Beginning Grammars-dark ages
Randall Buth
ButhFam at compuserve.com
Thu Jul 18 15:16:26 EDT 2002
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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