[B-Greek] Learning Variant Dialects Concurrently

Jonathan Bailey baileyjn at hotmail.com
Wed Dec 26 13:31:06 EST 2007


Thanks to everyone for their responses. The English to Attic book I had seen was English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language by S.C. Woodhouse. I do not have this book yet, but am considering purchasing it along with some other recommendations from this list, and I did download the PDF file. But with everything that promotes active skills being either specifically oriented to the Attic or not oriented toward the Koine, I was thinking that maybe I should just start picking up some Attic. For the pedagogues on the list, is this recommended? I basically have everything on my Pocket PC that I need to learn the heck out of Biblical Greek, and have made it a goal to get very adept with the Greek bible, and had thought that after I was already well acquainted with the Bible I would eventually get into Homer, Herodotus, and the classical works later. But I am wondering if, since the learning of Biblical Greek seems to have a particular flavor and style oriented toward passive recognition for a limited text corpus, I am feeling some frustration that looks like I might be able to alleviate by learning Attic concurrently with biblical Koine. The good news would be that I would not have to shell out too much money to do so, as I already have David Mastronarde's introductory grammar, which includes English to Greek translation exercises as a starting point, and I already have the Cooper/Krueger two-volume mega-syntax, the little Liddel for Greek-to-English, and my Loeb Classical Library includes some Plato. Really all I would need would be a good English-to-Greek dictionary and maybe some Xenophon, and I would basically be set for a long, tong time.
 
But for those of you who have been teaching and learning Greek for a long time, what are your impressions? Will the differences of syntax and shifts in meaning of vocabulary be more confusing than beneficial? (And for the record, I have been learning Koine off and on for about 12 years and am at a solid intermediate level with Biblical Greek. I've just forgotten and relearned the basics of the language so many times that I have never gotten to the level of skill where I can just pick up a New Testament or the LXX and just read it like a book. That is my goal. But anyway, I do have a strong enough background to be comfortable with distinguishing different styles and dialects. At least according to my own estimation. I was wondering if someone wiser and more experienced than me could possibly shed light about what kind of difficulties I would encounter, if any.
 
Thanks.
 
Jon
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