[B-Greek] Prepositional Phrase [How Did Greeks Think?]

Mark Lama markosl80 at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 7 16:32:19 EDT 2003



Doug Hoxworth <dhoxworth at charter.net> wrote: 


but this brings up another question that i've been 
wondering for some time and even more now that i'm trying 
to learn to actually "read" Greek rather than merely 
analyze it. i understand that the word order is relatively 
free but my additional question is how did they actually 
think or put the thought together as they read. having 
english as my native tongue when i try and read Greek it 
seems rather disjointed in thought as if the writer just 
keeps adding thoughts. i mean since they read from left to 
right then the sentence has to make sense as one reads it 
now just as we analyze it, parse it, diagram it, translate 
it, etc.

perhaps this is just my complete ignorance as to foreign 
language but i'm trying to get my arms around this idea of 
how they put ideas and thoughts together. i really don't 
know exactly what i'm asking...it really seems rather 
amorphous. but in Rev 13:8 in particular, how would the 
reader know when coming to the final prepositional phrase 
that it was supposed to modify the verb which came way 
before it (i.e., it is quite distant from it)?


[Mark]

This has been an interesting thread. The only thing that I would add to Ranulf's, in my view, excellent reply is that even in reading one doesn't strictly perceive a sentence "from left to right" but much more as a whole. Likewise, in speech, one does not understand one word at a time, but, to an extent, whole utterances. Not being trained in psycholinguistics, I am really not equipped to shed any light on how English speakers think, let alone how ancient Greek speakers thought, but from personal experience I know that as one reads more and more Greek the painful word-by-word, left-to-right sensation diminishes, and one begins spontaneously to grasp whole thoughts. At some point of familiarity, the text begins to "open up", and one begins to see whole word-blocks together, as one does while reading one's native language. It is an experiance of "peripheral vision" that comes as one no longer has to pause over every word and form. The key is to begin learning how to think in Greek by
 eliminating the "translation step" and internalizing the meaning directly from the source-language. It would be well if NT Greek learning programs more commonly had this as a central goal. There are tecniques on both the teaching and learning side that can be used to make this easier. Maybe someday some of the modern research on language learning will trickle down to the classical languages.

CARIS KAI EIRHNH,

Mark Lama




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