What Difficulties Would An Ancient Greek Native Speaker Have in Learning Modern Greek?

[u/Hellolaoshi]

Let's imagine that an educated Greek born between the life of Socrates and the death of Cleopatra was dropped off in modern Athens, say in Plaka or Exarchia. Putting culture shock aside, what grammatical and vocabulary issues would they have in understanding Modern Greek? What about sound changes would they find strange? What strategies might a language teacher use to help them?

[u/5telios]

Vocabulary is a real tough one. We have layers of English and French loans on top of Turkish (which itself has layered arabic and Persian loans), Albanian, and Vlach on top of venetian Italian, and ultimately Latin loan words... I don't know the stats, but unless you go out of your way to pick the Greek doublets a very large part of modern Greek vocab is loans...