[B-Greek] Mi verbs, some pedagogy and perspective
yancywsmith
yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
Sat Aug 4 13:00:25 EDT 2007
I heartily agree with your approach and wish I had been one of your
students! The most irregular parts of the language seem to be the
most used. So teaching regularities as a foundation only makes sense
for teacher. But it is a perverse logic that conspires to undermine
the usually stated objectives of teaching a language. Irregularities,
the ones that are regularly used in concrete circumstance like body
mapping and "at hand" actions and interactions is the foundation of
language learning in normal 2nd language acquisition.
Yancy Smith
yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
5636 Wedgworth Rd.
Fort Worth, TX 76133
817-361-7565
On Aug 4, 2007, at 8:47 AM, Randall Buth wrote:
> Yancy EGRAPSE
>> My first year Greek teacher introduced -mi verbs near the beginning
> of first semester, right after introducing prepositions. So we got
> compound verbs, "-mi" verbs and "contraction" right off the bat. I
> can't really say that I learned -mi verbs with that lesson. Perhpas
> the strength of introducing them early is the power unleashed in
> repetition. However, once "introduced" you need to supplement every
> verb lesson with the -mi paradigm verbs if you really want to be
> helpful. Throwing them in at the last like Mounce--"Oh, By the way,
> there are these things called -mi verbs. They are squirly little
> things that ocurr on every page of the New Testament, even though
> there are so few of them."--is like quite faint. My Question would be,
> do they ocur enough in his excercises for the extra early lesson and
> lesson supplements to begin to take?
> Yancy Smith
>
> Sounds like a promising beginning.
>
> a brief anecdote:
> the first verb that our students heard this summer at the SXOLH was
> ANASTHQI / ANASTHTE
> followed by, you might partially guess,
> KAQOU / KAQISATE
> (stand up, s/p, sit down s/p)
>
> (why KAQOU / KAQISATE, mixing aspects and stems? We wanted to be
> inconsistent? We just think that's the closest to the way people used
> the verbs in the first century.)
> As we looked at where our students were during the last couple of
> weeks of the SXOLH we realized that most of the verbs that we were
> using were either -MI verbs or at least highly irregular.
>
> You want to ask how someone is doing?
> a: XAIRE, ERRWSAI?
> b: NAI, ERRWMAI, EUXARISTW
> More -MI verbs right at the beginning, and some on the list might not
> even be able to parse them or find them in a dictionary without help.
> But vital words, without which one cannot read the most basic papyri,
> words and forms known by the most semi-of-literate ancients. The most
> necessary item for a beginning is a comprehensible context. First
> words should be used in contexts where students can guess correctly
> (or closely) to what a word means.
>
> A basic principle of SLA (second language acquistion) is to use
> material that coheres around real communication/learning needs. Greek
> is incredibly rich in irregular morphology, and any linguist knows
> that irregular morphology needs to be very commonplace in language use
> in order to be maintained within the language and language community.
> Otherwise the language community will 'regularize' the forms,
> something that was happening to Greek throughout the Hellenistic/Roman
> period with many a MI verb. There is nothing like a large dose of body
> part nouns and corresponding verbal collocations for getting things
> going. NAI, it's mostly "irregular", but correct. Just where any kid
> would have begun, though without being told that it was irregular.
>
> A student or teacher cannot think or talk without MI verbs, SUNIHS?
> KATALAMBANEIS?
>
> A glimmer of hope for normalcy remains, though, for some regular
> verbs. Of the three most common verbs in use in class, I would guess
> them to be EINAI, POIHSAI, SXEIN, and at least SXEIN has a 'regular'
> present indicative and POIHSAI has regular endings on aorists.
>
> ERRWSQE
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
> שלום לכם וברכות
> ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> ---
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