[B-Greek] Greek for English students

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun May 9 20:20:56 EDT 2004


At 6:53 AM -0700 5/9/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>I wonder if those who have taught Greek (Attic or
>Koine) would mind sharing with me what you have found
>to be the most difficult issues of Greek
>semantics/nuances that English students struggle the
>most with? Perhaps the top 2 or 3 grammatical issues
>that English students have a difficult time grasping.

One fundamental item that regularly confounds students of Greek is the
variety of ways that participles can function in Greek; another item that
I've found troubles students very much is various sorts of Indirect
discourse, whether with nominative or accusative subject and infinitive or
with hOTI or introduced by an interrogative (Indirect question--something
similar to but not quite the same as Indirect discourse). Conditional
constructions also seem to to be difficult to master. All of these are
problematic to the English-speaking student particularly if one expects the
Greek constructions to have exact parallels in English syntactic
constructions. I think most fundamentally that the expectation of parallels
in Greek and English ways of expressing ideas is at the heart of these and
other difficulties in coming to understand the way the native Greek-speaker
or Greek-writer thinks in Greek. Another way of saying the same thing is
that the language-learner (and this is true not only of one learning Greek
but of one learning any new language) doesn't realize that there's a
difference between the structures employed to express narrative or
argumentative content and the content itself: that is to say, the ideas or
sequence of events related is confused with the grammatical structures
employed to represent the ideas or sequence of events.

One of the exercises I insisted my students in Greek or Latin who were
translating should do is a "double" translation: first carry over the
content of the Greek or Latin text into English that is intelligible but
that reproduces as nearly as possible the structure of the Greek or Latin
text, then afterwards, think carefully through what it is exactly--without
adding or dropping anything, if possible--that the Greek or Latin text is
saying, and endeavor to put that into English in the manner that one would
express that understanding of the Greek or Latin text in the best natural
and idiomatic English formulation one can muster. One can often tell from a
translation that is strictly literal that the translator has understood
words but hasn't understood much at all of what the original text is
actually communicating.
-- 

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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