[B-Greek] "Crossing the Rubicon" (learning Greek NOT in English)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jun 20 14:42:52 EDT 2007
On Jun 20, 2007, at 10:52 AM, Iver Larsen wrote:
> 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.
And that's what I'd recommend myself, although it is obviously not
the way I learned.
> 3. You can spend much time reading the language, some time writing
> it, but little time hearing and
> speaking it.
This is not false, but its force is tempered by the fact that all
ancient literature was meant to be READ ALOUD and LISTENED TO, not
read silently. This means that reading with an ear cocked to what one
hears as the cadences of the language -- reading with a visual EAR,
not just an EYE, is very useful -- and I think that's true no matter
what pronunciation one uses. I've been trying to learn to read using
Randall's suggested pronunciation of 1st-2nd c. Koine, with some
success. It's not the pronunciation I learned originally more than 50
years ago, but I think it's worth the effort.
> 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.
Yes, that's what we must mostly rely upon. I guess it's the best we
can generally do. But I think we do well to exercise a bit of
skepticism with regard to the extent of the validity of our analytic
approaches to ancient Greek.
> 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.
While admittedly this is a subjective impression, I have the notion
that just a few of the NT authors did NOT have a very good idiomatic
command of the Greek of their era.
> ----- 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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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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