[B-Greek] How do English-speakers read English? (was: How ..?"

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Aug 23 13:13:06 EDT 2004


At 11:36 AM -0400 8/23/04, N.E.Barry Hofstetter wrote:
>>
>> From: Clayton Javurek <javurek at asu.edu>
>> Date: 2004/08/23 Mon AM 10:51:17 EDT
>> To: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
>> CC: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> Subject: [B-Greek] How did the Greeks Read Greek?
>>
>>
>>
>> Clayton Javurek
>> E-Mail:javurek at asu.edu
>>
>> Dear b-greek listers:
>>
>> Currently I am reading through the book of Hebrews in the NT with the
>> help of the Greek-English Interlinear. The Greek word order in the book
>> of Hebrews is very difficult. How did the Greeks in the first century AD
>> read Greek? By this
>> I mean to ask "Did the Greeks look at each sentence like a scattered
>> puzzle
>> and they first had to identify the parts and then fit them together" or
>> "Did
>> the Greeks, somehow in moving from left to right, were still able to use
>> Greek word order
>> somehow to read Greek"? I just find that the Greek word order in the
>> book
>> of Hebrews appears so crazy that it would seem so difficult even for a
>> Greek native speaker to read the book of Hebrews!
>>
>> Thanks for any insight you can offer.
>
>Clayton:
>
>The difference is that they knew Greek as a language, and that their
>language was not dependent on word order in the same sense as English.
>Could they tell at the beginning of sentence what the the full meaning of
>the the sentence was?  No more than in English, if we stop speaking or
>writing in the middle of the sentence.  However, the way they
>conceptualized the syntax was through not by through macro word order, but
>by listening for the inflections of the various words.  Of course, certain
>micro-word placements, such as nouns normally following prepositions, or
>the attributive/predicate placement of a modifier, did have significance.
>
>If you are at the inter-linear level of Greek, and have not studied it as
>a language, I can understand your confusion.  Word order is in English
>such an important part of communicating meaning that it is difficult for
>us at first to get how inflected languages work...

Yes, this might be rather difficult even with an interlinear! ;-)
-- 

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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