[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
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek


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/




More information about the B-Greek mailing list