Re:It’s All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks?
by polytronic on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:22AM
(#20661644)
Πράγματι όλοι εδώ!
Not to mention the fact that ancient Greek seems like a foreign language to modern Greek speakers. Interestingly ancient Greek is more compact and comprehensive (ie uses fewer words compared to modern) as it uses a richer grammar (tenses, voices, etc)
Re:It’s All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks?
by mpodlasin on Saturday August 10, 2019 @08:00AM
(#20661576)
I am a polish native speaker and only after I have met my french-speaking girlfriend, I realized how insanelly difficult my language is, for all the reasons you have mentioned.
Re:It’s All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks?
by StavrosK on Saturday August 10, 2019 @07:56PM
(#20665290)
Άμα δω ελληνικά μπαίνω.
It's not as difficult as you'd expect, because word genders are derived from the suffix, with very few exceptions (e.g. η ψήφος). Compare with German, where there's no relation between the word and the gender (you just have to memorize all of them) and they still have the dative. This makes German grammar a superset (and strictly more complex) than Greek grammar.
Greeks use Chinese as the canonical example of an incomprehensible language.
What's interesting is that although the "It's Greek to me" colloquialism mostly refers to the fact that the Greek alphabet seems incomprehensible to the (non-classical-humanities-educated) reader, Greek has actually a very complex grammar: Everything is conjugated, everything has genders, and you have to remember the correct form of every noun, preposition, article, pronoun, etc. In comparison, Chinese grammars are amazingly simple.
Most Greeks don't take notice of this fact until they see somebody struggling to learn Greek as a foreign language.