How many people know Ancient Greek?

[amygdalE]

A Retrospection
In an earlier post in this thread, I stated that the word Melissa is an epithet or [feminine] descriptive adjective that was used as a noun, as the name of a certain insect, since I took the ending "-issa" to be an adjective maker or mark like -ikos [English "-ic"] and other
voicings/vocables. But I realize that it can simply be the feminine gender form of any kind of word, possibly along with "-issos" and "-isson". For instance, a man is a kratOr but the female counterpart is a kratorissa. These two Greek words are nouns, just as are the Italian Principe and Principessa [Prince and Princess].
While discussing "melissa", I thought of the word "larissa", which, as I then found out, is actually the Greek word "larisa", the name of various ancient Greek cities. I had wandered whether the word is an adjective and whether there is the masculine "*larisos". No, for Larisa is a noun, which, says a dictionary, means or has the sense of "fortress". On the contrary, I think that the noun Larisa was formed out of the word Laris, an adjective that means, according to Liddell-Scott, Pleasant (to the eyes, ears, tongue), hence Lovely, Sweet, and the like. Hence I presume that "Ialyssos" (considered in our Rhodes Forum) is a masculine noun and that its "-yssos" is from the past participle of the verb "luO".

 

[amygdalE]

If you're a modern Greek speaker then ancient Greek will really improve your modern Greek. Many of the words used today are ancient Greek, and some of the expressions used are ancient Greek.

Speaking of latin, some words are Latin- e.g. the word for sugar in Greek is zaxari (ζάχαρη) which comes from zaccharo, and the word for honey in Greek is meli (μέλι) which comes from the Latin word mel

Hallo, Ellina,
You spoke of the derivation of two Greek words, and I have already dealt with "meli". Now I wish to deal with "zakharE". [By the way, your transliteration into the Roman alphabet is wrong since the Roman "x" represents the sound "ks", not "kh", even though the two letters look almost the same. Moreover, you wrote the "i" in order to express the way you pronounce the Greek eta, but I wrote the big "E" to transliterate the eta, rather than the small "e", which for me transliterates an epsilon.
The word "zaccharo" is not a Latin word; it looks Italian (possibly Venetian), because it is almost the same as the standard Italian word, "zucchero". Here the h is not a phoneme; it is simply an indicator that the c behind it has to be prononced like a k, otherwise it is pronounced as in the English word "cheese". Therefore the h in "zaccharo" is unnecessary, as in "accademy".

Enough about orthography. Now I wish to say that you (or someone else) recognized that "zaxari" and "zacchero" are COGNATE words, that is, that they are names of one and the same thing, namely that which in English we call "sugar", and that they have the same or almost the same sound. But then we should realize that the English word "sugar" is also a cognate word.
You claim that the Greek word in question comes from a Latin word (which historically happens to be "saccharum"), probably because it is a cognate of your Greek and because modern Greek is a language younger than Latin. Might the Latin word come from the Greek (the classical Greek) word?
To begin with, the Latin word is spelled with an H, precisely because their CH was a transcription of the Greek X . So, we can reconstruct a Greek-like word: *sakXarum. Its -arum is a traditional variant of the Greek -aron (for a singular neutral word). Therefore, the reconstructed word should be *sakXaron.
Believe it not, I searched the Liddell-Scott (Classical)Greek-English Dictionary [online], which lists words present in ancient Greek literature, and I found:
-----------[ Ho sa`kkhar (genit. sa`kkharos). Also: sakkhari, sakkharis, sakkaron. It = sugar, which was made from Indian cane or palm. Cf. Sanskrit "sa`rkara". ]----------------------
Presumably the Indic name was imported into Greece in ancient times and slightly modified. It denotes a sweet white stuff, but nobody says what it means, such as "sweet stuff" or "honey-like stuff". The Greek [as well as the Latin] "-ar(os)" has various senses, as in Honorary, Secondary, Voluntary, etc. These are adjectives that, like "sweet white", express what a stuff is or does or undergoes. Maybe we can think of a suitable aro-adjective.