ATH2010: On Our Way to Athens!

Ἀθήναζε is the Greek word meaning “to Athens”, and ATH2010 is an online study group of people whose desire is to learn to read the Greek of ancient Athens in order to understand the literature and culture of the time. This independent group study is based on the textbook Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek by Maurice Balme and Gilbert Lawall (2^nd Edition) and hosted on the GreekStudy list.

This course site is updated weekly to reflect the progress of the group. It is maintained by Jason Hare. On this site you will find the exercise schedule, templates for each lesson and a PDF of the lesson collations after they have been submitted. Check back here for regular updates.

Assignments are due weekly on Thursdays at 11:59PM, your local time (with the exception of announced holiday breaks).

Assignment Schedule

Formatting Your Collation

I’ve done everything I can to make the collation process as smooth as possible. The templates above include the expected format for each lesson. Right-click on the link, choose “Save as...” and download the template to your computer. As you edit it in your preferred text editor (I used Notepad), change each XXX to your initials, add your translations, and then send it back to me either as an e-mail attachment or by copying and pasting the text into your e-mail client.

Additional tags. Sometimes you might like to add a comment to your translation work. To do so, simply place a double carrot (>>) on a new line under the line that you want to comment on. Here’s an example:

Exercise Sections

Notice that the collation software processes the sections with the English alphabet. I have created the above correspondance chart to illustrate how the Greek section letters (α, β, γ, δ...) correspond to the English letters according to their regular order. This means that section 5η will be represented with the letter G in the collation rather than E. Likewise, section 10γ will be represented with the letter C rather than G.

Greek Fonts

One issue that presents itself when studying another language online is how to represent that language in a digital code that will be as standardized as possible. We are lucky enough to live at a time when we have been provided with such a standard. Unicode allows us to send various alphabets back-and-forth online without having to use many different fonts. This means, I can use the font Times New Roman to write English (as in this paragraph) and then write something in Hebrew or Greek (for example: שלום לכם and εἰρήνη ὑμῖν) without changing fonts.

The most common fonts are generally Unicode-compliant. On Windows systems, these include Times New Roman, Arial (and now Arial Unicode) and Courier New. Along with Windows 7, Microsoft released the fonts Calibri and Cambria, which both support a large range of symbols in Unicode. To represent Greek on your computer, you can use any font that contains a Greek (we’re looking for polytonic Greek) character set. Since the release of Windows Vista, the above fonts have supported polytonic Greek. If you have an older version of Times New Roman, for example, the basic letters are represented but accents and breathing marks may not be represented and may appear as squares on your screen.

This page was encoded for four Greek fonts: Arial, Arial Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif and Palatino Linotype. If none of these fonts is found on your system, it should default to sans serif. If you have any appropriate font, the following text will show up successfully: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν. (In my opinion, GFS Porson is the most attractive Greek font you could get.) If you have no other polytonic Greek font on your (Windows) system, you should surely have Palatino Linotype. This is the final font that I’ve used in the encoding to make sure that the highest chance of successful display is reached. If the Greek on this page does not display for you, check what fonts you have in your system.