Deponents

Ross Durham (rhd@light.han.ac.kr)
Wed, 22 Jan 1997 17:22:33 +0900

Of course, I'll have to defer to your experience in teaching Greek, and
the maxim "active in meaning" is especially egregious. My own experience
in the classroom, only as a student, with Greek deponents was that I was
told that they were similar to Latin deponents and that was the extent.

I may suggest, however, that the problem with teaching deponents is not
so much the connotation of the term (another meaning of "deponent" in
English is "one who testifies under oath in a deposition" -- perhaps
that's negative!) but an insufficient linguistic exposure, especially to
many different languages. What is the typical language background of
your students? Is it a good idea to study Latin before studying Greek?

So what suggests do people have for teaching "Deponents" to BEGINNING Greek
students? The Mounce text uses the "active in meaning" approach?

Ross Durham
Handong University
Pohang, South Korea
rhd@light.han.ac.kr