[B-Greek] Learning Variant Dialects Concurrently

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Dec 26 13:49:08 EST 2007



 
On Wednesday, December 26, 2007, at 01:31PM, "Jonathan Bailey" <baileyjn at hotmail.com> wrote:
>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? 

Yes, indeed! If you ever want to read even literary texts relevant to the NT, like Josephus and Philo and Epictetus, you're better off with competence in Attic, and it helps with the second-century and later patristic writers. And yes, everyone who studies Greek at all should read at least Plato's Apology of Socrates at some point.

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.

You have the Cooper/Krueger! I wish I had it. Mastronarde is certainly very good as a traditional text, but I bet you would whip right through the earlier sections of either the JACT "Reading Greek" textbook that I once used for teaching or the somewhat slower-paced "Athenaze" -- these are based upon reading the Greek text rather than the traditional progressive absorption of snippets of grammar and translation of sentences (one should be reading paragraphs or dialogue, preferably, rather than sentences, which in too many textbooks are made up and unidiomatic.

>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.

You really ought to think of even Hellenistic Greek as having at least two levels -- a literary level based upon writing by school-taught writers that involves much more continued usage of Attic forms and syntax, and a common level that is more fluid, inconsistent, often influenced by idioms deriving from non-native Greek usage, etc. But moving back and forth from one Hellenistic level to another is a far cry from moving to Homeric Greek or to the heavily-Aeolic texts of Sappho and Alcaeus or literary Doric texts of Pindar and Theocritus. It is not the big problem that some might make it out to be.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)



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