[B-Greek] Extracts from Funk's Grammar Intro
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Jan 26 16:15:19 EST 2004
It was a little over a week ago that Ken Litwak posted a note (Sat, 17 Jan
2004 22:09:49 -0800 (PST); "[B-Greek] Stanely Porter on Greek grammars")
about Stanley Porter's more-or-less blanket condemnation of most current
textbooks of Greek grammar as hopelessly out-of-date (with the exception of
"Moulton's Prolegomena and Young'sintermediate grammar." My immediate
response was that these remarks could not be applied to Funk's
_Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek_, a textbook that
really sets the teaching and learning of ancient Greek grammar on a new
plane altogether--more's the pity that the book is out of print.
Now I've prepared an extract from the introductory material of Funk's
textbook which I describe thus in my link to this PDF file: " ... an
extract from Robert W. Funk's 3-volume textbook of Koine greek, first
published in 1973 and long out of print. The materials here extracted set
forth the rationale of Funk's method and sketch the linguistic framework on
which the textbook and teaching program are organized. I have long thought
that these are the principles that ought to govern the teaching and
learning of ancient Greek at any level, whether Homeric, Classical Attic,
or Koine."
I've extracted this material and decided to make it public until such time
as a copyrighted reprint or new edition of Funk's textbook is made
available because I think the principles set forth in it for teaching and
learning Greek should be of value to anyone concerned with the pedagogy of
ancient Greek. As a come-in, I'll cite segments of a few paragraphs from
pages xxv-xxvi of the "Personal Word to the Teacher and Student":
" ... Although in almost daily touch with some Greek text for
twenty-five years, I find that each time I teach beginning Greek from a
traditional grammar, it is necessary for me to recommit portions of that
grammar to memory. There seems to be little correlation between my ability
to read and understand a Greek text and the ability, say, to reproduce
nominal and verbal paradigms by heart. I was puzzled by this discrepancy in
myself, and by the fact that students who appeared to be able to handle a
Greek text with facility often did poorly on examinations over Greek
"grammar." The reverse condition has also frequently caught my attention:
students who appear to know the "grammar" are not always able to read a
Greek text with correlative ease. In the case of the former, the difficulty
may have been that the students merely lacked the technical language with
which to make their functional knowledge explicit. Yet I took it to be the
case that more often than not those same students aspired to a working
knowledge of the language and not to a grammarian's portfolio. In the case
of the latter, knowledge of the "grammar" did not appear to guarantee
knowledge of the language. It then occurred to me that traditional grammar
might be something apart from the ability to read Greek, in fact, might be
an impediment to such ability.
"It was with some reluctance that I undertook to reassess the
status of traditional Greek grammar. A modest acquaintance with modern
linguistics was enough to convince me that a revolution had taken place in
the study and learning of language no less than in the study and knowledge
of mathematics
"I have endeavored to indicate the implications of linguistics for
the study of Greek in the Introduction (§§001-020). There the reader will
find some of the basic insights afforded by linguistics as I see them in
relation to Greek. ... "
The URL is http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/FunkGramIntro.pdf
--
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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