{"id":1884,"date":"2024-09-25T14:34:02","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T21:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/langlabbies\/?p=1884"},"modified":"2025-08-25T13:27:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T20:27:18","slug":"speaking-ancient-greek-in-modern-day-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/langlabbies\/2024\/09\/25\/speaking-ancient-greek-in-modern-day-greece\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking Ancient Greek in modern-day Greece?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Today we are interviewing Basil-Anne, our Greek and Latin tutor. We talked about starting a language from scratch at Reed, the GLAM department, and studying abroad as a speaker of ancient languages!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leilani: Would you like to talk a bit about your background, why you chose to study Greek and Latin?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basil-Anne: Sure! I have studied Latin for a very, very long time. I started officially in fourth grade, but I think my first real Latin class was in seventh grade. So I\u2019ve been taking it for a really long time. And I came into Reed undecided but I was very strongly either going to be a GLAM [Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies] major or be in the Sociology department. I went to the GLAM open house during O-week and fell in love and was like, \u201cThis is where I want to be.\u201d So I dropped Intro Sociology and switched into another GLAM class and have not looked back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: You mentioned taking Latin prior to Reed. Did you have the same experience with Greek, or did you start with Intro Greek?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: I started with Intro Greek, and Greek was a lot harder than Latin because I was starting from scratch. But it\u2019s a very cool language. My favorite thing about just Greek and Latin in general, and I don\u2019t know if this is true for all language learners, is the kind of peak you hit where you\u2019re thinking of every single thing and all of a sudden, you\u2019re just not thinking of every single grammar thing anymore. That\u2019s a really fun moment for me. It corresponds with the course load, like you switch from language classes to literature classes, and that\u2019s just such a fun transition for me, of being able to be like, \u201cOK, I know what I\u2019m doing, and now I actually get to talk about literature.\u201d Which is why language is so fun. So with Greek, I really got to see that process condensed from freshman year to now, senior year. It was great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

L: Have there been resources that have been particularly helpful for language learning?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: For Greek, I used drop-in tutoring all the time, and that was so helpful. Even when I didn\u2019t necessarily have a specific concept that I didn\u2019t understand, even when I was like, \u201cI technically understand everything.\u201d I remember when I was an intermediate student, I used to come in and just be like, \u201cCan I do my homework here?\u201d and then ask when I hit problems. And that was just such a nice space for asking for help before I necessarily was sure that I needed it, so that I could always get the help that I wanted. That was helpful. And also, we pay for so many different resources. We pay for Oxford Scholarly Editions<\/a>, we pay for Logeion<\/a>, we pay for the TLG [Thesaurus Linguae Graecae]<\/a>. So if people aren\u2019t using those things, they should, because those are wonderful resources that Reed pays for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LangLabbie note:<\/strong> These GLAM resources and many more can be found here<\/a> from the Reed Library GLAM LibGuide!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: Have there been any people at Reed who have helped you with language learning?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: Yeah! I really like the GLAM department because we\u2019ve got a very close-knit community. All of the students in years above me were both people I were friends with and people I got help from. The professors are awesome, I spent so much time in office hours. The thing I would say for Greek and Latin specifically is that every single person you can think of who could help you wants <\/em>to help you. So just get comfortable asking for help. I ask for help all the time. It\u2019s a very supportive department. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: Sonia Sabnis was my advisor during my freshman year. She almost convinced me to take Latin.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: You should have! It\u2019s wonderful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: Maybe! So do you have any favorite experiences with Greek and Latin?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: I did study abroad, and it was actually really cool because I went to Cyprus for the archaeological field school that Reed has a stake in for a month the summer before I studied abroad. Then I traveled around Europe for a month and then I was in Greece for three months. That was a really awesome experience. And it was weird because Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are different languages. They\u2019re similar languages, but they\u2019re different. So I took a semester off of Ancient Greek and I switched into Modern Greek. I was in Accelerated Modern Greek, which is like an introductory Modern Greek course for people who have already taken Ancient Greek. It was such a strange experience. There were so many vocab words that I recognized, but then I would say them, and the teacher would say, \u201cYou sound so silly saying that word like that,\u201d because I was using Ancient pronunciations for Modern words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: Did you have any funny experiences like that, talking to local people in Greece?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: Yeah, the crazy thing was vowels and stresses. The vowels are pronounced entirely different in Ancient Greek, and the stresses are different. So there were lots of words I was saying wrong and they meant different things. Like the word for \u201ctable\u201d and the word for \u201cbank\u201d are the same spelling, they just have a different stress. And so I was saying \u201cbank\u201d every time I said \u201ctable\u201d for a while. Stuff like that was just little mistakes, but I probably sounded like a crazy person to a native speaker because I knew all the vocab but I was just saying it all wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: That\u2019s really interesting! I\u2019ve seen YouTube videos of a guy who speaks Latin to Italian locals, and it\u2019s really cool.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: It\u2019s a strange, strange dissonance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LangLabbie note:<\/strong> Here\u2019s the link to the YouTube video<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

L: Last question, do you have a favorite word, expression, book, or story in Greek or Latin?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

B: I really liked my Advanced class last year for Latin was Apuleius. We did The Golden Ass<\/em>, that was really funny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we are interviewing Basil-Anne, our Greek and Latin tutor. We talked about starting a language from scratch at Reed, the GLAM department, and studying abroad as a speaker of ancient languages! Leilani: Would you like to talk a bit about your background, why you chose to study Greek and Latin? Basil-Anne: Sure! I have … <\/p>\n

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