Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

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Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Nov 21, 2019 6:49 pm

I had originally posted this yesterday from an alt account (with my username respelled in Greek), but as it turns out multiple accounts aren't allowed so I'm reposting it with my main account.

I prefer the term "Epic Greek" over "Homeric Greek" because A) it sounds cooler and B) what is Hesiod, chopped liver? I've dabbled in Epic Greek before but it was secondary to Modern Hebrew at the time. Now it's my main and in fact only focus. Instead of Pimsleur I'm listening to music in the car on my commute. It's a nice change of pace!

Those of you who have followed my many logs on will know that I have a tendency to have short bursts of heavy focus and then move on to something else, so manage your expectations about how long this log will last.

Keyboard Layout
The Polytonic Greek keyboard layout is actually ridiculously easy to learn since most of the letters map directly to the standard qwerty layout:

Code: Select all

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
ΤΗΕ :ΘΙΨΚ ΒΡΟ Ν ΦΟΧ ΞΘΜΠΣ ΟΩΕΡ Α ΛΑΖΥ ΔΟΓ

the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
τηε ;θιψκ βροςν φοχ ξθμπσ οωερ α λαζυ δογ.


There are only six letters that don't match up either in sound or appearance:
  • q maps to a question mark (which looks like our semicolon)
  • u maps to θ (theta)
  • c maps to ψ (psi)
  • w maps to ς (final sigma)
  • j maps to ξ (xi)
  • v maps to ω (omega)

So other than memorizing those six letters, you just need to learn where the deadkeys are. The main one is the acute accent (diaresis with shift), which takes the place of the old semicolon on the home row. To its right is the smooth breathing mark (rough breathing with shift).

The other two big deadkeys to learn take the place of the [square brackets]. On the left is the circumflex (subscript iota with shift) and on the right is the grave accent.

There are other deadkeys for combined diacritics but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Resources
Here is a very comprehensive list of resources for Homeric Greek: https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2019/02/25 ... greek.html

These are the ones I am using or plan on using:

  • Clyde Pharr - Homeric Greek, 4th Ed. (Iliad Book 1)
  • W. Sidney Allen - Vox Graeca, 3rd. Ed.
  • Frank Beetham - Beginning Greek with Homer (Odyssey Book 5)
  • Raymond Schoder, Vincent Horrigan - A Reading Course in Homeric Greek: Book 1 (Odyssey Book 9)
  • Raymond Schoder, Vincent Horrigan - A Reading Course in Homeric Greek: Book 2 (Odyssey Books 6 and 12)
  • Odyssey and Iliad texts on persius.tufts.edu in web browser
My main resource at the moment is Homeric Greek, 4th Ed. by Clyde Pharr. It gives you the grammar and vocabulary you need to get through book one of The Iliad, and it walks you through every step. An earlier version of the book is public domain, but I would strongly recommend getting the latest edition. The older version's lessons are basically, "lesson one, flip to the back of the book and memorize these charts. Lesson two, flip to the back of the book and memorize these other charts", etc. The new version is in a much more modern format with full explanations, and there's no need to flip to the back of the book for the first 40 chapters.

What makes it even better is that there is a terrific supplemental website for it, with lots of multimedia and interactive exercises. My only gripe is that they don't use reconstructed pronunciation.
https://commons.mtholyoke.edu/hrgs/

I ordered a copy of Vox Graeca, 3rd Ed. by W. Sidney Allen, which seems to be the definitive resource for the reconstructed pronunciation of Ancient Greek. I think it focuses on Classical (Attic) pronunciation, but to the best of my knowledge the pronunciation differences are minor. The ones I'm aware of are that some vowel combinations became monophthongs in the Classical period but would have still been pronounced phonetically in Homer's time. And the underscore iota stopped being pronounced during the classical period, but in Homer's time they would have still been pronounced.

If/when I get through Iliad 1 with Homeric Greek, I'll plan on using the other textbooks to have my hand held through three books of the Odyssey and then try to make my way through the full texts.
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Querneus » Thu Nov 21, 2019 10:19 pm

I had originally posted this yesterday from an alt account (with my username respelled in Greek), but as it turns out multiple accounts aren't allowed so I'm reposting it with my main account.

That's unfortunate. Personally I'd be in favour of allowing having an alternative account, maybe limited to only one or two, as long as you do it openly and make it clear in the signature what your main account is...

Deinonysus wrote:I prefer the term "Epic Greek" over "Homeric Greek" because A) it sounds cooler and B) what is Hesiod, chopped liver?

In comparison, yes, chopped liver. Chopped and filled with figs, a delicacy for the stomachs of the ancients.

(This was a real dish in antiquity, known in Greek as σῡκωτόν and in Latin as fīcātum. The dish was such a prominent use of livers for Romans that the word for "liver" itself, iecur, was replaced by fīcātum, hence > Romanian ficat /fiˈkat/, and with some modifications, > *fēcatum > French le foie, Italian il fegato (pronounced /ˈfeɡato/); > *fīcatum > Portuguese o fígado, Spanish el hígado.)

Resources
Here is a very comprehensive list of resources for Homeric Greek: https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2019/02/25 ... greek.html

These are the ones I am using or plan on using:

  • Clyde Pharr - Homeric Greek, 4th Ed. (Iliad Book 1)
  • W. Sidney Allen - Vox Graeca, 3rd. Ed.
  • Frank Beetham - Beginning Greek with Homer (Odyssey Book 5)
  • Raymond Schoder, Vincent Horrigan - A Reading Course in Homeric Greek: Book 1 (Odyssey Book 9)
  • Raymond Schoder, Vincent Horrigan - A Reading Course in Homeric Greek: Book 2 (Odyssey Books 6 and 12)
  • Odyssey and Iliad texts on persius.tufts.edu in web browser

When I made my first attempt to learn some Ancient Greek, I wanted to learn with a Homeric resource, and I got Schoder and Horrigan's textbook. However, I felt some frustration with it, because it doesn't mark long vowels (e.g. in lesson 7, page 13, they give the accusative plural ending -ας without telling the student it's actually -ᾱς with a long vowel), which is weird because they do introduce the concept of long vowels at the beginning. I guess they just could hardly care less about pronunciation. So far I've only been using Attic resources, but maybe I should try Pharr's textbook.
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 21, 2019 10:57 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:First, thanks for the guide to the ; for Greek. :)
The following resources provide help for those who are looking for the kind of help they provide. I'm just throwing them out there so you'll know about them if you don't already.
The late Pamela Draper published Iliad Homer Book 1 with bits of commentary and with partial running glossary. I give the Barnes and Noble because Amazon has no listing at this time.
There are parsed and/or interlinear translations of at least the first six books of The Iliad running around on archive.org.
The Iliad is definitely worth the effort. Have fun with it.



Sorry about the confusion, but Morkthefiddle answered in the original thread before the second thread was created, and if his post is left as the first one it will determine the creator of the thread. :?
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Nov 22, 2019 10:04 pm

I didn't use Anki the last time I worked on Epic Greek, but I'm using it now and I think it's a big help. It is taking a while to get the chapter 2 vocabulary into my head, though. The accent placement is especially kicking my ass.

Unicode has an obnoxious oversight where you can't combine a macron on the three variable-length vowels (α, ι, and υ) with any accents. I've been getting around this by simply typing the letter twice, so for example άά for a long α with an acute accent. Luckily since there's only one accent per word there's no potential for confusion.

I've also been typing out the declension table for βουλή (declension 1, paradigm A):
singularplural
nom/vocβουλήβουλαί
genβουλῆςβουλάάων
datβουλῇβουλῇς(ι(ν))
accβουλήνβουλάάς

There's also a dual number but it only has two forms:
  • nom/acc/voc: βουλάά
  • gen/dat: βουλῇιν

I also put every entry in the table into Anki so I won't have to go through the whole table to figure out a case

I figured I could just learn to type the combined diacritics as I went along as needed, and today I learned how to combine and underscore iota with accent marks. It's pretty simple: just press altgr+q and then the vowel you want for an acute accent, or altgr + whichever other accent you want, eg: ᾴ, ῇ, ῲ
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Querneus » Sun Nov 24, 2019 2:46 am

Deinonysus wrote:The accent placement is especially kicking my ass.

Unicode has an obnoxious oversight where you can't combine a macron on the three variable-length vowels (α, ι, and υ) with any accents. I've been getting around this by simply typing the letter twice, so for example άά for a long α with an acute accent. Luckily since there's only one accent per word there's no potential for confusion.

I am mystified by this comment of yours. I mean, the title of the thread right now says "Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek", with ῡ, an upsilon with a macron on top. If Unicode doesn't allow this, how did you get that there? :P

What you're supposed to do in the case of macrons is use the combining diacritical mark U+0304 after the alpha/iota/upsilon vowel, as there's no precomposed combinations for these. This is because Greek has traditionally not used macrons (or breves) to distinguish short and long alpha/iota/upsilon, rather, people were just told which were long and memorized them, and you can also hack some of the lengths through knowledge of morphology and dialectal variants. This traditional total lack of macrons (and breves) was reflected in the early codepages for polytonic Greek. The Unicode policy at its creation was to have precomposed characters only if they existed in codepages at the time in the early 1990s. Same goes for breves, for which there are no precomposed combinations, so you use alpha/iota/upsilon + U+0306.
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 2:38 pm

Ser wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:The accent placement is especially kicking my ass.

Unicode has an obnoxious oversight where you can't combine a macron on the three variable-length vowels (α, ι, and υ) with any accents. I've been getting around this by simply typing the letter twice, so for example άά for a long α with an acute accent. Luckily since there's only one accent per word there's no potential for confusion.

I am mystified by this comment of yours. I mean, the title of the thread right now says "Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek", with ῡ, an upsilon with a macron on top. If Unicode doesn't allow this, how did you get that there? :P

What you're supposed to do in the case of macrons is use the combining diacritical mark U+0304 after the alpha/iota/upsilon vowel, as there's no precomposed combinations for these. This is because Greek has traditionally not used macrons (or breves) to distinguish short and long alpha/iota/upsilon, rather, people were just told which were long and memorized them, and you can also hack some of the lengths through knowledge of morphology and dialectal variants. This traditional total lack of macrons (and breves) was reflected in the early codepages for polytonic Greek. The Unicode policy at its creation was to have precomposed characters only if they existed in codepages at the time in the early 1990s. Same goes for breves, for which there are no precomposed combinations, so you use alpha/iota/upsilon + U+0306.
I didn't say that you couldn't use macrons, I said you couldn't combine them with any accents. When you try to to paste a combining macron over a precomposed accent, it comes out wrong or not at all, depending on the font and input device:
ά̄ ί̄ ύ̄
ὰ̄ ὶ̄ ὺ̄

A combining grave or acute accent on top of a precomposed letter with a macron actually doesn't look too bad in this font (at least as I see it on this computer), but it would mean that I need to go back to the clipboard any time I want to switch accents:

ᾱ́ ῑ́ ῡ́
ᾱ̀ ῑ̀ ῡ̀

The macron would never need to be combined with a circumflex because it can only go on a long vowel anyway.

This thread on the TextKit forum gets into details: https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-for ... 5&p=204140

And this link in particular summarizes Unicode's issues with supporting Ancient Greek: https://jktauber.com/2016/01/28/polyton ... t-perfect/

But... I tried pasting an acute accent on top of a precomposed alpha on my phone and it looks awful on most fonts on my phone, but it does work in the font that Anki uses, so I'm good to go there! Unfortunately the keyboard that I use will only try to make precomposed letters so it deletes the macron if I try to hit the acute accent key. But as long as I have the combining acute on my clipboard, I should be all set. I'll never need to use a grave accent in Anki because I'm only using individual words.

So thanks! After a bit of trial and error, I used a combination of precomposed and combining characters that I hadn't thought of before and now my Anki deck looks spiffy!
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 5:04 pm

I'm still plugging along with Anki. There's a lot to memorize. I'm whittling it down, though.

I found a really awesome file with a list of grammatical terms in Ancient Greek!
http://scholiastae.org/docs/el/greek_gr ... _greek.pdf

I think I'll pop that into my Anki deck too and try to learn all the terms. No more switching to an English keyboard to write what case or number a noun is in!

(Well maybe I'll throw them into a separate deck because they're probably Attic)
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Querneus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:38 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I didn't say that you couldn't use macrons, I said you couldn't combine them with any accents. When you try to to paste a combining macron over a precomposed accent, it comes out wrong or not at all, depending on the font and input device:
ά̄ ί̄ ύ̄
ὰ̄ ὶ̄ ὺ̄

A combining grave or acute accent on top of a precomposed letter with a macron actually doesn't look too bad in this font (at least as I see it on this computer), but it would mean that I need to go back to the clipboard any time I want to switch accents:

ᾱ́ ῑ́ ῡ́
ᾱ̀ ῑ̀ ῡ̀

The macron would never need to be combined with a circumflex because it can only go on a long vowel anyway.

Ah! So there are precomposed vowels with the macrons. I hadn't noticed that.

This thread on the TextKit forum gets into details: https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-for ... 5&p=204140

And this link in particular summarizes Unicode's issues with supporting Ancient Greek: https://jktauber.com/2016/01/28/polyton ... t-perfect/

I disagree with the view the people in those links have about what the problem is. The real problem is that there's been a great lack of coordination between Unicode, input method makers and font makers.

The original intention in Unicode was to supply precomposed characters to ease compatibility with existing codepages, and the way forward was supposed to be using combining diacritics. That is, to render alpha with a macron and an acute, you'd use U+03B1 alpha + U+0305 combining macron + U+0301 combining acute. Unicode even established a rough way to specify individual Chinese and Korean characters with composition. This was all a mistake in my view, since not only is this a lot more work for font makers and input method makers, even application coders have a lot more work to do to be able to support searching!

And now, as you can see, as of 2019 no operating system provides any input method to enter Greek combining diacritics, relying purely on precomposed glyphs. And to make matters worse, font makers also don't do an adequate job at handling diacritic placement. A while ago a guy I know was transcribing public-domain Greek literature in dialects other than Attic, and he was frustrated that many fonts do not support upsilon with a smooth breathing (this doesn't occur in Homeric and Attic, but it does in other dialects).

But... I tried pasting an acute accent on top of a precomposed alpha on my phone and it looks awful on most fonts on my phone, but it does work in the font that Anki uses, so I'm good to go there! Unfortunately the keyboard that I use will only try to make precomposed letters so it deletes the macron if I try to hit the acute accent key. But as long as I have the combining acute on my clipboard, I should be all set. I'll never need to use a grave accent in Anki because I'm only using individual words.

Yeah, so in this case, you find yourself needing to do a weird composition of alpha-with-macron + a combining acute because of Unicode misdesign, which is very awkward because no input method supports that, and even if you achieve it you often get a bad end result because of a lack of font support. Isn't technological development beautiful sometimes? :D
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Nov 26, 2019 4:24 pm

I got my copy of Vox Graeca! I haven't had time to get very far in it but it's awesome. It's short but dense. I'm hoping to get through the whole thing within the next couple of weeks, but it will probably take several readings to wrap my head around it. It does contain a good amount of untranslated Greek in examples, but the main points are understandable without knowing what it means.

I gave up on learning all of the grammar vocab, but I did learn the case and number names. Here is my revised English-free declension chart for βουλή:
ἑνικόςδυϊκόςπληθῡντικός
ὀνομαστικήβουλήβουλᾱ́βουλαί
γενικήβουλῆςβουλῇινβουλᾱ́ων
δοτικήβουλῇ(γ)βουλῇς(ι(ν))
αἰτιᾱτικήβουλής(ο)βουλᾱ́ς
κλητική(ο)(ο)(ο)
Cases are on the left and numbers are on the top. The lone letters in parentheses mean that it's the same as the case that starts with that letter. For example, the vocative is always the same as the nominative (whose name starts with an omicron in Greek) in first declension.

I'm guessing on the vowel lengths for the numbers, but the ambiguous vowels should all be short except for the υ in πληθῡντικός; I couldn't find a dictionary that marked the length explicitly, but it comes from πληθῡ́νω (to multiply) and πληθῡ́ς (to fill), both of which have a long υ.

I suppose I'll learn the verb terminology when I get to my first conjugation. I think that will be in a chapter or two if I remember correctly.

It was particularly interesting to learn the case names. The Romans calqued them all directly into Latin, so they indirectly inspired the case names that we use today. The Greek names for "genitive" and "dative" look particularly familiar.

Case names:
  • ὀνομαστική /o.no.mas.ti.kɛ̌ː/ - One of a few alternative terms, but this was the one the Romans calqued and would eventually spawn the English name "nominative". Comes ultimately from ὄνομα /ó.no.ma/, meaning "name".
  • γενική /ge.ni.kɛ̌ː/ - Comes from γένος /gé.nos/, with several meanings including offspring.
  • δοτική /do.ti.kɛ̌ː/ - Comes from δίδωμι /dí.dɔː.mi/, meaning "to give".
  • αἰτιᾱθική /aj.ti.aː.tʰi.kɛ̌ː/ - This one seems to have been misinterpreted by the Romans: "From accūsō (“to accuse, blame”) +‎ -īvus (verbal adjective suffix). As a grammatical term, it is a mistaken calque of Ancient Greek αἰτῐᾱτῐκή (aitiātikḗ), which does not mean “related to accusing”, but rather “related to an effect”. As a noun, it is an abbreviation of the phrase cāsus accūsātīvus (“accusative case”), in which the adjective is masculine because it agrees with the masculine noun cāsus."
  • κλητική /klεː.τι.κɛ̌ː/ - Comes from καλέω /ka.lé.ɔː/, cognate to the English word "call" from Proto-Indo-European; the close resemblance is a coincidence.

Ser wrote:...

That's a fair point about fonts. Of the main fonts on Windows, Cambria handles ᾱ́ perfectly but none of the others support it well. Consolas looks way better but unfortunately doesn't support the combining accents.
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Re: Δεινόνῡσος εἰμί - Learning Epic (aka Homeric) Greek

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jun 16, 2021 7:41 pm

Well, I'm back into Ancient Greek. I decided it would be my summer project. I had been working on Xhosa but I won't have free rein to walk around an empty house and practice my clicks over the summer, so I'm taking a break from it until the fall. Then the plan is to study spoken Modern Hebrew in the car and possibly use the rest of my study time for Xhosa.

I dusted off my old Anki deck for Pharr and found that all my abbreviations were in Greek, so I needed to relearn a bunch of Greek grammatical terms, but that didn't take too long.

Attic

Although Pharr is still my main resource, I considered also adding Assimil Le grec ancien. It's based on Attic Greek, not Epic, but hopefully that wouldn't be too confusing, and for production I'll focus on Epic. The audio was pretty good, and for the most part it was good enough for me to tell exactly how a word was spelled (including tone) without looking at the text.

One of the voice actors used a uvular trilled /ʀ/ instead of an alveolar /r/ which is not a huge deal, but he seems to pronounce it voiced at all times, which means I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a voiced (single) and voiceless (double) rho in the middle of a word. But the biggest issue is that his long acute accent sounded like a falling tone when it should have been a rising tone. There may be some subtle way of telling his ή from his ῆ but that is an unnecessary annoyance.

Unfortunately, they introduced nouns with definite articles (two different cases) without explaining which gender and case each article goes through. Maybe this book will be better after I've studied Epic Greek a bit more. Epic Greek didn't have articles but the same words existed as demonstratives, so for example ἡ βουλή was "this plan", not "the plan". So I'm sure the declension will be covered in Pharr before too long.

Pronunciation

I've decided that rather than pronouncing Epic and Attic Greek differently, I'm going to just use the same pronunciation for both of them, so I'll pronounce ου and ει as the pure vowels /uː/ and /εː/ like in Attic but I'll always pronounce the subscript iotas like in Epic.

Something I've noticed about pitch accent languages (as well as other "soft" tonal languages) is that the overall prosody of a phrase has a really large effect, so it would probably be inaccurate to robotically use an even tone. So to try to get a sense of how to say the first three words of the Iliad «Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεᾱ́» I started saying "wrath sing, o goddess" to wrap my head around the phrasal intonation. But that sentence doesn't make much sense in English, so I switched to German where case marking would help, so I looked up how to say "wrath" and said to myself, "Den Zorn singe, o Göttin." But then I realized, why base my Greek on German intonation instead of Greek intonation? So I decided to start learning some spoken Modern Greek with Pimsleur. There are two levels so I might be able to get through most of it this summer. I won't bother trying to learn how to spell, there's a ton of historical baggage and there's like twelve ways to spell /i/.

Anyway, here are those first three words twice, first with flat phrasing and second with German-influenced Phrasing underneath the tones. The difference is a bit subtle but I think it's an improvement.

https://voca.ro/1nsTzw3M7K9q

As a bonus, here's me saying the Greek alphabet in my best reconstructed pronunciation. I call ε, υ, ο, and ω: εἶ, ὖ, οὖ, and ὦ instead of the anachronistic e-psilon and u-psilon (simple e and u, in contrast to the two-letter αι and οι/υι, respectively, which sounded the same) and o-micron and o-mega which became necessary to distinguish sounds that would merge later. I'm also pronouncing letter names that end with an ι in Modern Greek with an ει instead which seems to be an older pronunciation.

https://voca.ro/1eAVW53MsLCZ

Modern Greek

Back to Modern Greek. I've done the first three lessons of Pimseur and I have to say, I've heard that the pronunciation is very close to European Spanish but I was surprised how easily it rolled off of my tongue based on my muscle memory from Pimsleur Spanish (European). I just slipped right into my Spanish accent. I have noticed just a couple of slight differences. The Greek /s/ is less mushy except after /o/, and the Greek /β/ sounds a bit more forceful.

I was able to recognize some of the vocabulary. I recognized καλά and καί from my Homeric Greek book (and καί was easy to remember because I studied Esperanto many years ago), and κύριε from years of singing in choirs. The word είμαι was recognizable although the pronunciation and even the spelling are different from Ancient Greek.

The one thing that keeps messing me up is that the word for "yes" is pronounced /ne/. I keep thinking that they're saying "no"!

Keyboard Layout

I was a bit annoyed with the default Polytonic Greek layout on Windows because there is a separate deadkey for each combination of accents, so it gets hard to remember where a random rare combination of accents is. So instead I created a layout that uses chained deadkeys so that, for instance, I can press the rough breathing key, then the acute accent key, and then the subscript iota key, in any order, and then I press the vowel I want them to all go on.

Progress

: 2 / 77 Pharr - Homeric Greek
: 3 / 60 Pimsleur Modern Greek
Last edited by Deinonysus on Fri Jun 18, 2021 6:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
2 x
/daɪ.nə.ˈnaɪ.səs/


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