I think it is right to keep in mind that Greek, and very likely any ancient language, and Greek thought, is several removes from - alien to - modern understanding. Translation simply turns the Greek into an arcane coding of English that loses the Greek meaning. And the trick is to read it for direct meaning and understanding, and that is not easy. And just here this could break in to a difficult and incomplete effort to present some of differences in just the words. But a different, easier approach is available. Get and read the Iliad translated by Richmond Lattimore. Used copies available for under $10.

That's a good place to begin to enter the strange ancient Greek world.

Imo you're correct in observing that modern languages in many respects and ways overlay each other. Consider "The book is on the table." "Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch." But, "epi teis trapidzeis ton biblion." So what's the problem? A modern and an ancient Greek table don't match up, and, before Gutenburg there is no such thing as a book!

I ask you to imagine that a word's range of meaning be represented by a field in the shape of a long sausage. If a Greek word's sausage be horizontal, then the sausage of the English word used to translate it overlays it but is offset and turned, leaving only a small shared area of meaning. In translating, the shared portion is used along with the English portion, the rest of the Greek field lost. In this sense, the Greek becomes English, its Greekness cut away.

Also the problem of what things are. Who or what is the good man? For the ancient Greek, Agamemnon. But he could be the model for Trump, Trump on steroids. But underlying that is the notion of the good man is the one who wins, gets things done, protects his interests and his people, the successful man.

There (is) the question of the Greek verb to be. Often it (is) omitted. We (are) accustomed to saying this (is) that, and these (are) those. Implicit (is) a reified abstract in the this and these, to which the accidents of that and those (are) attached. We do this all the time. But I think the ancient Greek did not. For example, his trapidza (table) (is) really a four-legged thing; in particular that four-legged thing. His, then, () a decidedly concrete world of minimal abstraction.

And (there is) no such thing as Christianity, and Judaism very much a minority report. (This) not a matter of religion, but a fundamental difference in how the world (is) understood (to be). For him, the world itself () an arbitrary place of caprice and imperfection where a man wins his way. We on the other hand suppose the world to operate within the perfection of its own certain laws.

And a range of social customs and practices that the relative isolation of communities made as close to extreme as (to be) in many ways contradictory. Sparta and Athens. But Herodotus gives a Cook's tour of city-states around the eastern Mediterranean, noting often differences in customs, practices, understandings.

All of this preserved in the language, needing only ears that will hear it. This Greek is still with us, its knowledge and possibilities still accessible. Other languages are lost and are being lost, their respective knowledge being lost. A good book on this topic here:
https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Voices-Extinction-Worlds-Languages/dp/0195152468/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

I take the liberty of reproducing here my own Amazon review.
"A good book. From page 16: "In the native American language, Micmac, trees are named for the sound the wind makes when it blows through them during the Autumn, about an hour after sunset when the wind always comes from a certain direction. Moreover, these names are not fixed but change as the sound changes. If an elder remembers, for example, that a certain stand of trees used to be called by a particular name 75 years ago but is now called by another, these terms [can be seen as markers for change over that period]." And just in this a jewel of an example of the potential of "other" languages - what I think of as the magic of languages, and their collective ability to reveal a world that speakers of one language have difficulty accessing. A main premise of "Vanishing Voices" is that so-called native languages, once judged grossly inferior to the main European languages, are repositories of knowledge built up over hundreds and hundreds of years, that will be lost when the language dies, and that do not exist in any other form. But this is just a part of the book. The simplest review is this: if you like this topic, or it "speaks" to you, it's worth the time. Poetic as the Micmac example is, it is not a poetic book. It is a science book, with a message about loss of data, world-view, and different kinds of understandings of the world, and lots of examples."

- the modern concepts of love as such are comparable in Greek to those in English
- the words in the Greek language spoken by, for instance, Socrates, were directly and precisely mappable to other old European and Middle-Eastern languages such as Etruscan, Phoenecian, Babylonian, and Celtic
- the concepts were different, then are the very thoughts of humans then and now so different, that a close translation is impossible?
- the cause of the shift of meanings was needed, to hone the precision of the language, or has the precision of mapping between words' meanings and the real world's objects, actions and ideas eroded in comparative meanings but the shift progressed without any conscious human intervention? — god must be atheist

These are really interesting questions, and a great shame this thread hasn't received the attention it warrants (except kudos to @tim wood) when there are so many questions irrelevant to philosophy continually being asked here.

Really these questions could elicit many book-length responses but time is short, so I'll have to provide an abbreviated response.

Names for love - there is list of the names for different kinds of love - philial, erotic, friendly - sometimes read out at wedding ceremonies. There's a reproduction of them here. Suffice to say, becoming aware of this list is also to become aware of the poverty of current English in having only one threadbare term, 'love', for this vast range of emotions and passions.

Other languages - My knowledge of Greek, ancient or modern, is zero. But I did study the writings of a pioneering scholar named Max Müller, who published ground-breaking studied in the late 19th century about what he called 'linguistic archeology'. He discovered, through analysis of word-roots, the idea of the Indo-european languages and cultures. This is why, for example, you find many common word roots between Sanskrit, modern Hindi, and modern Latiin languages (sarpena - serpent pada - pedestrian - maitri - mater- mother - dyaus pitar - jupiter - sky father). Through tracing the similarities and differences between languages such as Hindi, classical Sanskrit, ancient Persian, ancient Greek, and others, he was able to arrive at an approximation of the dates of the ancient Indo-European diaspora which happened in pre-historic times.

concepts were different - this is a key point. As Tim Wood points out'There (is) the question of the Greek verb to be.' Arguably, the exploration of the various meanings of the Greek word 'to be' is the origin of Aristotle's metaphysics! So it is a question of great importance in philosophy. There is a seminal paper, which @StreetlightX pointed out some time back, on The Greek Word 'to Be' and the Concept of Being, Charles H. Kahn, on this topic. (With regard, for example, to the philosophical distinction between 'to be' and 'to exist' which again is barely discernable in modern English.)

There's also another point worthy of digression, which is the theory of 'linguistic relativity', usually discussed with reference to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that the structure of language determines in some strong way the worldview of its speakers. This claim is disputed, of course, but it has always made intuitive sense to me. Like the paucity of terms describing 'love' mentioned above, in my view there's a paucity of terms describing many of the subtle philosophical ideas that can be rendered in Sanskrit.

Another key point in conceptual mapping - Thomas Kuhn, author of Structure of Scientific Revolutions, encountered the idea of the incommensurability of worldviews - that they are sometimes so different that they can't even be described to each other. 'For instance, when he encountered the word “motion” in Aristotle (the standard translation of the Greek kinesis), he was thinking in terms of the change of position of objects in space (as we do today). But to get more closely at Aristotle’s original usage, he had to expand the meaning of motion to cover a much broader range of phenomena that include various other sorts of change, such as growth and diminution, alternation, and generation and corruption, making an objects motion in space (displacement or ‘locomotion’) just a special case of motion. Kuhn realized that these sorts of conceptual differences indicated breaks between different modes of thought, and he suspected that such breaks must be significant both for the nature of knowledge, and for the sense in which the development of knowledge can be said to make progress.' 1 '

This is why scholarship is so important in understanding ancient or foreign literature. It's why, for example, that the autodidact encounters baffling passages in ancient Greek when reading textbooks on Plato. The author is saying, 'look, in Greek, it is said like this .....' - but of course, it's all Greek to me, as the saying has it.

So - big and important topic, and something to be always aware of, especially in philosophy.

How would know?

:100:
One might add the Eskimo's many words for snow. But this not merely a matter of closer observation, or even just a necessity for survival. Instead it implies a relationship with the world influenced and even determined by snow, a way of being that runs deeper than language and only surfaces in language. And you're imo right: it's some topic!

I enjoyed reading this, and I’m glad I spotted this thread.

I dabbled in biblical hermeneutics for a period (don’t judge), and found an interesting use of three very different Greek words in John’s gospel commonly translated into the English verb ‘to see’. Recognising the difference drastically alters the meaning of that text in key points of the narrative such as those that refer to Jesus’ supposed divinity and resurrection. I’ll add it in here because it also refers to @god must be atheist’s reference to eidos:

θεωρέω - theoreo refers to seeing as in observing, discerning, considering. It describes more than simply looking - it includes thinking and deciphering what the visual cues mean. Theoreo is the root of the English word ‘theatre’, where spectators concentrate on meaning, as well as ‘theory’, in which a meaning is offered without confirmation. The seeing action is to attribute meaning through observation. The verb is used to describe someone not just seeing, but attempting to make sense of what they see - e.g. recognising a person or mistaking that person for someone else, recognising that what they observe has meaning, but not necessarily grasping the true meaning.

ὁράω - Horao is described as seeing with the mind, seeing spiritually, or with inward perception. The verb is used in the imperative to instruct the people to do more than simply look with their eyes. The seeing action is to grasp the truth of an observation. Horao is also used in the aorist form (eido) to describe knowing, or a seeing that becomes knowledge. Like the English expression ‘I see what you mean’, eido is described as ‘a gateway to grasp spiritual truth (reality) from a physical plane’ - a bridge to mental (and spiritual) seeing.

Both of these verbs are distinct in meaning from βλέπω (blepo) which refers to one’s physical sense of sight only. When this verb is used, the intention is to look at what is objectively visible, without necessarily associating what one sees visually with any meaning or knowledge in the mind. It describes a physical ‘looking’ or noticing. When someone is said to see in this manner, there is no sense that they are processing what they see, deriving meaning or realising the truth.

- - - - -

I’m intrigued by this aspect of ancient language and translations, in which the approach to thinking seems to be different, or perhaps has changed since these ancient languages dropped out of common usage. I’ve been trying address some of this in the thread on the Tao Te Ching, because there is also no single character that translates as ‘to be’ in traditional literary Chinese, and the language structure seems to lends itself more readily to communicating relations between the immaterial quality of ideas, rather than reifying concepts. The same characters in Chinese have been translated into seemingly contradictory English terms (such as jué, commonly translated as ‘absolutely’ outside of the TTC, yet in the TTC translated as ‘abandon’, ‘renounce’ or ‘avoid’). The notion of judgement or value also doesn’t seem to be a fixed aspect of the language - with most characters able to refer to both positive and negative approaches to an idea. I’d be interested in discussing this with a native Chinese speaker, though, as it seems as if modern use of Chinese may be different now to the traditional literary Chinese of ancient texts.

Thank you guys, for the many interesting, interested, and learned responses. I am actually not at all an expert on ancient languages, but my uncle is. He's 95, and extremely hard on hearing, so it'd be hard to elicit a response from him. His mind is sharp, his body is keen, but he lives in a different city, and we can't travel in this country currently. Plus there are more apropos topics to discuss with him in the little time left, like who inherits the knitted elbow-warmer collection of his late wife and whether or not he is a fan of euthanasia.

I'm joking, I love him, he is a fine feller, and I wish him a longer life than he has hoped for. But it's true he spoke fluent ancient Greek in his high school years, and he has retained most of it. He is a genius. It's sad I can't mine his richly learned mind to get some wisdom regarding this topic.