All the latest news in ancient Greek

The main purpose is to offer in Ancient Greek a summary of the latest world news. The growing interest for Latin language and its use worldwide is something known by everybody: congresses that are held in Latin, cultural meetings, publications on several areas, news services (from Helsinki, Bremen and Warsaw), youths that communicate with each other through internet, etc., all of this in the language of Cicero.

Would anything similar in Ancient Greek be possible? It is possible that a lot of people who at the beginning feel the desire of studying the language of Pericles give up because of the fear that an original Greek text from a classical author inspires, maybe too sudden a collision, and because of the sensation that, out of these texts, it is not going to be useful for anything else. If we remember that for several centuries Greek was the “lingua franca” around all of the eastern Mediterranean (and in the western Mediterranean it was the “lingua docta”), maybe the claim that it be used, within its possibilities, as a present cultivated way of communication (as Latin) is not too far. If the great figures of Latin literature themselves used to consider Greek as a language worthy of being learned and used, why shouldn't we?

On the other hand, a lot of times Greek lies in a situation of small creativity (and, automatically, of small use): people translate from Greek, but not into Greek. Fortunately, in many universities, especially in the Anglosaxon world, students practise Greek composition at different levels of difficulty, according to the course, and English manuals that instruct into Greek (and Latin) composition are well known worldwide; all of this is of the greatest help in the learning of the language.

To offer world news in this language would maybe help many students to lose fear of coping with it and make them be more interested in its study. On the other side, for those more advanced in the language, this “news service” may offer to them the novelty and the attraction of seeing Thucydides’s and Plato’s language itself used for current matters, it could be a new and refreshing experience that eliminates the sensation that Greek must move only inside a “closed corpus" and makes hellenists cope with the study of classical texts with a more "live language" concept of Greek.
AKWN will be published in plain Attic dialect, avoiding unnecessary complications. In the case that modern vocabulary has to be used (airplane, tank, computer, etc.), words will be taken from modern Greek and they will be adapted into Attic language. You will find a list of the most used ones in the page "Modern vocabulary".

Dr Juan Coderch was born in the Mediterranean city of Barcelona, the city where he spent most of the first 40 years of life before moving to the UK. He studied Classics at the Universitat de Barcelona (BA 1985, PhD 1991) and at the University of Sheffield (MA 1986). His current position is Senior Language Tutor in Greek and Latin at the University of St Andrews (UK), where he is in charge of the teaching of these two languages.

see his site here: http://www.akwn.net/