Recently the twitterverse was aptly reminded by Dr. Marchella Ward of the existence of “The Road to Latin“, a very fine Latin introductory textbook from 1932, not least because it was authored by a Black Woman, Helen Maria Chestnutt.
On the whole, it makes excellent reading material for any beginning (or advanced) Latin student, but I wondered if I couldn’t also adopt/adapt it to Greek. Here is a pdf with the first chapter rendered into Greek, for anyone interested, and I’ll make an effort to work on more chapters. If nothing else, it provides me with a pleasant diversion and you with a new source of easy, readable Greek.
A google-docs version is here: you can leave comments on it freely. This will enable you to keep up to date with any progress I make (I’m not promising any though)
While I’m here, I might as well make a couple of observations. Even in the very first reading, you have to make translation choices. The Latin sticks to first declension nouns ending in -a entirely. To keep the same vocab in Greek, I had to introduce other endings. Similarly, to express ‘stand’, ‘open’, and ‘closed’, required a perfect verb and two perfect participles. Thirdly, to keep Greek style from the very beginning, I introduced a few particles. Fourthly, Greek necessitates introducing the article here. Finally, I made the choice to keep the names and context of the original. All of which make this considerably harder for a student starting from scratch. This is (one set of reasons) why Greek ab initio books can’t simply ape Latin ones, let alone translate them. That said, I mostly intend to keep on in the same vein – a close rendering of the Latin, with whatever Greek seems apt or best. I think that’s the best way to honour the original work here.