[B-Greek] Help with Prepositions

Mike Sangrey msangrey at BlueFeltHat.org
Wed Aug 4 09:30:47 EDT 2004


On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 00:38, Patrick Narkinsky wrote:
> On Aug 3, 2004, at 8:57 PM, JMonte2000 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > Hi besides brute memory work does anyone have any helps with learning
> > Prepositions in first year Greek. They are causing me the most 
> > difficulty.
> > I'm up to 200 words.
> 
> Jimmy,
> 
> I'm not much of a scholar, but I found it very helpful to memorize 
> prepositional phrases rather than prepositions alone.

When looked at as just a word, prepositions are weird.  They have
meaning; generally in Greek it's a spatial sense.  However, they also
mark semantic relations (cf Louw & Nida's lexicon and see which semantic
domains prepositions fall into).  These two sides of prepositions make
learning them hard.

What this ends up meaning--I think--for learning these things is that
you're dealing with both sides of your head.  Memorizing the spatial
sense is a left brain activity and therefore can be attacked
analytically.  However, the semantic relation is much more a pattern
matching activity and therefore is a right brain activity.  The
difficulty is getting the two sides to "talk".  And that depends on your
corpus callosum.

Since Walmart isn't carrying enhanced corpus callosums yet, Patrick's
suggestion above is a good one.  It encourages you to think along
pattern lines--and you should try to focus on the pattern.  That's your
right brain.  To balance that I would recommend reading a few good
grammars on prepositions in an effort to get a good handle on what a
given preposition means.  This is the left brain, analytical side.  I
was helped a lot by Robertson's big tome.  Porter's "idioms of the Greek
New Testament has what I think is a good chapter, too (chapter 9).  And
his diagrams helped me more than Machen's (or was that Dana and
Mantey's) single diagram.

-- 
Mike Sangrey
msangrey at BlueFeltHat.org
Landisburg, Pa.
                        "The first one last wins."
            "A net of highly cohesive details reveals the truth."




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