Ex. The Iliad was said to have been written in around 7 BC before the creation of the modern Latin alphabet. How did we, for example, decipher and give the word “Trojans” to name the people who were fighting off the Greek armies? Is it just some word we made up and then assigned?
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There’s a fantastic book by Eleanor Dickey called “Learning Latin the Ancient Way.” It reproduces excerpts from ancient textbooks that were used to teach Greek-speaking non-Romans how to speak Latin and live in Roman cities. Based on those texts and other ancient documents, we can see how people who spoke both languages would express an idea from one language in the other. Those ancient translations may not have included the word “Trojan” specifically, but they do contain enough other proper nouns that we can learn about how proper nouns were transliterated into a different alphabet and were likely pronounced.
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