First Year Greek

c stirling bartholomew cc.constantine at worldnet.att.net
Sat Apr 20 15:53:53 EDT 2002


on 4/20/02 10:12 AM, Randall Buth wrote:

> A question:
> Wouldn't it be more correct to say that the mnemonics that Story
> uses teach a metalanguage (English-based) rather than the language
> itself? 
> E.g., rather than have a student know ANASTHQI and KAQOU so
> well that they stand up and sit down when they hear it, my impression
> of Story was that they would learn trigger words for AORISTS and
> SUBJUNCTIVES and English vocabulary tags.

Randall,

Yes. At some point one must stop parsing and start reading. I wonder how
long it takes for students who have been trained in the bottom up,
analytical approach to Greek to learn to read a sentence without ever
thinking about the formal features of the constituents? You know, read it
like they would a sentence in their own language.

A metalanguage can be very useful for analysis, but it should not be based
on English or even Latin (more common). A really useful metalanguage should
be language generic. However, this will result in a level of abstraction
that might be a bit daunting for a first year seminary student.


greetings,

Clay




--  
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062





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