Beginning Grammars-dark ages
Brian Swedburg
brian at discoveryhills.org
Tue Jun 12 19:13:52 EDT 2001
on 7/18/02 12:16 PM, Randall Buth at ButhFam at compuserve.com wrote:
> shalom Matthew Ferris
>
> egrapsas:
>> I don't quite understand the comments about Mounce
>> et. al being in the dark ages. He takes a radically
>> different approach than Machen, and if you are
>> learning Greek on your own, Machen will be next to
>> impossible. Mounce, however, I have found to be quite
>> good and would recommend it.
>
> You have done well to ask.
> There are more than one answer
> to your question, but it is an important one.
> Clay, who made the comment, is probably referring to
> linguistic developments that have come to the fore in
> the last twenty years or so, which I would fill in
> with things like thematic prominence, forgrounding,
> aspect and verb valency. Those provide slightly
> different starting points for describing Greek, and
> Mounce has not reoriented to those or reflected any
> advance on Machen.
>
> But another answer, and more important in my opinion,
> is to step back and ask a more basic question:
> If Mounce's grammar methodology were teaching
> French, would a student ever learn French?
> Professionals involved with second language
> acquistion may smile. The answer is 'No' if
> one intends to be able to think with the language,
> to get inside the language. And I see that as the
> big question for anyone who would write new training
> material for Greek.
>
> As to Machen versus Mounce, I suppose I would need to
> ask you whether you drive a Ford or a Chevy? (Actually,
> that's irrelevant, since both of those machines work.)
> Machen is terse, Mounce is wordy. Neither one leads
> to "internalization", even after twenty years of
> similar follow up. And that is where the warning
> bell should come from.
>
> And that may ironically illustrate why we need
> to leave the modern "dark ages"
> so that we can get back to skills where
> some really knew their Greek (like in the 11th
> century when Anna Komnene wrote the Alexiad: she wrote
> a Greek that was more Classical than the literary
> Koine in many ways.)
>
> ERRWSO
>
> Randall Buth
> Jerusalem
>
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>
Greetings,
Randall, what beginning and intermediate level grammars would you
recommend?
Thanks.
Brian P. Swedburg
Student
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