Author : Barry B. Powell
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 39,95 MB
Release : 1996-10-28
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9780521589079
A challenging and fascinating enquiry into the genesis of alphabetic writing.
Author : Alexander Humez
Publisher : David R Godine Pub
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 43,88 MB
Release : 1983
Category : History
ISBN : 9781567921014
In the first offering of this beloved duo, the Humez brothers take on the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet (plus those elusive "dead letters"), and through the device of the abecedarium bring the Greek culture and thought to life. From acoustics to zygote, they provide not only an engaging romp through the Greek language but also a series of glimpses into the world and man's place in it. The historical, philosophical, mathematical, cosmological, and political (all Greek words) approaches we take toward life, its description, elucidation, and evaluation, are all mainly derived from several thousand years of Greek culture. The vocabulary of language is a mirror of the minds of its speakers, and in this book we see the first reflections of the modern world.
Author : Paola Ceccarelli
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 23,63 MB
Release : 2013-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0199675597
Ceccarelli offers a history of the development of letter writing in ancient Greece from the archaic to the early Hellenistic period. Highlighting the specificity of letter-writing, the volume looks at documentary letters and traces the role of embedded letters in the texts of the ancient historians, in drama, and in the speeches of the orators.
Author : Philip S. Peek
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 606 pages
File Size : 10,92 MB
Release : 2021-10-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1800642571
In this elementary textbook, Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts they will most frequently encounter when reading authentic ancient texts. Analysis and logic exercises enable the translation and parsing of genuine ancient Greek sentences, with compelling reading selections in English and in Greek offering starting points for contemplation, debate, and reflection. A series of embedded Learning Tips help teachers and students to think in practical and imaginative ways about how they learn. This combination of memory-based learning and concept- and skill-based learning gradually builds the confidence of the reader, teaching them how to learn by guiding them from a familiarity with the basics to proficiency in reading this beautiful language. Ancient Greek I: A 21st-Century Approach is written for high-school and university students, but is an instructive and rewarding text for anyone who wishes to learn ancient Greek.
Author : Roger D. Woodard
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 24,84 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Greek language
ISBN : 0195105206
Certain characteristic features of the Cypriot script - for example, its strategy for representing consonant sequences and elements of Cypriot Greek phonology - were transferred to the new alphabetic script. Proposing a Cypriot origin of the alphabet at the hands of previously literate adapters brings clarity to various problems of the alphabet, such as the Greek use of the Phoenician sibilant letters. The alphabet, rejected by the post-Bronze Age "Mycenaean" culture of Cyprus, was exported west to the Aegean, where it gained a foothold among a then illiterate Greek people emerging from the Dark Age. Woodard's study, a combination of philological and epigraphical investigation with linguistic theory, should be of interest to both scholars and students of classics, linguistics, and Near Eastern studies.
Author : Martin Bernal
Publisher : Eisenbrauns
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 49,75 MB
Release : 1990
Category : History
ISBN : 9780931464478
Western civilization has long sought its cultural roots in the classical civilizations of the Aegean. During the twentieth century, however, it has been made increasingly clear that it owes a great debt to the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. In the thick of the debate as to how much classical civilizations were influenced by the Levant has been the question of the date of the transmission of the alphabet. In this monograph, Bernal takes up the question anew and marshals persuasive arguments that the date of transmission of the alphabet should be moved considerably earlier than generally has been thought, to the middle of the second millennium B.C. Growing out of his work on Black Athena, the intricate matters of alphabetic history and transmission are dealt with, both in terms of the history of the investigation of the topic and also with regard to the specific working out of his own new proposal.
Author : Michael Trapp
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 43,43 MB
Release : 2003-03-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521499439
The 78 letters in this Anthology (41 Greek, 36 Latin and 1 bilingual, with facing English translation) are selected both for their intrinsic interest, and to illustrate the range of functions letters performed in the ancient world. Dating from between c. 500 BC and c. 400 AD, they include naive and high-style, 'real' and 'fictitious', and classical and patristic items: Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny, Julian, Basil and Augustine are juxtaposed with Phalaris, Diogenes, Chion, and the authors of letters on lead, wood, papyrus and stone. Four final items exemplify ancient epistolary theory. The Commentary, besides providing contextual and linguistic assistance, draws attention to specifically epistolary features and to different stylistic levels of Greek and Latin represented. Epistolary topics and formulae are discussed in the Introduction, which also provides biographical and bibliographical information on all texts and authors included, and a history of letter-writing and letter-reading in antiquity.
Author : Anastasios-Phoivos Christidēs
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 43 pages
File Size : 26,44 MB
Release : 2007-01-11
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 0521833078
Publisher description
Author : Johanna Drucker
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 40,83 MB
Release : 2022-07-26
Category : History
ISBN : 0226815811
"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, Drucker describes the frameworks-classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political-within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago"--
Author : Martin Persson Nilsson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 42,25 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812210347
Long recognized as one of the truly great interpreters of Greek religion, Professor Nilsson has, in this volume, made a real and lasting contribution.--Morton Scott Enslin
