[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)






More information about the B-Greek mailing list