Ancient greek?

Hex

Hex

Write, monkey, write
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For reasons that have become blurred in the mists of time, my current wip's mc can speak ancient Greek (well, she can read it, like a public school boy in the 1900s could've) and I can't.

I don't suppose there's some marvellously educated someone around who knows how to say "When will you come back?" in er Ancient Greek?

Babylon tells me it's Όταν θα έχετε έρθει ξανά in modern Greek, but I don't even know how different that is... (or, because I haven't looked it up yet, how to pronounce it).

Huh. Google translate says it's: "Πότε θα έρθει πίσω".

Help...?

Glug glug glug (<-- that's the sound of me drowning in my ambitions for this wip)
 
Can't help you myself, but I do know there is somewhere a website where they have various experts, one of whom will translate things into Ancient Greek and Latin. I had to use her myself as I was trying to recall a word I'd read in a dictionary that derived from the Greek or Latin for blue. That was about 3 years back, though, but I'll have a hunt around to see if I can find the details of the site again.



EDIT: found her: http://www.allexperts.com/el/Greek/ I used Maria, but the other chap looks knowledgable, too.
 
The Judge said:
I had to use her myself as I was trying to recall a word I'd read in a dictionary that derived from the Greek or Latin for blue.
Click to expand...

Sorry likewise to derail the thread, but did there turn out to be an Ancient Greek word for blue? I've read a couple of times that Homer used "wine-dark sea" because they didn't at that time differentiate between wine-colour and sea-colour. (I thought it more likely he was just being poetic.)
 
I can't find my question amongst the list of her answered queries, and despite a quick search I can't find any notes I made of her reply. (She couldn't actually help me, as the word/part of the word I'd found had nothing to do with blue, so goodness knows what I read!) Anyhow, the only thing I can recall, there was grey-blue as in Athene's eyes which was glaukos or similar.
 
This is (well, was) my brother's specialty (well, classical civilisations) and he was a lecturer at the British Museum. As he is no longer with us, I will ask his best friend who - if she doesn't know - will be able to find someone at the BM.

Will get back to you as soon as I hear

pH
 
Fun fact regarding colour words; apparently, English had no word for "orange" until remarkably recently, maybe the 17th century. This is probably why people are described as having red hair, when the colour is nothing remotely resembling what is called "red" for anything else.

Even more fun, the word "orange" was derived from the fruit rather than the other way around. Spanish for orange (the fruit) is "naranja" and in English (we are good at mugging other languages for their words) that became "a narange" which proceeded to shift into "an arange" and then of course "an orange".
 
Thank you, TJ and Phyre for directly helping :)

(and everyone else, for being interesting!)
 
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