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Comment by giomasce | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how they are going to make it easier to understand the Greek alphabet. With LLPSI at least it can be given for granted that the great part of readers will be able to decode the Latin alphabet (and, say, understand what "Roma", "Italia" and "Europa" are even if they don't know Latin yet), given that English, Spanish and French made it (in different ages) the "alphabetus francus" for basically the whole world. That seems much less obvious with the Greek alphabet.

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I wonder if you could find people or objects whose Greek names would be familiar to enough readers, and have a section with pictures and the names written out. Like

Αα, Ἀλέξανδρος → https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Alejandr...

Αα, Ἀθῆναι → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_of_Athens#/media/Fil... (although some readers might assume that the word illustrated is Ἀκρόπολις rather than Ἀθῆναι)

I'm not sure there are famous-enough ancient Greek people, places, or things to use for each letter, though. Optimistically, you could maybe have a few gods, a few philosophers, a very few places (on a map?), and then you might be stuck. Even using Homer brings in a challenge, because beginners won't yet know about the rough breathing mark and most would expect his name to begin with an H letter, as in Latin, rather than an O letter, as it does in Greek.

You could try to use things where a loanword from ancient Greek is still used with exactly the same meaning in most modern European languages (like περίμετρος for the outside of a circle), but this might turn out to depend a little too much on people's native languages and prior education.

A slightly weird compromise might be to use Latin transliterations alongside each word at first, like you could have the picture of Alexander and say

  Ἀλέξανδρος
  Alexandros

or of Athens and say

  Ἀθῆναι
  Athēnai

It's really not that hard to learn the Greek alphabet. It's just 24 letters almost all of which represent sounds common in English. I'm currently learning the devanagari script for Sanskrit, which isn't exactly an alphabet, and it's a much steeper climb, though I think I'm making progress.

Someone could record an audiobook version so people can read along and figure out the sound values on the fly.

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