[B-Greek] Ancient Greek-Grammar War?

virgil newkirk virgilsalvage1 at msn.com
Tue Feb 28 13:54:18 EST 2006



Carl said in part:


"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 another post, Carl said in part,

"UNDERSTAND the text for exegesis? How are they to UNDERSTAND the text
for exegesis if they can't follow the thought-flow of the ancient
Greek? Somehow THINKING in Greek must come into play. I'm under no
illusion that students want to write Greek poetry or exchange e-mail
with make-believe Koine Greek friends, but I think that they need to
come to terms with a language that really was and really can be used
by living human beings as an instrument of thought and communication.
Otherwise I doubt they'll ever get beyond reliance upon interlinear
translations or the equivalent, and I really think that's somewhat
like swimming without even getting more than one's feet in the water."


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To Carl's comments I would like to add something from the essay Linda
mentioned in her post of:

"I am indebted and thankful to Hardy Hansen and the late Gerald Quinn for
putting these textbooks together. They have been an invaluable tool to me in
learning proper Greek and opening my understanding to many things in the New
Testament that I would not have seen otherwise.

Before you make up your mind perhaps you would benefit from reading an essay
by Hardy Hansen on the subject of why his teaching of Greek includes so many
of the technicalities of Grammar and the purpose for such."

This essay can be read at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/class/rhetfig.htm

Best Regards,
Linda Harris

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In part from that essay by Hardy Hansen:

"Consider again Caesar's placard. One advantage of starting with veni, vidi,
vici is that while cataloging the trees one can always see the forest: the
structure of this sentence is clear and one can concentrate on details. When
analyzing complex sentences, however, it is easy to forget that the goal of
arranging words "rhetorically" is to shape a sentence which develops clearly
as it is heard or read, not to distract the audience with pointless
ornamentation. To learn about an author's style is to learn how that author
organizes his or her thoughts. Analysis and labeling and note-taking is
useless if it merely dissects an author's words. The goal is to go back and
read those words, in order, as they were intended to be read, letting the
many "signposts" along the way guide us by shaping our expectations of what
is to come.

This point cannot be emphasized enough. Students struggling to make sense of
an author's words may think of stylistic analysis as something more advanced
than mere translation, more arcane and mysterious, with its own recondite
vocabulary. Ironically, they get this impression from the emphasis which
most of us place on the most obvious marks of style--rhetorical figures such
as chiasmus, alliteration, homoioteleuton--as the key to everything: these
strike our ears and eyes as we read, so naturally we begin our analysis by
scanning the text, collecting as many tropes as we can, and labeling them
like specimens found on a nature hike. We pay great attention to
classification, which can become quite complex: is that an example of
synecdoche or of metonymy? Are we dealing with paronomasia or only
parechesis?

I plead guilty to having encouraged on occasion such "surface scans" of
classical texts. The problem with them is that they don't necessarily lead
students to understand how Gorgias or Demosthenes or Isokrates has
structured and expressed his thoughts, the "character" or "cast of thought"
each presents to us. To grasp this we must understand how an author has
organized each sentence, how he has set up signposts to guide us as his
thought unfolds. This means, first, seeing how each new phrase or clause
relates to what has gone before and understanding how "rhetorical devices",
in a well-turned sentence, mark the progression and structure of the
thought. The real rhetoric is in the unfolding of the ideas in the order in
which the author wants us to hear or read them; rhetorical tropes are
markers along the way. To learn about an author's style is to learn to read
that author's words, in order, as they were written--not to disarrange the
words but to hear what the ancient audience heard. "


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And finally hoping that it adds worth to the current discussion and as well,
compliments the above; I refer now to some comments by Gilbert Norwood from
"Pindar": a collection of lectures given at Berkeley in 1943.

Early in his first lecture Gilbert states (writes):

" You derive a quite respectable idea of Homer and Hesiod from a
translation, if wisely and adroitly written. Of Pindar a good deal more
vanishes; and it is significant that here prose versions are actually
better, or less bad, than verse. On the whole, Abraham Cowley was not far
from the truth when he declared that, if a man translated Pindar literally,
readers would think a madman had translated another.

   These lectures have for their sole object the elucidation of Pindar's
poetry: that is, to show it's virtues with whatever force and precision may
prove attainable; and negatively, to remove those obstacles to enjoyment and
illumination that are inherent in his language, in his topics, and in other
differences that separate a modern reader from a Greek of the fifth century
before Christ.

   An exacting enterprise, this, no less that delightful; but it permits us
to ignore much that some might expect from us. Too often, after determining
to appreciate a poem in itself, we drift off upon themes which, though they
have nothing to do with poetry, yet give us a piteous illusion like Ixion's
that we embrace the goddess, though in truth we lavish caresses upon a
phantom of cloud. Our libraries swarm with the unnatural offspring: those
disquisitions upon the poet's "attitude" to this or that; those lists of his
prepositions and spondee's; investigations of the books he may have read and
the women he may have loved. The radiance, the potent vitality of great
writings dazzle our weak sight and fatigue our puny strength; we stumble
away from the shrine to gossip with the sacristan about dates and
measurements. This childish, though not ignoble desire to create some
relation, however trivial, between a poet and ourselves has produced
numberless "studies" and "aspects" which enlighten us no more, on the only
subject about which enlightenment is worth having, than the purchase of
Aeschylus' writing-tablet inspired the prince of Syracuse. "What have these
details to do with poetry?"--that is the test, which, while it condemns much
pretentious research, yet approves much humdrum study. Hearing that Ovid's
'Metamorphoses' contain a narrative parallel to the scene played by Bottom
and his mates, the true student of poetry reads it eagerly--not because he
wishes to discover what books Shakespeare read, not because he means to
write a thesis on "The Teaching of Latin under the Tudors," but only in case
he may light upon something that increases his relish of the passage in 'A
Midsummer Night's Dream.' If a man chooses to read Wordsworth's
correspondence, let him; just as he may, if he chooses, play chess or prune
his roses after he has read the 'Ode on Imitations of Immortality.'
Either he has seen the vision, or he has not. The roses matter nothing, the
rook or the bishop nothing-- and "the man Wordsworth" nothing, even after
the discovery of Annette. She can, perhaps, enable us to see why he wrote
thus or thus; and the reason matters vastly to him. For us it has no value,
our concern being not why he wrote so, but that he wrote so; there stand the
noble lines: upon them and them only must we fling our souls. "     .... 
Gilbert Norwood






Virgil Newkirk
Salt Lake City 



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