[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
Iver Larsen
iver_larsen at sil.org
Wed Jun 20 10:52:01 EDT 2007
People can learn foreign languages to various degrees of fluency by various methods.
1. You can be born into a community that speaks the language. In that case you have limited use for
grammar and discourse studies. You know the grammar without knowing why you know it. But then, I
have seen examples of people mistranslating from a language they know well into their mothertongue,
precisely because they were not consciously aware of the discourse features of their own language.
2. You can spend much time hearing, speaking, reading and writing the language. This is what Randall
Buth and others advocate in order to obtain a high degree of fluency.
3. You can spend much time reading the language, some time writing it, but little time hearing and
speaking it.
4. You may not be able to do any of the above, but can then benefit from a good knowledge of the
grammar of the language, including discourse features.
I think many of us would like to have been able to learn Greek through option 1, 2 or 3 in that
order of preference, but for various reasons may have to live with some of 3 and some of 4. I
learned English through method 2, and I still need a dictionary much more often than I need for the
language I learned through method 1. Some of the NT authors learned Greek though method 1, others
through method 2, but none through 3 or 4.
Iver Larsen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
To: "Iver Larsen" <iver_larsen at sil.org>
Cc: "B-Greek B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
> This has gotten rather far afield, it seems to me, from what was originally being highlighted--
> the question whether one can learn to read Greek without attempting
> to convert the Greek into one's native language -- and whether one can think in ancient Greek.
> Inasmuch as ancient Greeks seem to have done it, I would think that there's a positive answer to
> be given to that question. I think that over the past several centuries there have been many who
> were trained in the schools even as C.S. Lewis describes, who have read oodles of ancient Greek
> texts and have long since ceased to think about how those texts might be Englished. Dictionaries
> are by no means useless because confrontation with words never before seen must necessarily occur
> repeatedly -- but I think that the usage of the particles is something that one picks up in the
> course of voluminous reading, not through the latest disclosures of discourse analysis. Those
> disclosures may help, but after-the-fact analysis of a text by a trained linguist, I'm inclined
> to think, is not quite like a biologist's account of how an acorn turns into an oak tree. And
> the oak tree does it so effortlessly (or so it seems to us, if we're around long enough to watch
> it grow).
>
> Carl W. Conrad
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