[B-Greek] Ancient Greek-Grammar war?
Carl W.Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Feb 27 16:10:56 EST 2006
Grammar in Teaching and Learning Ancient Greek
Having read the Mulroy paper and having shared many of his
experiences and frustrations, I’ll add my own two bits, for what it’s
worth. I have certainly felt the tug-of-war of opposing feelings
about the role of grammar instruction as part of language teaching
and learning, especially with respect to ancient Greek.
I think it’s the rare individual who can acquire competence in
ancient Greek through self-teaching and textbook. Most people
acquire real competence with the right “chemical” mix of teacher,
textbook and self-application with patient industry. A really good
student can overcome bad teaching and bad textbook, but the
methodology matters considerably whether one is self-taught or learns
in a classroom. I started Greek with an utterly wretched textbook
based on Mark’s gospel in the first year, then moved on to working
through Benner’s Iliad in the second year and Aristotle and Sophocles
in the third — a very challenging and hardly-to-be recommended
sequence for anyone, but somehow I learned. I was successful largely
because I had a passion for the language and I had, in those earliest
years, teachers who challenged me by raising questions and by
answering my questions or showing me where and how to find the
answers for myself.
When I came to teach Greek in a classroom on my own, I quickly became
aware of the problematic nature of grammatical knowledge both as
something necessary and as something having curiously little
connection with ability to read Greek successfully. I’ve seen too
many students who knew the paradigms and the rules but couldn’t read
sequential Greek textual material, and I’ve also seen some who could
read Greek texts pretty well but weren’t very good at grammatical
analysis.
Why is that? I think that two not-unrelated factors are at work:
(1) Students who have learned by the traditional textbooks and
pedagogy know the paradigms and the rules of grammar and have learned
the vocabulary, but they attack the Greek text as a problem to be
analyzed, as a step-by-step hunt for the subject and the verb and the
modifiers and then a synthesis of the pieces rather than as an
integrated whole: they readily discern the Greek trees by genus and
species, but they are lost in the forest of Greek discourse.
(2) Another metaphor I’ve met with frequently of late is that these
students view a Greek text as a sequence of cryptograms to be
deciphered: for them, reading Greek is a process of DECODING an
alien script — and that involves transcribing an alien script into an
intelligible script. Generally that means TRANSLATING the Greek text
into the student’s native language, more or less item-by-item. The
false assumption here is that UNDERSTANDING a Greek text is
fundamentally a matter of producing a corresponding text in one’s
native language such that each item in the Greek text has its
corresponding term in one’s native language. But in fact, nothing
could be much farther from the truth; TRANSLATING is by no means the
same as UNDERSTANDING the Greek original text. Accurate translation
does presuppose the understanding of the original text, but that text
must first be understood on its own terms: unless one can grasp the
thought of the writer/speaker in its own format, think that thought
as the writer/speaker thought it and as the original reader/listener
read/heard it in the original Greek, one will not be able to re-
express the sense in the intelligible idiom of one’s own native
language. Reading Greek is not a matter of decoding a script and it
is not a matter of converting the elements of a formula into another
script; rather, it is a matter of THINKING in Greek.
In the course of my own teaching of Greek I tried several different
textbooks. I came to feel more and more that traditional instruction
focused on learning rules and vocabulary lists and paradigms and then
TRANSLATING sentences from Greek to English and English to Greek
(sentences all too often composed by textbook-authors in quite
unidiomatic Greek and English) would work only with the exceptional
students who actually went beyond those procedures and internalized
the language in a manner not altogether different from the way
children learn their native tongue. I knew that I myself had acquired
as much fluency as I had in Greek and Latin through reading long
sequential texts of good (and some less good) ancient authors. I felt
that what was needed was a textbook that moved as soon as possible
into sequential discourse in the Greek or Latin. Of the traditional
type of textbooks the best I ever found for classical Attic was
Hansen and Quinn (the sentences were written with authentic
understanding of both Greek and English idiom). But I was really
looking for something that focused on getting the student to THINK IN
GREEK.
The first time I felt excited about a new textbook was with Carl
Ruck's _Ancient Greek: A New Approach_ Although it used vocabulary
lists for basic equivalences and used traditional grammatical
concepts where necessary, it concentrated on grasping and
manipulating phrases as units and understanding them as Greek rather
than translating them into English. It also moved quickly into
sequential Greek texts for reading and instead of challenging
students to translate it posed questions in Greek about the Greek
content and asked for Greek answers about that content. I really
thought that was the best approach but I don't think the textbook
went far enough. Of course, making such a textbook work really puts
the teacher's skills and capacities to the test, because teaching and
learning Greek is not something that can ever be wholly dependent
upon the textbook except with the very exceptional student who is
very intuitive; of course, most, nearly all of the work of learning a
language is done by the student; the teacher functions primarily to
focus the student's skills and to answer the questions that good
students will ask in abundance.
I later discovered and for the rest of my teaching career I used the
JACT “Reading Greek” course, delighted to have a textbook that begins
from the outset with sequential readings: dialogue and simple
narrative all in good, solid idiomatic Attic and moving quickly into
barely altered original texts from Aristophanes and then from
Demosthenes and Plato and Herodotus and the Odyssey, all in the train
of a single course. Like the Ruck text, Reading Greek had exercises
in manipulating phrases and understanding words in contexts, and the
testing was in terms of sharply re-paraphrased narratives based upon
the readings of the preceding lesson. The entire focus of the course
was upon reading skills. Grammar was introduced as necessary in order
to explain the constructions introduced in the reading passages of
the new lesson, but it was rather minimal and was in fact a sort of
metalanguage used when necessary to TALK about the language and how
it works AFTER experiencing through confrontation with the text the
language in pragmatic application.
I confess that in the course of my teaching from the JACT Reading
Greek I found it necessary to construct my own supplementary
grammatical materials to distribute to my classes to assist them to
use traditional grammars to answer their questions and to be able to
talk about how the language works in courses with other instructors
to which they would move on from my Beginning Greek course. I always
had mixed feelings about this grammar: that it is a necessary evil:
both necessary and an evil. What one needs the grammar for is
analysis of HOW a Greek text works; one doesn’t really need it in
order to learn to read or speak the language. The grammar is a
metalanguage to be used to discuss how the language works. Frankly, I
have come to think that Randall Buth is right in thinking that,
insofar as this metalanguage of grammar is necessary, it really would
be better to use Greek for the grammatical metalanguage if the
language one is trying to learn is Greek.
Why? One reason for it is that the grammar that we use most to talk
about Biblical Greek is a metalanguage that aims at facilitating
translation into English or some other target language. The
categories in BDF or Smyth, all the more those of Wallace’s GGBB, are
phrased in terms of how to convert the Greek construction into an
idiomatic English equivalent construction RATHER than how to
understand the Greek construction in its own terms. How can that be
improved upon? Probably the grammar to be used for studying Biblical
Greek should be written in a Greek that is as close to Biblical Greek
as possible even if vocabulary must be added to accommodate concepts
about the language not adequately dealt with in the grammar of the
Hellenistic schools.
As for translation, we need to realize that translation is ultimately
a matter of compositional skills in one's native language. But that's
also true about the Greek: one needs to compose Greek; orally and in
conversation, if possible, but writing Greek helps immensely. One of
the better features of the graduate curriculum I was exposed to at
Harvard was (a) an immense reading list that could only be attacked
by reading long consecutive texts at one sitting, and (b) required
two-year courses in Greek and Latin composition, converting such
things as texts from Nabokov's Lolita into the Greek of Plato’s
Symposium and NY Times editorials into the Greek of Thucydides’
political speeches. However unthinkable that may seem, it is not at
all impossible. Ultimately the goal of assimilating ancient Greek
requires learning to think, to speak, and to write in the fashion of
ancient Greek thinkers, speakers, and writers.
On Feb 25, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Randall Buth wrote:
>> I found another very interesting article by a UWM professor David
>> Mulroy in
>> the Classics
>> and how the war on grammar is effecting his field to the point of
>> extinction.
>> This can be read at http://www.ateg.org/monographs/mulroy.php
>>
>> Regards,
>> Linda Harris
>
> Another perspective. (davar aHer)
> I profoundly agree and strongly disagree with the perspecitve of that
> article. It is very sad that students will not be learning Greek. But
> the culprit is not English. The culprit is Greek teaching itself.
> Notice the oxymoron here. Mulroy complains that students cannot learn
> Greek without knowing English grammar metalanguage (last term mine).
> since when did Plato or Luke need to know English grammar terms in
> order to learn Greek? Did Isaiah or Hillel need English in order to
> learn Hebrew?
> What students need to learn any language is a good, efficient course
> in that language.
>
> How does one tell a good course from a bad one? If 90% of class time
> is spent in the language being learned, then the course is probably a
> good one, and students will probably make efficient progress. If only
> 10% of the language in class is the language being learned, but 90% is
> English talking about the languag, then those students will probably
> never internalize and learn that language. At least, not in the way
> that human languages are to be learned and used.
> I sympathize with Professor Mulroy, but I think he is complaining
> about a deadend alley instead of walking down tree-lined street. Well,
> that's how I see it. Sadly, I had to write this in English. I see that
> as a much bigger trajedy than students who don't know what an "English
> gerund" is. (Let the English teachers complain about English gerunds!
> DEI HMAS DEIKNUNAI TOIS MAQHTAIS THN GLWSSAN EN XRHSEI KAI EN
> PRAGMASI. XAIRETE, OUPW TO TELOS.)
> Anyway, the "war" can be won by using Greek.
> ERRWSQE
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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