According to the TLG, ὄλβιος is used by Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poet Bacchylides, the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, and the Christian archaizing poets Gregory Nazianzenus, Didymus the Blind, and Christopher of Mytilene. Herodotus uses ὄλβιος once when quoting an oracle (Book 5, 92e), and Plato uses it once when quoting a couplet attributed to Solon (Lysis 212e).
By contrast, εὐδαίμων occurs not only in the tragedians, but also dozens of times in the prose works of Aristotle, Plato, Demosthenes, Thucydides, and countless later authors.
Hesychius' lexicon glosses ὄλβιος as "πλούσιος, εὐδαίμων, μακάριος" and Apollonius' Homeric lexicon glosses it as "εὐδαίμων καὶ μακάριος." Neither lexicon glosses εὐδαίμων.
So the distribution clearly indicates that ὄλβιος was an archaic word associated to the high poetic register. If it wasn't, there would be no need to define it in a dictionary.
Homeric Greek is a blend of different dialectical forms, mostly old Ionic and Aeolic. But it's a very complicated question whether any one spoke like that or not in the 9th century BC.
If you compare Homeric, on the one hand, to Attic and, on the other, to the language in the Linear B tablets, you will see that Homeric will agree substantially with Mycenaean (e.g. lexically, using words like φάσγανον for sword, as well as grammatically, such as the use of the ablative/locative suffix -ιφι). This suggests that it is highly probable that the form of language we get in Homer dates all the way back to the depths of the Bronze Age. It is even possible that ὄλβιος was already archaic when Homer used it.
All this to say that languages can have different registers and different words or grammar associated to them. Phrases like "who art in heaven" go back to the King James Bible and, through that, all the way back to Middle English. It's a specific type of English used in contexts of prayer, not everyday conversation.
Honestly, if you want to ask your friend his opinion on something, would you say, "Tell thou me who art wise in such matters what it is that thou thinkest" or "Tell me what you think since you know a lot about these things"?
Thank you for the reference. I also highly recommend the book
The Development of Greek and the New Testament by Chrys C. Caragounis:
http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/t ... ent/279710
Over the course of several hundreds of pages and quotes from ancient, medieval, and modern Greek texts, the author demonstrates that modern Greek is essentially just a simplified form of Attic, not a different language like Italian is to Latin. Many, if not all the changes that separate the two (grammatical, semantic, syntactic) go back to Alexander the Great's time and are extremely old.
As such, I think where modern Greek (demotic and katharevousa) can help in learning Ancient Greek is by providing a basic foundation on which to build one's knowledge and achieve fluency in the language, specifically regarding pronunciation. I also agree that the LSJ dictionary has its limits, and that's also an area in which modern Greek can help. It's one thing to read the definition of a word in a book, but it's quite another to use it in conversation.
Given all of this, I find that learning straight Attic to read the tragedians and Plato is like a Chinese student with no prior knowledge in English being taught Elizabethan to read Shakespeare. Undoubtedly it
can be done, but is it ideal?
