How difficult would it be for a person who knows Koine Greek to communicate with a native speaker of modern Greek, aside from the non-existence of words for modern inventions?
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2 Answers
It's anecdotal, but whenever I taught ancient Greek, my modern Greek students were usually the first to drop. It is not at all what they expected, and they were not happy about the ancient pronunciation.
Beyond pronunciation, there's also a vocabulary difference. The modern Greek word for dog, e.g., is σκύλος, while in ancient Greek it was "animal hide." You also have plenty of modern words (not necessarily inventions) that were borrowed from other languages, especially Slavic and Turkish, that would appear quite bizarre to a Koine speaker.
But the largest difference is in grammar. Modern Greek lost infinitives, optatives, participles, and duals; merged the dative and genitive cases; gained gerunds; has some differences in conjugation endings; and uses more periphrastic verb forms (such as using θέλει να for future constructions; also, να is a modern particle that would throw ancients for a loop).
All of these would have rendered the two languages largely unintelligible, even if they were to pronounce everything the same.
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The differences in grammar seem less significant, honestly—Romance grammar has changed a lot from Latin, but I can understand the basic gist of a Romance text by recognizing content words from Latin.– Draconis ♦yesterday
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1@Draconis I guess it depends on what exactly was being communicated. I would suspect than an ancient Roman wouldn't even begin to comprehend that je veux aller au supermarché puis à la plage is somehow descended from Latin. I'm sure they could get some of the gist, but probably not to a high degree of accuracy. Stuff like είχα γράψει would be too enigmatic, I imagine.– cmw ♦yesterday
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(That said, I did find French much, much easier to learn because I knew some Latin before taking a class. And even now plenty of Spanish is comprehensible. Some Italian or Romanian dialects still throw me for a loop. And Modern Greek isn't really easy, either!)– cmw ♦yesterday
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I've always heard that Koine Greek is closer to Modern Greek than to Ancient Greek, so I'm not sure this answer, which related to Ancient Greek, really answers the question about Koine Greek.– Nacht11 hours ago
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@Nacht Koine Greek is still ancient Greek, and everything I said is true about Koine as well as Classical Greek.– cmw ♦10 hours ago
Quite difficult. The pronunciation has changed significantly from Koine to Modern Greek, and anecdotally, my Modern-Greek-speaking friends and I usually have to write out words when discussing them: even when the same word exists in both time periods, I can't understand their pronunciation and they can't understand mine.
In writing, on the other hand, we can usually recognize a lot of the words. The grammar has changed significantly, but there's enough similarity to get the basic meaning across…if they use a form of the alphabet that both can understand. All-caps (imitating old Greek inscriptions) is the most likely to work for this, since Koine handwriting and Modern handwriting are significantly different from each other.
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If the Koine speaker learned modern pronunciation and used it, would they be able to talk to each other?– Someoneyesterday
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2Potentially, but learning to adapt the pronunciation is far from trivial! I know the main rules for it in theory, what sounds turned into what other sounds, and I still can't understand if someone cites a word to me in Modern pronunciation.– Draconis ♦yesterday
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1@Someone Many words are spelled the same way, but the way the letters are drawn has changed significantly. If the Koine speaker learned in the modern day, this isn't an issue: modern classes use the modern shapes of the letters. But if they're a time-traveller, they'll need to figure out some way of writing that's intelligible to both of them. Modern capital letters are based on ancient monumental inscriptions, so that should be recognizable enough to both of them (even if it's not what they're most used to).– Draconis ♦yesterday
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3@Crazymoomin Old English to Modern English will definitely be harder, because of the vast influx of Romance vocabulary displacing the inherited Germanic words. Greek never had such a big change to its lexicon (especially since Ancient Greek always had a certain level of prestige to it that Old English didn't).– Draconis ♦19 hours ago