Athenaze - O Dicaeopolis

About a year ago I bought the second edition of Athenaze Book 1 from the recommendations of a certain guy (the english version as I don’t know italian). Essentially it’s the closest thing you get to LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLUSTRATA for learning ancient greek

Now it’s been at least a year since I initially got it and had my first look (busy times), but lately I spent some time performing my first translations of the text: “O Dicaeopolis” (latinized). Even if you’re not a hopeless language nerd, I actually do believe you can get a good laugh out of this (trust me bro)

Prerequisites

The book does however not start with this text. In contrast to learning something like latin, greek has it’s own alphabet you need to learn first. But it’s not the hardest and in many ways very similar to the latin one (compared to hebrew let’s say)

(WIP sound-matrix of interesting alphabets)

There’s actually a lot of sound-overlap in the greek alphabet. Thus the purpose of the illustration is more to give an idea than an accurate lookup-table

The Text Itself

Once you’ve got the alphabet down, the text is suddenly readable (even though you have no idea what it says). This is where the glossary comes in. Unfortunately the glossary is not learned intuitively as in LINGVA LATINA. I will for the sake of keeping this post digestible skip right to my initial translation:

Dumb Word-by-word Translation

The most striking aspect here, is in my opinion the difference in word-ordering. It beats even Yoda at his own game. Now, this translation is litterally (pun intended) done by just inserting the english glossary for the greek words. It’s however not very readable.

(I see I cut short the second sentence, but eeh)

Slightly Less Stupid Translation

There’s still some… Yoda stank, but it’s possible to read at least. It’s really a rather naive and conservative translation, as I’ve only allowed myself to reorder words and inject he/she/it wherever it helps the readability

Translation = Interpretation (at least in French)

This reveals how translating from one language to another involves varying degrees of interpretation. Even a so-called “word-by-word” translation is sometimes not actually a real possibility (presuming you want a good and readable translation)

It seems to boil down to how much interpretation the translator allows for the sake of making a high-quality translation (which I’m not doing here). There are also most likely things and nuances I don’t know of yet as I’ve merely dipped my toe into this field