[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
Jonathan Robie
jwrobie at mindspring.com
Tue Jun 19 20:50:59 EDT 2007
Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
> On Jun 19, 2007, at 3:59 PM, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>
>> Ah, but what should we picture for DE, hOTI, hOU hEINEKEN (no, please
>> don't picture a Dutch beer!), or for various grammatical features?
>> 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.
Yes, I think that's easier with MEN ... DE than with DE alone. Naus and
ship refer to the same thing, but what does DE refer to? Nothing that an
English speaker has any experience with ....
>> 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.
I think you are implying that the best I can do, when faced with the use
of particles, is to gather lots of illustrative examples. Even with lots
of examples in front of my face, it takes real time to begin to grasp
what these examples are telling me ....
Jonathan
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