How mutually intelligible are Greek and Ancient Greek / Hebrew and Classical Hebrew?

Question

I would like to learn Classical Hebrew and Ancient Greek, however I feel it is more beneficial to learn a language you can use to actually talk to people. If I were to learn their modern equivalents would a transition to their older counterparts be easy? I know that Old English and English are drastically different, I was just wondering how much these languages have evolved.

Answer 1

Modern Hebrew is a revived language based directly on Ancient Hebrew - Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda) used it to revive the Hebrew language, dead ca. 500 BCE after the Babilonian invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_Hebrew_language).

Modern Greek is indeed very different from Ancient Greek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greek) - I would personally recommend you to learn Classical Greek (which is maybe what you are looking for), which is more or less like learning Latin if you are looking to talk in Spanish. The great difference is, though, that when you learn Latin you are learning the ancestor of Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc., but when you learn Classical Greek you are learning the ancestor of Modern Greek only, so it might not be worth it if you only want to talk to people...

Another practical way could be to learn Proto-Indo-European (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language), so that you learn Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Avestan, Hittite, etc. through the comparison with their ancestor, with each other and with other old Indo-European dialects like Italic (Latin), Germanic, Slavic, etc. A free practical grammar is available at http://dnghu.org/en/Indo-European%20grammar/

Answer 2

I spent 4 years learning ancient Greek and Latin, and than the next 4 years learning modern Greek and Italian. On the basic level of learning, there are no similarities, but when you go a bit deeper in a language structure, you find it very useful to know the language history. So, basically, ancient languages and their modern ancestors are very different, but you can use the knowledge of an ancient language mostly in irregular grammar forms.

Answer 3

Greek has changed tremendously over the millennia. They are not close.

Modern Hebrew is a recent reconstruction of ancient Hebrew. Therefore, they are pretty close.

Answer 4

Greeek p-eople hate Ancient Greek people the same Hebrew.....
even don't try to speak it near them they will kill you

do you think why there are not any Ancient Greeks or ancient Hebrews???
they were all killed by Modern Greeks and herbew!!!!!!!!