Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

in History, Language, Literature | June 4th, 2026

You can, of course, learn the Greek language as it’s spoken today. You can also learn Greek as it was spoken in antiquity — and as it was, until fairly recently in historical time, taught to students in the modern West. But it’s a fairly different endeavor again to learn Greek as Homer spoke it. The fact of the matter is that no human being ever really spoke like Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Penelope, or any of the other characters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s many literary achievements through these works include the creation and command of a kind of synthesized poetic Greek, combining qualities of regional Ionic and Aeolic dialects with various forms and expressions that were outdated even in the eighth century BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Needless to say, when most of us attempt to read Homer aloud in the original, we get it all or mostly wrong, even if we’re familiar with modern Greek. We’d have to spend a long time indeed in the world of classicists before hearing a more accurate recording than the one above, delivered by a YouTuber called Thomas Whichello.

On his channel, Whichello specializes in performing venerable literary texts with a pronunciation and cadence as close to period-accurate as possible, often in the original language, sometimes with his own musical accompaniment. He’s done readings of the Bible, Shakespeare, Keats, and Wilde, but none so far has been so popular as his rendition of the first book of the Iliad, accompanied by subtitles of Homer’s text and an English translation.

A Greek here in 2026 with no particular knowledge of the classical language may understand a quarter of the individual words Whichello uses, and maybe half of them in certain passages. Actually being able to follow the story, however, is another matter. Still, you can get a surprising amount out of the video even if you understand nothing at all, since Whichello is aiming not just for linguistic accuracy, but also emotional resonance in his delivery. Ignore his glasses, button-down shirt, microphone, and window frame, and you could almost be sitting around a campfire with him nearly 30 centuries ago. Note, also, that the commenters include genuine classicists who call his the best reading they’ve ever heard — as well as viewers, credentialed or otherwise, eager to hear him name all those mighty Achaean ships in Book 2.

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

in Language, Music | June 1st, 2026

I’ve interacted with many entertaining language-learning resources in various classes—from miniseries in Spanish to comic books in French—all geared toward making the unfamiliar language relevant to daily life. Learning counterintuitive pronunciations, parsing a new system of grammar, or memorizing the genders of word after word can be laborious and intimidating in the classroom. Doing so in everyday pop cultural settings, not as much.

When it comes to the teaching of dead languages, the resources can seem less approachable. I certainly appreciate the literary and rhetorical genius of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, and Julius Caesar. But during my high school years, I did not always find their work easy to read in English, much less in formal classical Latin. The elation I felt after successfully translating a passage was sometimes dampened as I puzzled over historical notes and glosses that often left me with more questions than answers.

That’s not at all to say that students of Latin shouldn’t be exposed to cultural and historical context or read the finest exemplars of the written language. Only that a break from the heavy stuff now and then goes a long way. Might I submit to Latin instructors one ingenious tool from Eddie O’Hara, former British Labour Party MP and classics teacher? O’Hara passed away in May 2016, and not long after his death, his son Terry O’Hara tweeted these translations of Beatles songs (including two Christmas tunes) his father made in the 60s for his students. At the time, these were the height of pop culture relevance, and, while a far cry from the complexities of the Aeneid, a fun way for Latin learners to relate to a language that can seem cold and imposing.

I will admit, my Latin has fallen into such a state that I can’t immediately vouch for the accuracy or elegance of these translations (“cue fierce arguments among Latin grammarians,” replies one Twitter user), but there’s no reason to doubt Mr. O’Hara knew his stuff. ““He was a born educator,” his son remembers, “He was a teacher and classicist by background and he had a strong interest in educational matters and Greek cultural heritage.” Educated himself at Magdalen College, Oxford, O’Hara taught at Perse School, Cambridge, Birkenhead School, and in the early 70s, C.F. Mott College in the Beatles’ own Liverpool.

In addition to his role as a statesman, the Liverpool Echo remembers O’Hara’s many decades as “a popular teacher who brought classes to life translating Beatles lyrics into Latin.” We do not have any indication of whether he actually tried to sing the lyrics, though his students surely must have attempted it. What must the chorus of “All My Loving” sound like as “Ita totum amorem dabo, Tibi totum, numquam cessaba”? Or “She Loves You” as “Amat te, mehercle”? Singing them to myself, I can see that O’Hara was sensitive to the meter of the original English in his Latin renderings. But I’d really love to see someone set these to music and make a video. Any of our readers up to the challenge?

Finally, since early sixties Beatles lyrics aren’t as likely to engage students in 2017, what pop cultural material would you translate today—classics teachers out there—to reach the bemused, bewildered, and the bored? If you’re already hard at work using hip resources in the classroom, please do share them with us in the comments!

Note: To view the images in a larger format, please click on the links to these individual images: Image 1 - Image 2 — Image 3. When the image opens, click on it again to zoom in.

Note 2: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

in Design, History, Language | February 6th, 2026

Khipus, the portable information archives created by the Inca, may stir up memories of 1970s macrame with their long strands of intricately knotted, earth-toned fibers, but their function more closely resembled that of a densely plotted computerized spreadsheet.

As Cecilia Pardo-Grau, lead curator of the British Museum’s current exhibition Peru: a journey in time explains in the above Curators Corner episode, khipus were used to keep track of everything from inventories and censuses to historical narratives, using a system that assigned meaning to the type and position of knot, spaces between knots, cord length, fiber color, etc.

Much of the information preserved within khipus has yet to be deciphered by modern scholars, though the Open Khipu Repository — computational anthropologist Jon Clindaniel’s open-source database — makes it possible to compare the patterns of hundreds of khipus residing in museum and university collections.

Even in the Incan Empire, few were equipped to make sense of a khipu. This task fell to quipucamayocs, highborn administrative officials trained since childhood in the creation and interpretation of these organic spreadsheets.

Fleet messengers known as chaskis transported khipus on foot between administrative centers, creating an information superhighway that predates the Internet by some five centuries. Khipus’ sturdy organic cotton or native camelid fibers were well suited to withstanding both the rigors of time and the road.

A 500-year-old composite khipu that found its way to the British Museum organics conservator Nicole Rode prior to the exhibition was intact, but severely tangled, with a brittleness that betrayed its age. Below, she describes falling under the khipu’s spell, during the painstaking process of restoring it to a condition whereby researchers could attempt to glean some of its secrets.

Visit Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino’s website to learn more about khipu in a series of fascinating short articles that accompanied their groundbreaking 2003 exhibit QUIPU: counting with knots in the Inka Empire.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

How the Inca Used Intricately-Knotted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their Histories, Send Messages & Keep Records

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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist in NYC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

in History, Language | January 7th, 2026

It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until scholars deciphered it during the last two centuries.

In the past, we’ve published audio that lets you hear the reconstructed sounds of Akkadian (Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia). Now, should you wish, you can download PDFs of U. Chicago’s Akkadian dictionary for free. All 21 volumes would cost well over $1,945 if purchased in hard copy. But the PDFs, they won’t run you a dime.

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Listen to The Epic of Gilgamesh Being Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

in English Language, History, Language | December 29th, 2025

It’s easy to imagine the myriad difficulties with which you’d be faced if you were suddenly transported a millennium back in time. But if you’re a native (or even proficient) English speaker in an English-speaking part of the world, the language, at least, surely wouldn’t be a problem. Or so you’d think, until your first encounter with utterances like “þat troe is daed on gaerde” or “þa rokes forleten urne tun.” Both of those sentences appear in the new video above from Simon Roper, in which he delivers a monologue beginning in the English of the fifth century and ending in the English of the end of the last millennium.

An Englishman specializing in videos about linguistics and anthropology, Roper has pulled off this sort of feat before: we previously featured him here on Open Culture for his performance of a London accent as it evolved through 660 years.

But writing and delivering a monologue that works its way through a millennium and a half of change in the English language is obviously a thornier endeavor, not least because it involves literal thorns — the þ characters, that is, used in the Old English Latin alphabet. They’re pronounced like th, which you can hear when Roper speaks the sentences quoted earlier, which translate to “The tree is dead in the yard” and “The rooks abandoned our town.”

The word translate should give us pause, since we’re only talking about English. But then, English has undergone such a dramatic evolution that, at far enough of a remove, we might as well be talking about different languages. What Roper emphasizes is that the changes didn’t happen suddenly. Non-Scandinavian listeners may lack even an inkling that his farmer of the year 450 is talking about sheep and pigs with the words skēpu and swīnu, but his final lines, in which he speaks of possessing “all the hot coffee I need” and “friends I didn’t have in New York” in the year 2000, will pose no difficulty to Anglophones anywhere in the world. Even his list of agricultural wealth around the early thirteenth century — “We habben an god hus, we habben mani felds” — could make you believe that a trip 600 years in the past would be, as they said in Middle English, no trouble.

Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 32 ) |

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

in History, Language | October 14th, 2025

As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….

So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

in History, Language | July 15th, 2025

When we speak English, we might say we’re speaking the language of Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote its first dictionary. Or we could say we’re speaking the language of Shakespeare, who coined more English terms than any other individual in history. It would make just as much sense to describe ourselves as speaking the language of the King James Bible, the mass printing of which did so much to standardize English, steamrolling flat many of the countless local variations that existed in the early seventeenth century. But as many an Englishman (and more than a few Americans) would be loath to admit, when we speak English, we are, much of the time, actually speaking French.

“In 1066, the Normans turn up and seize the English throne from the Anglo-Saxons says YouTuber Robwords in the new video above, describing the single most important event in the entire history of the English language, which he recounts in just 22 minutes. “William the Conqueror becomes king, and Norman French becomes the language of England’s élite.”

Under its new ruler, the country’s earls, thanes, and athelings would be called barons, dukes, and princes. “The now-subdued Anglo-Saxons needed to learn French words if they wanted to get by, so English absorbs a whole host of French terms associated with power, justice, art, government, law, and culture — such as power, justice, art, government, law, and culture,” to name just a few.

This thoroughgoing Frenchification gave rise to what we now call Middle English, as distinct from the Old English spoken before. As noted by RobWords, about 85 percent of Old English vocabulary is no longer in use today, yet we’re still “using Old English in every sentence that we utter,” not least when we break out such irregular-seeming plurals as mice, oxen, and wolves. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday make reference to “the Anglo-Saxons’ pre-Christian gods.” And even in the fast-changing, slang-ridden, internet-influenced, and — for better or for worse — highly “globalized” English we speak today, we can still hear dim echoes of the ancient ancestor linguists call Proto-Indo-European. Perhaps that’s why, despite being so widely spoken, English is still so tricky to learn: when we speak it, we’re speaking not just a language, but many languages all at once.

Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

in Language | June 9th, 2025

What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatrical home. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater’s purpose has always been to recapture as much as possible the original look and feel of a Shakespearean production—costuming, music, movement, etc. But until recently, the Globe felt that attempting a play in the original pronunciation would alienate audiences. The opposite proved to be true, and people clamored for more. Above, Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate to us what certain Shakespearean passages would have sounded like to their first audiences, and in so doing draw out some subtle wordplay that gets lost on modern tongues.

Shakespeare’s English is called by scholars Early Modern English (not, as many students say, “Old English,” an entirely different, and much older language). Crystal dates his Shakespearean early modern to around 1600. (In his excellent textbook on the subject, linguist Charles Barber bookends the period roughly between 1500 and 1700.) David Crystal cites three important kinds of evidence that guide us toward recovering early modern’s original pronunciation (or “OP”).

1. Observations made by people writing on the language at the time, commenting on how words sounded, which words rhyme, etc. Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson tells us, for example, that speakers of English in his time and place pronounced the “R” (a feature known as “rhoticity”). Since, as Crystal points out, the language was evolving rapidly, and there wasn’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of contemporary commentary on this evolution, which early modern writers like Jonson had the chance to observe firsthand.

2. Spellings. Unlike today’s very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, Early Modern English tended to be much more phonetic and words were pronounced much more like they were spelled, or vice versa (though spelling was very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).

3. Rhymes and puns which only work in OP. The Crystals demonstrate the important pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Juliet, which is completely lost in so-called “Received Pronunciation” (or “proper” British English). Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP.

Not everyone agrees on what Shakespeare’s OP might have sounded like. Eminent Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sounded more like American English does today, suggesting that the language that migrated across the pond retained more Elizabethan characteristics than the one that stayed home.

You can hear an example of this kind of OP in the recording from Romeo and Juliet above. Shakespeare scholar John Barton suggests that OP would have sounded more like modern Irish, Yorkshire, and West Country pronunciations, an accent that the Crystals seem to favor in their interpretations of OP and is much more evident in the reading from Macbeth below (both audio examples are from a CD curated by Ben Crystal).

Whatever the conjecture, scholars tend to use the same set of criteria David Crystal outlines. I recall my own experience with Early Modern English pronunciation in an intensive graduate course on the history of the English language. Hearing a class of amateur linguists read familiar Shakespeare passages in what we perceived as OP—using our phonological knowledge and David Crystal’s criteria—had exactly the effect Ben Crystal described in an NPR interview:

If there’s something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand … it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It’s a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head.

In other words, despite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal, and more of the moment, even, than the sometimes stilted, pretentious ways of reading Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or BBC news anchor.

For more on this subject, don’t miss this related post: Hear What Hamlet, Richard III & King Lear Sounded Like in Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear the First Book of Homer’s Iliad Read Aloud in the Original Greek

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online

How Far Back in History Can You Start to Understand English?

Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like

The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

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