How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

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Tugodum
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How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Tugodum »

And/or is there a dictionary (preferably on-line) providing direct answers to such questions?
Thanks in advance.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

I don't think there is an exact equivalent in Classical Greek. "Thank you" is very bland and meaningless, and where we might say "thank you," the Greeks would be more exaggerated and direct about their praise.

Xenophon:

τὴν μὲν σὴν πρόνοιαν ἐπαινῶ

Plato:

καὶ καλῶς γε ὑπέμνησας

ὡς ὤνησας ὅτι μόγις ἀπεκρίνω ὑπὸ τουτωνὶ ἀναγκαζόμενος

Herodotus:

τὸ μὲν εὐνοέειν τε καὶ προορᾶν ἄγαμαί σευ
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Paul Derouda
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Paul Derouda »

How about χάριν οἶδα σοι?

There's Woodhouse's English-Greek dictionnary that might be helpful.
https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/

You can also do reverse searches in the TLG LSJ.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Tugodum »

Wow... Thanks a lot! But how to do a reverse searches in the TLG LSJ ? When I go in TLG to "LEXICA", it gives me just one place to enter my input (under "LEXICOGRAPHICAL RESOURCES"), and then does not allow to enter anything in English but demands that I select from a drop down menu of Greek words.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

For convenience, here is the entry from Woodhouse:

Thank, v. trans. P. and V. χἀριν ἔχειν (dat.), χάριν εἰδέναι (dat.). That they may have this too to thank you for: P. ἵνα καὶ τοῦτό σου ἀπολαύσωσι (Plat. Crito, 54A). No thank you: use Ar. καλῶς (Ran. 888, cf. Ran. 508).

Woodhouse, S. C. (1910). English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (p. 864). London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited.
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by bedwere »

Page with THANK from A copious phraseological English-Greek lexicon;
by Frädersdorff, J. Wilhelm. [from old catalog]; Arnold, Thomas Kerchever, 1800-1853, ed; Browne, Henry, 1804-1875, ed


and from

An English-Greek Lexicon
By Charles Duke Yonge
Harper, 1890


Unfortunately nobody has made searchable versions like those in

http://lexica.linguax.com/

If only somebody wrote a simple, public-domain, software for dictionaries exactly like that! I'm not qualified since I'm familiar with parallel Fortran using MPI :roll: How much would it cost to hire a programmer to do it?

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Hylander »

Definitely do not say εὐχαριστῶ σοι -- that would mark you as an ignorant boor, according to Phrynichus Arabius, a 2d c. CE grammarian in Bythinia. You would not be considered one of the δόκιμοι.

Say instead χάριν οἶδα σοι.

Scroll down to p. 18 (a long way because there are lengthy prefaces in Latin):

https://books.google.com/books?id=apRbA ... &q&f=false

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrynichus_Arabius
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

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Last edited by Tugodum on Sun Jul 23, 2017 11:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

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Hylander wrote:Definitely do not say εὐχαριστῶ σοι -- that would mark you as an ignorant boor, according to Phrynichus Arabius, a 2d c. CE grammarian in Bythinia.
Very interesting, as it places in the boor-category not only the New Testament but also all the Byzantine authors writing in their wake. LSJ, however, gives the following:
"to be thankful, return thanks, Decr. ap. D.18.92, IPE12.352.14 (Chersonesus, ii B.C.); “τοῖς Α᾿θηναίοις” Posidon.36 J., cf. Phld. Ir.p.92 W., al.; ἐπί τινι or περί τινος for a thing, Plb.4.72.7, D.S.16.11, etc.; esp. to the gods, ἐπὶ τῷ ἐρρῶσθαί σε τοῖς θεοῖς εὐ. UPZ59.10 (ii B.C.), cf. LXX Ju.8.25, 1 Ep.Cor.1.4, etc.:—Pass., to be thanked, “ηὐχαρίστηται κεραυνοῖς” Hp.Ep.17; to be received with thanks, 2 Ep.Cor.1.11."

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Tugodum »

p.s. No less interestingly, Younge gives it as the primary meaning, whereas Woodhouse does not list it at all.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

Tugodum wrote:Very interesting, as it places in the boor-category not only the New Testament but also all the Byzantine authors writing in their wake.
Your topic title is 'How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek' -- not "in Koine Greek." εὐχαριστῶ σοι is a post-New Testament usage. It's perfectly appropriate to anyone not trying to write Classical Greek. In fact, I think that it's even the modern Greek term.

---

Xenophon using χάριν οἶδα:

τὴν μεγίστην χάριν οἶδα ὅτι μοι Κλεινίαν ἀναφαίνουσιν

I think this is another example of a Greek usage that says more than a simple "thank you" in English. Would Xenophon have used it in return to someone bringing him a glass of water? (Trick question. A slave would have brought him the water.)
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Tugodum »

jeidsath wrote: εὐχαριστῶ σοι is a post-New Testament usage.
That's what I thought. What I found interesting is that a grammarian in 2d c. CE still considers it boorish.

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

He did not write about popular usage, but about Attic usage. And what he said was:

Εὐχαριστεῖν οὐδεὶς τῶν δοκίμων εἶπεν͵ ἀλλὰ χάριν εἰδέναι.

See page 69 of Rutherford's New Phrynichus.

I believe that the entries in Pollucis Onomasticon on page 299 contain a few examples of the variety of popular usage.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Tugodum »

Thanks. Does he mean by δόκιμοι the writers of the past (given that he uses aorist)?

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Tugodum wrote:Thanks. Does he mean by δόκιμοι the writers of the past (given that he uses aorist)?
He means authors of the Classical period, already well in the past from his point of view. They all wanted to imitate classic authors, and so looked down on the common Greek spoken at the time (though they probably spoke that same Greek for daily, ordinary communication -- they just saw it as unfit for literary consumption). However, if you read carefully authors of that period, you can see that their style and usage sometimes strays a bit despite how careful they try to be.
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Hylander »

He wrote a manual of Attic usage in the second century CE, about 500 years after Attic had evolved into the koine, so that contemporary authors could avoid what he considered non-Attic usage. This was during a period when some authors went to great lengths to write pure Attic Greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sophistic
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

From his dedication:

Ἡμεῖς οὐ πρὸς τὰ διημαρτημένα ἀφορῶμεν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰ δοκιμώτατα τῶν ἀρχαίων

So in particular, the best Attic authors.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

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But he's telling you how to speak δοκιμως. See the beginning.
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

The entire dedication is on page 54 of the above. Perhaps I don't understand it fully, but the last part seems discussing the issue of people citing ancient witnesses for their mistakes. To correct for this, he says, one should instead use the "better part" of witnesses, instead of all. However, I'm not sure what his criterion for "better" was. Perhaps he was talking about manuscript corruption and forgeries, and not reputation, as I thought at first.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Hylander »

Phrynichus is prescriptive -- how to write "correct" Greek -- not merely descriptive of how Greek was written 500 years before his time. The proscribed usages are "errors" that speakers and writers of Greek were making in his own era, not manuscript corruptions or forgeries.
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

Here is the part of the dedication that I referred to:

Οὐ λανθάνει δὲ σέ, ὥσπερ οὐδ’ ἄλλο τι τῶν κατὰ παιδείαν, ὥς τινες ἀποπεπτωκότες τῆς ἀρχαίας φωνῆς, καὶ ἐπὶ τὴν ἀμαθίαν καταφεύγοντες πορίζουσι μάρτυράς τινας τοῦ προειρῆσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀρχαίων τάσδε τὰς φωνάς· ἡμεῖς δὲ οὐ πρὸς τὰ διημαρτημένα ἀφορῶμεν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰ δοκιμώτατα τῶν ἀρχαίων.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Hylander »

Very roughly:

"It does not escape your notice, like everything else related to education, that some who have fallen away from the ancient language and fled to ignorance furnish witnesses [i.e., examples] that such sounds/words have been spoken/used previously/in the past [προειρῆσθαι] by the ancients. We look not to the mistaken, but rather to the most approved/exemplary [understand maybe 'usages'] of the ancients. After all, if anyone should offer them the choice as to whether they wanted to speak in the ancient manner and correctly or with new-fangled innovations and carelessly, they would accept/choose above all to belong to the better party/class [of speakers and writers of Greek], coming into agreement with us. For no one is so wretched as to prefer ugliness to beauty. Take care."

Joel, could you post the remainder of the introduction for comparison (not the beginning, just the end, after what you posted above)?

Phrynichus is like people who insist that you can't use "decimate" in English to mean "destroy a large part of" because it meant "kill every tenth man" in Latin.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012 ... one-tenth/

An even better analogy: Phrynichus is like people who claim that singular "they" is wrong. When confronted with examples of singular "they" from 500 or more years of the best English writing, starting Chaucer and including Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Jane Austen, Henry James, etc., respond by insising "But that doesn't make it right."

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504

Same with split infinitives.
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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by jeidsath »

The section that Hylander has translated:

Οὐ λανθάνει δὲ σέ, ὥσπερ οὐδ’ ἄλλο τι τῶν κατὰ παιδείαν, ὥς τινες ἀποπεπτωκότες τῆς ἀρχαίας φωνῆς, καὶ ἐπὶ τὴν ἀμαθίαν καταφεύγοντες πορίζουσι μάρτυράς τινας τοῦ προειρῆσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀρχαίων τάσδε τὰς φωνάς· ἡμεῖς δὲ οὐ πρὸς τὰ διημαρτημένα ἀφορῶμεν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰ δοκιμώτατα τῶν ἀρχαίων. καὶ γὰρ αὐτοῖς εἴ τις αἵρεσιν προθείη, ποτέρως ὰν ἐθέλοιεν διαλέγεσθαι ἀρχαίως καὶ ἀκριβῶς ἢ νεοχμῶς καὶ ἀμελῶς, δέξαιντ’ ἂν ἀντὶ παντὸς ἡμῖν σύμψηφοι γενόμενοι τῆς ἀμείνονος γενέσθαι μοίρας· οὐ γάρ τις οὕτως ἄθλιος, ὡς τὸ αἰσχρὸν τοῦ καλοῦ προτιθέναι. ἔρρωσο.

Thank you especially for καὶ γὰρ αὐτοῖς εἴ τις αἵρεσιν...γενέσθαι μοίρας. I stumbled on that pretty badly, though now it appears obvious.

EDIT: φενόμενοι -> γενόμενοι, caught by Hylander.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: How to say "thank you" in Classical Greek?

Post by Hylander »

φενόμενοι should be γενόμενοι?
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