7 Summary

In this session you have practised writing ancient Greek and learned about some of the characteristic features of Greek as it was written in antiquity.

The main skills you should keep practising are:

• forming the correct shapes of all the letters, lower case and capitals
• writing whole words – this might be through the process of:
  • copying
  • converting an English transliteration
  • writing down any words you can remember. You could combine this with the process of learning vocabulary, introduced in the next session.

If you would like additional practice, you could visit the ‘Words’ section of the Introducing Ancient Greek website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

Please note: we’ve had numerous reports of the practice site content not displaying properly. If you’re having trouble with it, try copying and pasting this link instead: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/greek

This concludes your study of the Greek alphabet. However, you will continue to consolidate your knowledge of it through the rest of the course as you study Greek words (Session 4) and are introduced to some basic grammar (Session 5-7).

The end of this session therefore provides a good opportunity to pause and reflect, and to ensure you have a reasonable understanding of:

• the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, lower and upper case
• breathings (rough and smooth)
• accents (you should be able to recognise an acute, grave and circumflex)
• the pronunciation of the Greek letters, individually and in combination, e.g. as diphthongs or double consonants.

You can now move on to Session 4.