Aristophanes and Greek Writing

One of the the great Greek figures we read about as part of our History studies was Aristophanes. A little paragraph in the book The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky has a short paragraph that tells of his contribution to mankind. He was apparently the one who introduced spaces between words. What a clever guy!

I wished Chinese sentences also have spaces in between words. I often have to pre-read Chinese story books not just to make sure I know how to read the words, but also to draw brackets around names and terms. It gets very confusing reading especially when the names are translated from another language and each name can be 3 or 4 or 5 characters long! I really don't know, at first glance, where the name starts and where the name ends. Or maybe I am the only person who have this difficulty!!

A book that I found in the library called Spend the Day in Ancient Greece by Linda Honan has very interesting projects. I like the short informative write-ups before each project. We have attempted quite a number of the projects from this book. This time, we decided to try some calligraphy in Greek! First, my boys had to figure out some Greek names. They were thrilled to see the characters in The Illiad appearing here in Greek. They then wrote their own names in Greek. With the phonetic chart provided, they formed English words using Greek letters. You can take a look at the their end products in D's and B's blogs respectively.


Visit Rumphius History Webpage to find out more about how we approach History in our homeschool.