[B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 29 09:13:41 EDT 2007


While you certainly have a point, I think there are certain factors which constrain one to follow a more traditional approach to learning Greek through the medium of learning the grammar.  It would hardly do to simply throw a Greek text at someone and say, "Here, read this."  They would need to approach it as some form of cryptogram (which some seem to do in any case).  The only method even approaching this is the immersion technique -- something like Randall Buth's approach.  Most of us, however, aren't able to immerse ourselves in the language in such a fashion since the opportunity to do so is not practically available.  It would only be practical if such an opportunity were available on a more local level.  In any case, learning a second language as an adult is not quite the same as learning a language (or languages) by osmosis as a child.  We might nevertheless be able to do so if we were to be thrown into the middle of Athens sometime between 300 BC and 100 AD.  Time
 machine, anyone?
 
george
gfsomsel
_________



----- Original Message ----
From: John Sanders <jfs at jfsanders.com>
To: jtauber at jtauber.com
Cc: B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 8:42:38 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.


The problem is not the capacity of an individual to learn both, but the 
efficiency of learning the language.  It appears that linguists are 
attempting to piggy-back on the teaching of Greek by also teaching 
linguistics, two for one with no added effort.  One wonders then why 
Universities do not teach one course instructing calculus, physics and 
chemistry, easing the work load of science students; or one course for 
political science, social science, world history and world geography.  It is 
not the inability of an individual to learn all these different subjects, 
that they can do, but a "unified field theory" type couse is more 
efficienctly taught after one has acquired the rudiments of each basic 
subject.

In addition, although both linguisitics and language learning have a common 
material to work with, they each have different agenda.  Language learning 
is developing a skill in commerce with other human beings.   It is an 
amazing thrill to get into a taxi cab and tell the cabby where you intend to 
go and how to get there in a different language than your own native tongue, 
and he (or she) understands and goes there and even starts having a 
conversation with you, talking about traffic, or the weather, or even 
politics or religion, whichever is their bent.  Or, for Koine Greek, to open 
the GNT and start reading a passage and actually comprehending it withour 
resorting to English (or whatever your own native tongue is).

A kind individual sent the following from the preface from Funk's grammar:

". . . It is the language itself and not a grammar about that language that 
the student who wishes to learn to read Greek needs to confront. For that 
reason, the grammar itself is suppressed wherever possible. And, if modern 
linguistics is correct in its fundamental affirmations, the one needful 
thing in learning a new language is familiarity with its grammatical 
structure. Such familiarity need not be explicit; the learner needs to 
"know" the structure and structure signals only in the sense that he is 
able, immediately and without deliberation, to respond to them.". . .   
traditional grammar might be something apart from the ability to read Greek, 
in fact, might be an impediment to such ability."

My wife has started to study Chinese herself.  She actually keeps a diary in 
Chinese.  How many students attempt to keep a diary in Greek, or write their 
shopping lists in Greek, or write doggerel (spelling?) to a boyfriend or 
girlfriend.  Instead, I suspect they are putting out meaningless jibberish 
about overlapping domains of imperfectives with perfectives while the 
aktionsart of the stative is modifying the lexeme of the following 
perfective.

I have not seen the impact of linguistics on language instruction in 
Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese as I have seen it in Biblical Greek.  I 
conjecture it all began with Erasmus.  When he attempted to reconstruct a 
"correct pronunciation" of Greek for the classical period, he set in motion 
a consequence not predictable at the time (or so I think).  What he did was 
remove Greek (and Latin) from a language spoken by other human beings to one 
that could be "intellectualized".  In other words, it is not related to 
actual human commerce, but one that can be treated as if it were caballa (or 
kaballa, spelling?) and bring in all this gnostic reasoning and get to the 
real meat behind the GNT (all without having to have real human 
communication restraining our thinking).

At least that is how it looks to me.

John Sanders
Suzhou, China


>From: James Tauber <jtauber at jtauber.com>
>To: John Sanders <jfs at jfsanders.com>
>CC: B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.
>Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:11:48 +0800
>
>
>On 28/03/2007, at 1:33 PM, John Sanders wrote:
>>In other words, I think you can sit down and read the GNT in Greek  
>>without
>>knowing any of this linguistic theory.
>
>Yes, but if you truly believe in a distinction between "talking a  
>language" and "talking about a language" then you'd have to agree  that you 
>can't adequately talk *about* Greek without knowing the  metalanguage.
>
>In other words, while I agree that being able to talk about a  language 
>doesn't mean you can talk the language, the converse is also  true: just 
>because you can talk the language doesn't mean you are  able to talk about 
>it in a clear way.
>
>>I think each of you need to make a decision about why you are  learning 
>>Koine
>>Greek, do you want to learn to talk about the Greek, or do you want  to 
>>"talk
>>the Greek".
>
>It's an important distinction (albeit hardly a new one). But anyone  who 
>has studied linguistics is proof that you can learn both. You  just learn 
>them differently.
>
>James
>--
>James Tauber              http://jtauber.com/
>journeyman of some   http://jtauber.com/blog/
>

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