Used to be long ago you had to take a foreign language when you were in high school. French or Spanish or German or whatever. Didja?

Merci mille fois mon ami. Color me very impressed R. I don't know what KOINE Greek is but my dad spoke Greek. During the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks he and his family fled to the Island of Crete where he learned how to speak Greek. He also spoke Turkish, Armenian and learned English when he arrived in America. My uncle married a Greek lady and my dad and she spoke Greek all the time. My mom's first language was French. She and her parents fled to Paris during the genocide. She learned Armenian at home of course and then when she came to America she learned English. When I was 12 I attended Armenian school for like 5 minutes! Should have stuck with it because whatever Armenian I knew as a child is pretty much buried in my subconscious. Shot Shunuryagalyem(thank you in Armenian). :) This post was edited by RosieG at November 9, 2019 7:30 AM MST

Koine is New Testament Greek, the idiom in vogue in the first century CE. Bears a similar relationship to the language of Plato and Aristotle that Shakespeare does to modern English. Very dissimilar to modern Greek - compare Chaucer to modern English and triple it.

Thanks m'dear. Are you able to read Plato or Aristotle in Greek? My gosh I just got shivers thinking about it. Wow! I get that humongous difference. Olde English is a tough thing to read and pronounce. It's odd how it evolved don't you think? STREAMLINED. Does that happen to all languages over time R? Streamlining? Greek and English are streamlined. Every other language too? Like rocks honed by water smooth out over time (bajillions of years). I know slang jargon patois develop.

The vocabularies increase as new discoveries are made, new scientific principles are developed and new gadgets are invented. But the usage can get sloppy. Modern conversational English follows no rules any more, grammar isn't taught so it gets abused. By youngsters especially. English is still basically Teutonic but hybridized - it has French overtones thanks to the Norman conquest and subsequent occupation, and a little Celtic thrown in to muddy the waters still more.

Boy you just reach into your brain and pull all that out so smoothly R. Really nifty. Thank you for your informative reply teach! :)

Cool Stu. Can you read a Torah or is that holy book not available to folks who attend Temple? Only the Rabbi gets to touch it? Gracias! :)

I read Hebrew and sometimes lead part of the service. In fact, I am going to get off here in a few minutes to attend this morning. I don't personally read Torah as I haven't learned how, but it is not only available to the rabbi. Anybody who is able and wishes to may read it, and the weekly parsha (portion) is divided into seven parts and usually read (layned) by several people. Rabbi Carter is usually the backup - she only layns when nobody has volunteered for a particular section. Anyone may look at it and touch it, although we don't touch the parchment with bare hands. The reader points and touches it with a yad (Hebrew for hand), which is a silver pointer with a pointing finger at the end.

This post was edited by Stu Spelling Bee at November 9, 2019 9:31 AM MST