[B-Greek] Greek trivia: all the letters...

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed May 7 07:16:29 EDT 2003


I guess that I really ought to apologize to the list for inflicting this
somewhat-less-than-fully-earnest exchange of correspondence -- even though
it has made for an interlude of fun in the course of other matters of
concern to the list. My initial response was in fact only partly, as Rod
Decker suggested, with tongue-in-cheek. As a pedagogical device it seems to
me that using a passage such as 1 Peter 3:19-20 to introduce the alphabet
on grounds that it contains all the letters does have, as Rod indicated,
some difficulty along the lines of the circular dictionary: one needs to
know so much more than the alphabet in order to make sense of the passage!
And so I thought back to the old device in Macintosh System 9 (and earlier)
fonts: clicking on the font icon would open up a panel showing all upper
and lower case characters and then display the sentence, "The quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog" (a text that DOES contain all 26 characters of
the Roman alphabet), in the font in question. If that happens to be a Greek
font such as Graeca, SuperGreek, Mounce, or any of a couple dozen others,
one would see all the characters represented.

In my own teaching over the course of many years I made it my practice, as
I imagine most teachers of Greek have done, to insist that students
memorize (a) the alphabet in its Greek sequence by Greek names of the
letters (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, etc.,etc.), (b) the
forms and sounds of all the upper- and lower-case characters as written and
pronounced in at least one of the conventional pronunciations, and (c)
standard methods of drawing each character by hand in a graphic script for
transcription purposes. And although I did spend at least one class doing
pronunciation and reading aloud the text of the first reading segment (I
used the JACT text, "Reading Greek"), it never occurrred to me to use an
authentic Greek textual passage as a mnemonic device for the reason that I
stated in the first paragraph above.

Now, of course, Richard has carried the original notion and its successive
spoofing responses a step further by translating "The quick brown fox ..."
into Greek, even retaining my faulty "jumped" for what should have been
"jumps." All good fun. I'm reminded yet again of the Saturday afternoon in
December of 1996 when Jonathan Robie started up a playful thread of
conversion of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" into Koine Greek; anyone
curious enough (and foolish enough) to want to look at that may find it in
the B-Greek archives for December 7-8, 1996.

At 11:05 PM -0400 5/6/03, Richard Ghilardi wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>I couldn't get more than 20 letters in the Greek translation:
>
>hJ alwvphx hJ tacei'a kaiV orfnivnh uJpeVr toVn rJa/vqumon kuvna
>ephvdhsen.
>
>hH ALWPHX hH TACEIA KAI ORFNINH hUPER TON hRAiQUMON KUNA EPHDHSEN.
>
>Missing is B, G, Z and Y.
>
>Yours in His grace,
>
>Richard Ghilardi -- qodeshlayhvh at juno.com
>New Haven, CT USA
>
>On Tue, 6 May 2003 19:52:59 -0400 "Carl W. Conrad"
><cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> writes:
>> Clever! Yes, actually, it's a gnomic aorist, best translated into
>> English
>> as a present tense. The sentence works fine if it's "The quick brown
>> fox
>> jumps over the lazy dog." That includes all the Roman letters.
>>
>>
>> THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.
>>
>> When I put that into Greek characters I get (transliterated):
>>
>> THE QUICK BROWN FOX .UMPS O.ER THE LAZY DOG. All the Greek letters
>> are
>> present here, while J and V are 25th and 26th letters.
>---
>B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
>B-Greek mailing list
>B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek

-- 

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/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list