[B-Greek] Lining Out a Greek Text

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Fri May 25 17:33:35 EDT 2007


>
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Lining Out a Greek Text
>
> Oops, I fogot that our list software strips attachments.
>
> I posted the attachment here:
>
> http://ibiblio.org/koine/greek/liningout/liningout.html
>
> Jonathan
>

shalom Yonatan,

Your project is sound and I appreciate what you are doing. You might be
encouraged to know that I do something similar whenever I record material.
(As soon as I send this off I need to record some  Epiktetou paragraphs
about visiting bathhouses, BALANEIA in Greek. We have a nicely preserved
BALANEION in BetShean [SKUQOPOLIS]. The first thing I did was 'clause'
these out into short sense units on different lines.)

In addition, we do this in both Hebrew and Greek when presenting material to
students in our ulpan. We happen to call it "clausing" but the results and
motivations are similar and overlapping to what you describe. It is very
simple and it definitely helps a student follow a text in the original
langauge. (See Buth, Selected Readings with 500 Friends, BLC)

As your notes and discussion show, the line length is arbitrary and reflects
a function of 'sense' with natural breathing. Length also changes as
students reach different levels. At the base is what might consider a breath
sequence, I find that 3 to 6 seconds is a typical upper end, and these can
be broken down into pieces as short as under 1 second. Greek 'clausings'
tend to be a tad longer than Hebrew ones, probably because of the long
syllable structures caused by the grammatical concord systems EN TH
ELLHNIKHi.

Bottom line is that I recommend short 'sense lines' for student readings.

ερρωσο ERRWSO

Randall Buth


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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