[B-Greek] studying Homeric Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Aug 14 22:02:39 EDT 2004
At 8:34 PM -0500 8/14/04, Steven Lo Vullo wrote:
>On Aug 14, 2004, at 6:26 PM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> I come late to a thread on which several have made useful comments
>> already.
>> For my part, I don't think that you really need to start from scratch,
>> Steven, with Homeric Greek. You need to become familiar with
>> distinctive
>> case-endings e.g., (genitives in -OIO, -AO, -EW, dative plurals in
>> -AISI,
>> -OISI, -ESSI, etc., distintive dual forms, and verbal inflections such
>> as
>> the varied infinitives in -EN, EMEN, EMENAI, etc. Then there are
>> distinctive Homeric usages such as subjunctive as simple future tense,
>> etc.
>> I did Homer as a sophomore at Tulane in 1953 after a year of NT Koine;
>> we
>> used a book first published in 1903 and still in print, Allen Rogers
>> Benner's _Selections from Homer's Iliad_, which includes a 50-page
>> "short
>> Homeric grammar" and a very good vocabulary and fine notes--there's
>> every
>> good reason why it's still in print. I think now that I would rather
>> have
>> begun with the Odyssey, but that may ultimately be a matter of taste
>> (John
>> Finley at Harvard used to cite with approval the old notion that the
>> Iliad
>> is a young man's poem and the Odyssey an old man's poem; in my older
>> years
>> I prefer the Odyssey but I love Homer and applaud anyone's effort to
>> read
>> those great epics. I don't know if anyone's mentioned that Autenrieth's
>> Homeric Dictionary is on-line at Perseus now too--it's also still in
>> print
>> after more than a century both as a German work and in English
>> translation.--a very helpful resource. All I can say, then Steven, is
>> GO TO
>> IT! Enjoy!
>
>Thanks, Carl. Interestingly enough, while looking for other materials
>on Homer in a closet full of books I had set aside because I didn't
>have room for them, I came across the book by Benner. I say
>"interestingly enough" because I didn't know I had it! Makes me want to
>do a more thorough inventory to see what other gems I don't know I
>have! Someone else also recommended this book off-list, so I think I
>will forgo the full beginning grammar by Pharr for now and use Benner's
>book. The section on grammar looks adequate for getting the basics and
>the notes and vocabulary look very helpful. It looks like it will get
>me into the actual reading of Homer pretty quickly, which is what I
>want. I notice that even the vocabulary entries have references to the
>notes on the text, something I haven't seen before.
>
>I have a hard copy of Autenrieth's dictionary. It, along with Pharr's
>grammar and the vocabularies by Owen and Goodspeed, is published by the
>University of Oklahoma Press. Looks like they are making a good effort
>at keeping the reading of Homer alive. I can't help thinking that it
>seems a little odd that the Okies are helping to sustain high culture.
>:-)
>
>What do you think about Pharr's contention that everyone should start
>with Homer? He devotes almost 16 pages of his grammar to arguments for
>doing so. Though it is too late for me, I wonder if others could
>benefit from this approach.
I think there's something to be said for it IF one intends to read through
any significant amount of Greek literature from the whole range of
antiquity; I had a colleague who did, in fact, teach Homeric Greek to
beginners using Pharr when he did the Beginning Greek class at WU. When I
taught it, I used the JACT "Reading Greek" program which was programmed to
prepare students to go in any direction in the follow-up course, whether it
be Homeric, Classical Attic prose or verse, or NT. I think one can make the
transition from later to earlier stages of Greek (I did it myself) but I
don't know that I'd urge one to begin with Homeric Greek unless one DOES
plan to read a lot from the entire Greek literary corpus.
--
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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