The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.
I distinctly remember being very confused about the spray of particles interjected between nouns and verbs, and trying to shut out the noise of the particles to be able to parse a sentence. I probably got a headache.
The problem is that, the meaning of "ενταύθα", "ουν", "ον", "γε", "δε", "ην", etc may be well known if you take them as individual words, but when you string them together they're apparently trying to say ... something. And that something is opaque and incomprehensible, like an ancient joke for which you have no context.
Meanwhile Plutarch enriches the laconic myth corpus by reporting that the Lacedaemonians were content with replying to a letter with only the words "About what you wrote: no." Writing style is part of the message.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
Growing up bilingual, I personally always found Greek more verbose than English even in brevity. It's good for avoiding ambiguity and getting your intent across but sometimes bad for colloquial communication.
That said, I do think there's a point that a lot of things end up getting translated in the wrong "register" and lose some of the meaning. One message John the Baptist sends to Jesus is rendered in my translation, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?" But in the Greek there's no "should", and the whole sentence is a lot shorter. To me it has much more of a "get off your but and do something" implication; more like, "Hey, are you the one, or are we looking for someone else?"
Same in another place, where where Jesus says something my translation renders, "Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: [About his upcoming death]" The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.
Maybe. Another possibility (in general) is that that's the idiomatic thing to say in the source language, and it only sounds colorful to non-native speakers.
Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ?
To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.
It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.
Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.
It's satirical.
Well now I must know.
I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").
And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.
I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.
P.S. There's also a limiting sense in the dictionary, with the example given:
Greek: ho de ge (+ participle)
Russian: tot že (kto)
English: but the one (who)Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.
They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.
Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”