[B-Greek] Where do verb charts come from? + James Tauber's "Graded Reader"
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Feb 11 07:22:28 EST 2008
On Feb 11, 2008, at 6:21 AM, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> This morning, I found myself wondering where these verb charts in our
> grammar books come from historically.
>
> Did Greeks in the time of Plato or Christ have verb charts (and other
> paradigm charts)?
I don't think so. Perhaps Randall could tell us. I bet that they got
them from Kalos Software (http://www.kalos-software.com/) ;-)
I think that back in those days they learned Greek orally and aurally;
we might learn better that way ourselves. I I have known students to
learn those paradigm charts and still be unable to read Greek.
Moreover, the paradigm charts are generally constructed artificially
and likely to be inaccurate in some detail. For instance, most NT
Koine Grammars include a paradigm chart for the verb LUW and include
an aorist middle for this verb -- but there is no aorist middle of
this verb in NT Koine, so where do they get it? From older Greek. The
only paradigm charts that I have much trust in are those in Smyth, but
those are for classical Attic.
While I really ought to make a separate post of this, I'll piggy back
on this topic, because I think it's really related. James Tauber has a
new blog item, a 9-minute Flash presentation of his recent show at the
Bible Tech:2008 conference. It's entitled "A New Kind of Graded
Reader," and can be accessed at
http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/02/10/a_new_kind_of_graded_reader/
or http://tinyurl.com/yp8uyq
Those with high-speed connections will enjoy it far more than I could
with my dial-up connection from behind mountain walls too far from any
wireless tower.
What's exciting about James' projected method -- which seems to me to
be more than halfway between the traditional learning of vocabulary
and paradigms before reading text and Randall Buth's oral-aural method
-- is that it begins with recurrent phrases from John's gospel, such
as ἀπεκρίθη ᾿Ιησοῦς (APEKRIQH IHSOUS), shows them
imbedded in several Johannine sentences where the remainder of the
verse is in English, then shows these phrases in combination with
other related phrases such as καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ/
αὐτοῖς (KAI LEGEI AUTWi/AUTOIS). Another item is that one needs
to learn Greek at the clause level, not the single-word level: i.e. we
need to learn words in the contexts in which they appear in actual
speech/writing. That's also the approach of the JACT _Reading Greek_
and Oxford _Athenaze_ series of textbooks.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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