[B-Greek] William D. Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Dec 4 20:01:19 EST 2003
At 7:47 PM -0500 12/4/03, <bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca> wrote:
> "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> wrote on
> : Wed, 3 Dec 2003 15:03:07 -0500
>
> Several like Mounce's work
>> very much; I've taught out of it myself and don't really much like it, but
>> it's certainly more useful if one has the workbook and if one starts
>> learning nouns and verbs at the same time. The grammatical explanations are
>> adequate; what turned me off personally was the "exegetical insights"
>> feature, which seems to me to confound a particular theological perspective
>> with points of grammatical analysis that are arguable and probably
>> premature for beginning students of Biblical Greek.
>
>Is the reason that you don't like this grammar much, due to the exegetical
>insights or are there other reasons as well?
>I have become convinced (because of discussions on b-greek) that al least
>two excegetical insights have fallacies, but as for the grammar proper, I
>have really enjoyed it.
>
>Once I started getting onto verbs I saw separating the verbs from nouns as
>an advantage. It allowed me to really get familiar with case endings
>before having to memorize personal endings of verbs. (Even then, I recall
>parsing a word like ELUON as acc. sing masc.)
>Why is it so critical to learn verbs at the same time as nouns? After all,
>in order to learn verbs earlier something else has to give way; maybe 3rd
>decl. nouns or pronouns would have to wait till chapter 17.
I do think that the grammatical explanations in Mounce are reasonably
clear, more so than in two other Koine primers that I've taught out of, at
any rate (one of them being Machen). I think that if one's using Mounce's
workbook along with the textbook the problem of doing the whole verb before
doing the noun (or vice versa) is less, but it seemed to me that even so
the workbook had to explain a lot of material not yet introduced in the
grammar pretty far along in the readings. What's most important of all, I
think, is that one gets into reading authentic Greek texts--not made-up
Greek such as is found in Machen and in some primers--as soon as possible,
preferably from graded levels of difficulty, but nevertheless real Greek.
What one needs to do is to become acquainted as early and as deeply as
possible in patterns of Greek expression so that one need not even analyze
the forms of nouns and verbs any more, although that is necessary at the
earlier stages and one should always be able to do the analysis when called
upon to do so--but once one is really reading, one doesn't think about
analyzing verbs and nouns and adjectives any more.
>Unlike you, I can't compare very many grammars because I have only three.
>The other two being "Homeric Greek, a book for beginners" by Pharr, and
>"Beginning Greek" by Paine.
>I enjoy using them but I am not sure if I would have been able to learn
>Greek using either one of them as my first grammar.
I'm familiar with Pharr, and I think it's fine provided that one goes right
ahead and reads plenty of Homeric Greek immediately after finishing it
rather than jumping from it into Greek of the classical or Koine eras.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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