For those of you who don’t know, χαίρετε essentially means “hello!” in ancient Greek. Now, some of you might be wondering why anyone would want to know how to greet someone in ancient Greek – after all, it is a dead language.
I have the same question.
This August, in equal parts due to my curiosity and a desire to spend the final weeks of my summer in Greece, I will be embarking on a journey to Selianitika, a village in the northern Peloponnese in Greece, to participate in a spoken Attic Greek program. As a Latin and Greek major at Hunter College, I’ve spent almost two years studying Greek in a fairly traditional way: discussing it with a professor and peers in a classroom with just the text, a dictionary, and a grammar. This program, however, introduces the idea of discussing texts in the language in which they were written. While immersion is a fairly common practice in modern languages, it is more than a bit unorthodox in the case of a language that has been largely out-of-use for centuries.
Since I’ll be participating in this program through an independent study and have a significant amount of writing to look forward to at the end of my journey, I plan on using this e-portfolio primarily to document my experiences through photographs. You can expect daily posts starting mid-August.
Until then,
ἔρρωσο
(farewell)
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