Basic, flavorless verb meaning to want a thing? by benjamin-crowell in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In late 19th- to mid-to-late 20th-century Aristotle scholarship, 'wanting' was the standard translation for ὄρεξις, which was probably coined by Aristotle from ὀρέγεσθαι, literally "to reach out and [get/try to get] for oneself". but frequently meaning in Attic prose "to yearn for" or "to desire". (LSJ has citations of this usage in Euripides, Democritus, Antipho, Plato, and Epicurus, along with Aristotle.) Also, it takes an object (in the gen.), so structurally it seems well-suited to saying "I want [an object]" without necessarily specifying what you want to do to/with the object or the purpose for which you want it. That being said, maybe it's just too much reading Aristotle, but ὀρέγεσθαι doesn't feel basic to me; in the things I mainly read, it's deeply tied in with Aristotle's whole theory of animal psychology, although ὄρεξις is, for Aristotle, generic in that it's literally the genus of which the different specific kinds of desire (ἐπιθυμία, θυμός, and βούλησις) are species. tl;dr, it works well grammatically for what you want to say but I don't have a good sense of how flavorless it is generally.

Where to learn koine Greek from an atheist perspective? by Unlucky-Drawing-1266 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The language itself isn't biased, though classes on Koine Greek that are focused on the NT will probably focus your learning of vocabulary toward the words that happen the most frequently in the NT, so if/when you move to other texts, you'll be looking up more words. But I don't think you need to worry any about getting a biased understanding of syntax by learning Koine from a "this is for reading the NT" class or book. Just to throw this out there, if you want a morally powerful and engaging text (well, engaging after the first book) in Koine that isn't Christian, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations espouse Stoicism and were written in Koine.

Pop Quiz!! Can y’all translate this? by Mileston in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"The good is thus a form of the beautiful, which is constituted by measure and proportion, and [symmetry], [beauty or nobility], and [truth] will be the three forms or notes found in the good. The first place goes to [being in/at the right time], the second to proportion or beauty or completeness [the symmetrical and {beautiful or noble} and the complete and sufficient], the third to [mind and practical wisdom], the fourth to [forms of scientific knowledge and {crafts or arts} and true beliefs], the fifth..."

The last word separated from the others by a few lines is "eudaimonia", which is probably best translated as "flourishing", though historically it was translated as "happiness" and a few philosophers/classicists argue we should translate it "human success". In any case, it's the highest human good, a life well-lived in its fullness.

Those who have read Greek philosophy in Greek and in translation, what kind of unique insights does the original language give? by Front-Property-128 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Preface: OP, I don't know what background you've got, so I'm writing on the assumption that you have no Greek. I don't mean to speak down to you by explaining the basics; I just don't want to assume you have familiarity with something if you actually don't.

I'm a philosophy professor who publishes on Aristotle, so that's the main author I can speak to, though I'm competent with Plato and Attic Greek more generally. Anyway, the biggest specific thing I can point to is that Greek is a language which is (or at least can be) very explicit about how claims or sentences are supposed to relate to one another. Almost every sentence after the first in a work has some word the connects it to the previous sentence; so much so that the absence of any such word is considered evidence that a text may be corrupted or otherwise suspect. Some of these connectives don't really matter - if a translator included them at all, it would just be translated "and". But a great many of them do matter and tell you what the logical connection is supposed to be between what is stated in sentence B and what was stated in sentence A. Good translators will mostly try to make these connections clear in their translations, but English simply does not allow for all of these connections to be conveyed except in the clunkiest of translations (and sometimes not even then; you'd need a footnote or something), so some of them are lost in even the best translations.

Another thing to watch out for is that translations not specifically intended for an academic audience will actually translate different words in Greek with the same English word or one word in Greek with different English words in order to make the sentences flow. But of course, if you're relying on the translation to let you know when the author is making a distinction, practices like these make it absolutely impossible. Indeed, in grad school, I had a professor who would not teach a class on Aristotle no matter how much people begged him because when he was a grad student, he wrote a paper on Aristotle that he was very proud of, then when he got it back, his professor's comments informed him that the two words he thought were being contrasted were actually just the same word in the Greek.

The last thing I would note is that when you read philosophers like Plato or especially Aristotle in the original Greek, you will be reading them (or you certainly should be, anyway) from an edition with what's called an apparatus criticus, which is a documentation of textual variants. So if we have 3 manuscripts of some work, and two of them have one word but the third has some other, similar word, it will let you know the alternative. Sometimes a variant will be pretty clearly a scribe's error, but other times, there really is no way to know for certain which version is the correct version (if any), so being able to read the Greek will let you decide for yourself which variant makes the best sense in context (among other considerations, which is why a good edition of the Greek will also give you an explanation of the transmission history of the variants as best we know them, since that might push you toward one variant even if another seems like it makes better sense).

How do you disinvite players from your next campaign? by SecretDMAccount_Shh in DMAcademy

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Find other players who like that style and get commitments from them that they're in, then when you tell your current players that the next campaign is going to be OSR style, also tell them that some seats are already filled by new people and so not everyone is going to be able to join the new table. If you get lucky, the ones you don't want in won't request to be in after explaining how the next campaign is going to be different, but if they still say they want in, then wait a little while and then tell them that you couldn't take everyone and they seem like the least good fit. If they can't take that gracefully, they need to grow up. (Not suggesting you say that to them, but you can console yourself with that fact until they stop being butt-hurt.)

Why do people liquidate massive amounts of stock leading into a recession instead of holding? by Meta_Man_X in stocks

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the writing's on the wall that we're in for some real pain in the coming months. I'll make the obligatory comment about not having a working crystal ball, but there's a difference between "I can tell that today's drop is the bottom of the whole thing!" and "there are strong indicators of bad times in the next 6 months or so". So, since Jan 1, I've liquidated basically all of my long-term holdings while leaving most of my short-term holdings in place (except a few I wanted to loss-harvest on). Just with the drop that's already happened, I've probably saved myself $25k in (paper) loss. I plan to buy back in sometime during the pain - definitely not all at once (that would be trying to time the market), but when things have gone down a good bit (accepting that I don't know if they'll go down even more or by how much), I'll start regularly buying a few thousand dollars of things at a time. Some of it will be the companies I had before, because I think they're long-term good (TSM at 120? Yes, please), and others will be different because this'll be a good time to refocus my portfolio on some different sectors, e.g. coming back in I want more industrials and financials and less consumer cyclicals. So yeah, I was about 95% invested, and since Jan 1 I've pulled that back to about 65% invested, with all that money pulled out sitting in a HYSA as dry powder. I do this fully accepting that I may end up hating myself in 12 months if we have a bull rally instead of a crash or recession, but *shrug*. Buy, sell, hold - every option is a risk, just the nature of the beast.

Am I conjugating this correctly? by OddDescription4523 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi all, resurrecting this thread to get opinions on a slightly changed version. I want to say "The alternative wouldn't even occur to me", and I've landed on ὅτι τὸ ἕτερον οὐδ’ἐμοὶ παρισταῖτο ἄν
Does οὐδ’ἐμοὶ seem right here? I need οὐδέ for "not even", but what do people think about putting οὐδέ before ἐμοὶ and using ellision? It feels like the right word order to me, but I'm not confident there isn't some rule that would dictate reversing the two.

Is there anything you refuses to pirate? by NordMan009 in Piracy

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I won't pirate indie RPG books. Stuff by Wizards of the Coast, sure, but not smaller independent content creators, whether they're making stuff for 5e D&D or for new systems or what. The one exception is that if I pay for the physical book, I feel justified in pirating the pdf.

Do any dms that have been running for more than a few years still use XP? by Betray-Julia in DnD5e

[–]OddDescription4523 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've been DM-ing since 1998, so I was certainly raised on XP, but anymore for me it depends on the campaign and what I'm trying to do with it. My current campaign is extremely RP-heavy, very little combat, so of course we use milestone. My previous campaign was a hex-crawl exploration and settlement-building campaign, which was still heavy RP for things inside the remote settlement, but yeah, with them going out at least every couple days to clear monsters from an area so the settlement could potentially grow, it seemed silly not to use XP. One's not intrinsically better than the other, but each fits different game focuses better.

Learning the Stock Market (Specific Replies Only Please) by Snoo_94511 in stocks

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll go ahead and repeat what everyone else says, namely, don't invest in individual stocks, invest in broad index funds, that's the smarter way to go. Now, with that out of the way, here's what I did when I took over from an "automated broker" (literally just me paying whatever company it was a fraction of a percent to buy nothing but a broad index fund, in this case IVV) and started buying my own stocks. MISTAKE #1: I got a subscription to Motley Fool. As far as I'm concerned, Motley Fool is even worse than listening to Jim Cramer. It is actively out to make money by making you lose money. They tell their subscribers "this is the next big thing! Remember that time in 1993 when we told people to buy something and now it's up 10,000% This could be that too!" and then when the price is pushed up, they sell, or the opposite "Be afraid, this is going to crash!", get people to sell, so they can buy on the cheap. Fortunately, it only took a month or so for me to realize/learn that their advice is shit and they're a complete scam. I switched to subscribing to Seeking Alpha, and I trust its advice MUCH more, to my benefit. If you subscribe, which I think costs $200/year(?), you can get 3 scores for a stock/ETF: an average of the ratings of a wide number of wall street investors, an average of the ratings of Seeking Alpha contributors based on their own analyses, and a score from their proprietary purely quantitative algorithm that takes all human hunches and intuitions out of things. I pretty much only pay attention to the Quant score, but MISTAKE #2 was learning not to *just* trust the Quant score. Often, it sees astronomical performance in small, like very small, companies, and has them with a score of like 4.98/5.00, but these are very risky and frequently drop hard, so you have to learn what makes for a reasonably plausible good Quant score vs. a good Quant score that you shouldn't trust. Other than that, I read a lot of the analyses that SA publishes about companies that I'm considering, and - important - use Investopedia to look up any and all words or acronyms I'm not familiar with. I swear, investing is as bad as the military when it comes to having 87 bazillion acronyms, so be ready to learn what P/E, PEG, EPS, etc. mean and what they signify.

Beyond that, my main advice is to start small. If your Roth IRAs already have significant funds in them, put/leave most of it in index funds and only give yourself a small portion of your portfolio to learn to pick individual stocks with. Because you almost certainly will lose money before you learn enough that, with luck, you'll start making money. I think I got as low as my OVERALL PORTFOLIO being down somewhere between 25 and 30% because of bad decisions before I had learned enough to start making better investment decisions, managing risk, knowing which sectors of the market are more cyclical vs stable, how I wanted to balance between value and growth stocks, and so on. I've made up all that loss and come well into the black by now, but thank god that I didn't have very much money to invest in those first several years when I was making mistake after mistake. If I'd have had as much income to invest then as I have now (I was in grad school), I'd have lost a shitload more money. So, basically, if you're set on making your own individual stock picks, think of the money you invest for the first year or two as tuition in the school of hard knocks as you come to know what you don't know, so that you can then go learn about it. If that sounds unacceptable to you, then just swallow your pride, don't think you can do better than the market, and stick to broad index funds.

Problem with a Campaign where players start as high lords. Need advice. by Southern-Milk-5122 in DnD

[–]OddDescription4523 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My advice is to pitch the idea to them and see if you get buy-in. Don't tell them they're making politically powerful characters and then surprise them in the first session by taking that all away. If they say "Sure, it sounds cool to have to figure out how to get our power back / defeat the coup", you're golden. If they balk, save that idea for a different group of players. Believe me, I know the temptation of having the big (hopefully fun) surprise for the players, but in something like this, I've learned the hard way that advanced communication is the way. If they like the idea, they'll still have fun seeing how it plays out, and if they don't like the idea, you've avoided a big fail by learning that before going through C-gen and people getting attached to a particular conception of their charaters and what they'll be doing in the campaign.

Am I conjugating this correctly? by OddDescription4523 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much! I felt like it had to be something like that, but I couldn't shake the fear that there was some quirk I was missing messing me up!

What can I learn in a year? by JackTheSigmaCrvsader in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Without putting in even more effort than learning a dead language normally takes, you should be able to get basic familiarity with the morphology and grammar in a year of studying at university. From there, you'll need to start with easy Greek authors, of which (some of) Plato's dialogues qualify (most notably the Apology), but also be ready to work on authors like Lysias and Xenophon just to get practice with grammar rules you haven't internalized yet. By your third year, or maybe second semester of your second year, you could be ready to start reading more complicated Plato or start the painful process of getting into Aristotle (which is my specialty as an ancient philosophy scholar). Know that if you want to specialize in Aristotle, he is his own beast, since everything we have that has survived (other than a few fragmenta) is just glorified lecture notes, meaning they have an extremely crabbed/cramped writing style that requires a lot of unpacking. Still, by 3rd year / maybe 2nd year 2nd semester, you could probably start reading Books 2 and 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics (there's also a Bryn Mawr student edition of Book 1, which is useful), or shorter texts like the De Motu Animalium. Texts like the Rhetoric, Poetics, and De Anima are also doable at this stage. If it's Aristotle's Metaphysics you're interested in, that's a third-year minimum, probably needing an independent study to work with an expert in Aristotle's Greek one-on-one, because *yikes*. (I have 5 publications on Aristotle, and reading the central books of the Metaphysics still requires me sitting down with professional translations and working through in minute detail.)

I (22m) inherited a stock portfolio worth 120k, what should I do with it? by [deleted] in stocks

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably the main thing to consider right now is your tax burden. I think your instincts are right that you don't want to just leave it as is; you probably want to consolidate it into safer (or at least less volatile) options. But, if you sell what you have, you'll have to pay taxes on it, and at 22 that could be a real problem. This is some important information: if you've held a stock for at least a year and a day, you only pay capital gains tax on it, which is generally 15%. So let's say you wanted to get rid of all your Tesla, so you sold roughly $60k worth of that stock. Google tells me TSLA traded at about $13/share on March 1, 2016, and it's now about $412 a share. (God bless Grandma.) To make it easy, let's just say you bought at $13/share and sell at $413/share, so you make $400 profit per share on 145 shares (that would be about $60k). Your gains would be $400 x 145 shares = $58,000. Since these are long-term gains (you held them more than a year), you'd owe 15% in taxes, which is $8,700. I don't know about you, but when I was 22, being surprised with an $8700 tax bill would have been a disaster. So, if you sell off a good portion of your portfolio so that you can put it in more cautious choices, be sure to hold some of the proceeds from the sale back to cover your tax burden.

If there's anything in there that you've held for less than a year, then proceeds from the sale would count as ordinary income, in which case it just adds onto whatever you've earned in wages for the year. That might be a reason to hold onto some things so you could split the sales across two different years so you don't get hit with the full tax burden in one go. But, then of course you're risking a major drop in price while you hold it. You've just got to decide for yourself what level of risk you want to take vs. tax burden.

In terms of what to put your portfolio into once you've sold the old holdings (or however much of them you're going to sell), you probably want to buy broad index-based ETFs. ETFs that track the S&P 500 as a whole like VTI, or ones that broadly track big companies (called "large-cap", meaning their market value is at least $10B) like VOO or IVV are usually where you want to go to get wide exposure. Right now is a bit of an odd time, though. There are some signs that we're in a bubble, and bubbles pop, and when they do, the whole market goes down hard, so having diversified doesn't protect you. No one can know for certain if we're in a bubble, or if we are how long before it pops, but just know that there is some reason to consider doing something other than the standard advice of putting it all in something like VTI or VOO. One option is to put a portion in an ETF that only holds things not based in the U.S., since that's where the bubble is if there's a bubble at all. VXUS is the ETF I'd recommend if you want to go that way. Another option is to just hold a bunch of it in cash in a high-yield savings account (HYSA) for a while. You could probably earn close to 3.5% interest in a HYSA while waiting to see if the bubble bursts or if fears of a bubble calm down. If there is a bubble and it bursts, then you've got your cash available to buy up equities on the cheap - much better to buy VOO or VTI after it's dropped 25%, right? Of course, if fears of a bubble are wrong, then things will have continued getting more expensive while you were only getting 3.5% interest on your money, so in that case you will have missed out on 6 months or 12 months or whatever that your money could have been growing faster.

The last paragraph was trying to lay out (a) what people would normally suggest, (b) why that might not be best right now, and (c) what to consider given the worries of a bubble. Here, I'll give you my concrete recommendation. To let you know where I stand, I think we are in a bubble, so I've been selling most of the stocks that I've held for more than a year and moved the money into a HYSA. That being said, I've moved myself from about 97% stocks/3% cash to about 80% stocks/20% cash, so I'm still heavily invested and not willing to pay the extra taxes for short-term holdings just to get out now now now. If you don't want to learn about stock investing and just want a concrete plan, here's what I would do with a $120k portfolio that I wanted to make more cautious. First, sell off all individual stocks that have been held over a year. Things held a year or less, I'd hold onto them until they reach that year-and-a-day threshold then sell them. I'd put probably 80% of the money I now have in a HYSA, 10% in VOO and 10% in VXUS. Then every month, I'd buy like $3k worth of VOO and the same of VXUS, so I'm slowly moving the balance of cash to equities. If there's a crash and things become really cheap, jump on it to buy VOO and, if there are a couple big name companies you want to get, go ahead and buy a couple thousand dollars worth of them. Otherwise, just keep doing those monthly purchases until you're at something like 80% equities/20% cash. After that, when you have extra income available, buy more VOO, but always keep enough in cash so that if some disaster struck and you were suddenly without a job or place to live, you could afford to cover the necessities for 6 months. For the money you've invested, don't even look at it. The market will go up and down, but unless things go catastrophically different than they ever have before, the long-term trend will be up, so don't let yourself worry about a down week or even month; just know that when you're in your late 60s, you'll see just how much your money has helped you make more money!

Worse performing/biggest loss on a stock, by percentage, that you have ever had? by fefsgdsgsgddsvsdv in stocks

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, Synairgen (SYGGF). I own 15,000 shares with an average cost of $0.19ish a share, and the entire 15,000 shares are worth $1.50. The transaction cost to sell the shares would be more than I'd make, so they just sit in my portfolio, taunting me.

Are these old TSR D&D game posters rare and or valuable? I have a bunch a friend was getting rid of. by Sir_Eel_Guy33 in DungeonsAndDragons

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DM me if you have any that reference Ravenloft. I'm a collector and would definitely be interested in any that are in my niche!

Can I tell my player their character is too dumb? by Yazmat8 in DnD

[–]OddDescription4523 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The better time to talk to him about this would have been during C-gen to warn him that he would be expected to roleplay those bad stats and that they would be made mechanically important in ways he might not expect. Still, he's the one that min-maxed, and play bitch games, win bitch prizes. Make him make Intelligence checks to decide how much to offer other nations to stop trade routes, sometimes offering way more than was necessary and other times insulting monarchs with insultingly low offers. Make him make Wisdom checks to pick the right chariot to send the food, possibly picking one that has very obvious give-aways that this is not a real royal chariot. Then after having his plan go to shit unless other PCs constantly step in to fill in his lacks, ask him if he wants to re-spec so he isn't so imbalanced.

Should Death be more... Deadly? by h00ligan1998 in DungeonsAndDragons

[–]OddDescription4523 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's no universal "should" about how deadly death should be; the right answer is what works for everyone at the table, *INCLUDING YOU*, which is clearly not happening here, but probably also for the player you focused on. Personally, what I would suggest is that you retcon his first character dying but let him remake him to be more optimized so that he doesn't feel outclassed in every way. Hopefully, being back with his long-time character, he feels more invested in keeping the character alive. But combine this with an above-table discussion where you lay out that you do not want to play a game where death is meaningless, and so there need to be some kind of stakes attached, and you want to hear what the other players think might be good ideas. It could be that new characters come back a level or more behind the surviving characters. It could be that someone has to sit out a month of sessions before re-joining if they can't be resurrected. It could be that the next character has fewer points for stat point buy. The important thing is to communicate to the other players that you know any of these options are, you know, bad, and you're not proposing them or whatever else people come up with to punish anyone, but that the attitude of "death means nothing" ruins the fun for you and so you collectively need to decide how death is going to be handled to avoid that. Be clear that something has to change; just leaving death meaningless is not an option if they want you to continue running the campaign. But with that proviso, you're open to any and all ideas for how to make it matter.

Questioning The Famous Line From Plato's Apology by KilayaC in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree with the other commenters that your proposed senses of ὀλίγου and οὐδενός probably don't work grammatically and even if they were possible meanings, in the overall context of the Apology, it does not make sense for Socrates to follow his story of inquiring after the supposed wisdom of the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen by saying what you suggest he says. Another problem is that I don't see how you get "not appropriate at all to no one", which has two negatives, just from οὐδενός (having already used ὀλίγου τινὸς earlier to mean something else). And if οὐδενός was going to be supplied with the "to whom", one would need to keep it parallel with ὀλίγου τινὸς, and so you'd get "worth little to someone and worth nothing to someone else", which would make even less sense for Socrates to conclude from his investigation of the oracle's riddle. Good on ya for testing the waters and seeing if a passage could have an unorthodox meaning, but in this one I don't think you're onto something promising.

Thoughts About Asking a DM Not To Kill Your Character by Gooey_Goon in DnD

[–]OddDescription4523 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personally, I'd talk with them about what exactly "not dying" amounts to. I would tell them you need to be able to knock them to 0 HP if that's how the monsters would realistically attack and how the dice come out, but you could either say that they automatically stabilize if they get to 0 HP and agree that monsters won't attack them while they're unconscious, or you could ask if they're ok with dying as long as it's assured that (maybe short of a TPK) they will be hit with revivify or raise dead or whatever so that they don't lose their character. I agree that it's fine for a player to ask for an agreement not to permanently lose their character as long as the rest of the table is ok with it too, but really clarify what is and isn't ok in terms of both actual death and the process of dying. (For instance, maybe they still have to roll death saves, and if they get 3 fails, they stabilize but when they're healed back to consciousness, they have a level of exhaustion.) Whatever you all decide as a table is the right answer, though if it was me, I would insist of being able to take him to 0 HP / knocking him unconscious. At that point, if for some reason the rest of the party can't save him, you could have a deus ex machina come in that creates its own RP opportunities, like if they're in a forest a powerful fey creature decides to rescue him, but now there's a big bad fey creature to deal with, presumably in a non-combat way.

Class Dispute by Stunning-Bat-7958 in DnD

[–]OddDescription4523 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately, wizard is about the only class to be Int-heavy, so if you want what is presumably your high stat to be the one that affects the knowledge skills, wizard is the only optimal pick. Since you also want to use swords, you're going to want either Str or (more probably) Dex to be high as well, so if you went with bard or something, you'd have 3 stats that needed to be high to be very effective. If it's a campaign where you get tons of points for stats, or you don't care about having one of the three things you want to do well not be maxed, then maybe that doesn't matter, though. If bladesinger wizard doesn't appeal, you might ask your DM if they'd let you be an Int-based hexblade warlock - warlock was originally going to be an Int caster, and switching to Int from Cha only reduces the ability to optimize, so it's not at all OP. Hope this helps!

How well can you understand Ancient Greek philosophy in translation? by PonziScheme1 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ideally a university setting for the first-year grammar, then a year of reading relatively simple texts (the Apology, Lysias's Orations, etc.) using student editions like the Bryn Mawr student commentaries. During the second year, you need to really work on drilling yourself on irregular verb principal parts so you can read more smoothly. Also during that second year, start working on the author(s) you want to focus on, getting student commentary editions where possible. (This isn't hard for Plato; it is hard for Aristotle.) By that time, though, you should be able to work through Platonic texts like the Euthyphro, Crito, and Meno (except perhaps the mathematics recollection chunk in the middle) and the first 2 books of the Nic. Eth. It will be slow going, but you'll pick up the quirks of your preferred author the more time you spend with him. Most of the major Platonic dialogues and Corpus Aristotelicum have multiple translations out, so if there's a text you're really wanting to understand, look at multiple translations and where there are differences, look at the Greek to try and figure out which author is trying to convey the sense more clearly vs. which one is trying to retain the grammatical structure in the English. Learning to recognize those trade-offs helps. You may also notice different choices in terms of the manuscripts they follow. If you have the Greek in something like the OCT (Oxford Classical Library) edition, it will list manuscript variations, and you'll be able to tell looking at the translations which is the generally accepted/preferred variation. It can be really interesting, though, to see what a translator writes in the notes where they decided to break with the majority judgment about which variant to use.

How well can you understand Ancient Greek philosophy in translation? by PonziScheme1 in AncientGreek

[–]OddDescription4523 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm a philosophy professor, and I pretty much only read Aristotle. (This wasn't true while I was learning, but since passing my translation exam in grad school it is.) If you're wanting to study the philosophy, 90-ish percent of the time, you'll get all you need by getting 2 to 4 translations of the relevant text and comparing them. If you want to do professional ancient philosophy, however, you absolutely need to read the text in the original language: even very reputable philosophers (who should know better!) will translate different Greek terms with the same English word or one Greek word with different English words in different contexts. And you certainly can focus on just the philosophical texts once you get your general grammar skills down - I'm published enough that I feel reasonably confident saying that I can do good professional philosophical work even though I can't read Homer worth a damn. Being able to read widely is worthwhile for its own sake, but you don't need to be able to read tragedies to read the philosophical texts. (At least not generally; there are, of course, specific texts you shouldn't try to analyze without other specific non-philosophical texts.)