις

I have not yet clapped eyes on an off-the-web Greek Anthology, but this Locrian site (by way of this site) has kindly put several of Nossis’s epigrams from the Anthology in picture form. I tried using the Macintosh’s support for foreign keyboards to type it in Greek, but it’s for modern Greek, so I used the Perseus Greek word study tool and its little language (a=alpha; h=eta; etc.) to compose the lines, save them to RTF Unicode-16, then used sed or awk to delete extras. Then to unicode.org to fill in some holes, some of which are not done yet.

If anyone knows a better way to do this on a Mac OS X, please tell me!
8:52:32 PM  #  comment []

Testing, 1, 2, 3.

?

Well, what do you think? Too ornate? I know, I know, “If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it,” but my tastes tend to swing back and forth between the Spartan and the Persian, and the pendulum has swung back.

I’m thinking the background pic has to be set a tad paler. Especially for you poor Windows folks. [done. better?]

[Update:] The image (if you see it), by the way, is from the Glasgow University Library treasures pages, well Photoshop™-edited to avoid legal hassles (it’s a derivative work, I swear!). I was going to try to copy the paper texture of it, but thought to keep some continuity with the rest of the site. Maybe next site update.
6:30:59 PM  #  comment []