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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