[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jun 19 17:14:54 EDT 2007


On Jun 19, 2007, at 3:59 PM, Jonathan Robie wrote:

> I really like this, but it also points indirectly to a difficulty:
>> The very
>> formula, "Naus means a ship," is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a
>> thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or
>> naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or
>> oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.
>
> Ah, but what should we picture for DE, hOTI, hOU hEINEKEN (no, please
> don't picture a Dutch beer!), or for various grammatical features?

I have no objection to Heineken beer, but I'd prefer Löwenbräu dunkeles.

> It's pretty easy for me to think in a foreign language with respect to
> concrete nouns and verbs. It's much harder to do so with respect to  
> all
> these subtle things that constitute the greatest real differences  
> among
> languages. And these are harder to convey with some of the language
> experience approaches. What pictures would RosettaStone use to convey
> the meaning of MEN ... DE?

No, you don't use pictures; but you DO learn to think in terms of the  
contrasts or parallelisms that are highlighted by MEN and DE -- and  
you try to move, as soon as possible, beyond thinking in terms of "on  
the one hand ... " and "on the other ..." You become familiar with  
recurrent locutions such as LOGWi MEN ... ERGWi DE ... or POLLA MEN  
KATHGGEILATO, OLIGA DE APEDEIXEN. You become used to the way these  
things work by seeing them repeatedly in use, and you don't try to  
picture them.

> At my current level of Greek, it's easy to stop thinking of nouns and
> verbs in English, but all these rich little words, tense and  
> aspect, and
> the like really matter, and I find that I often use English or German
> equivalents as a reminder of their meaning.

Well, OUN and GAR may take a little longer. I think I may have told  
the story of a U. of Chicago professor who was writing a treatise on  
GAR and had a young woman assisting him with gathering examples from  
hither and yon in the far-flung archives of ancient Greek literature.  
Over the course of much time she amassed thousands of index cards  
referencing uses of GAR (that's the way the did it in those days  
before computers) and, as might not be altogether unexpected, the  
young lady soon acquired the nickname of Dr. X's "GAR GOYLE." While  
the story may sound highly improbable, I've been told that it's  
absolutely true.

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




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