[B-Greek] relative value of re-reading the Greek NT versus following the advice of Conrad and Buth

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Mar 7 08:56:52 EST 2008


On Mar 3, 2008, at 8:30 AM, Randall Buth wrote:

> I suppose that it would be fitting to respond to a thread with my  
> name in it.
> John Sanders recent post is delightful and provides a nice jumping off
> point. Let me add that I think that Carl and I agree that reading  
> massively
> outside the NT is a must. I suppose my 'cHiddush' is to insist on  
> speaking
> the language. and I think that Carl would agree with me, at least
> in an idealistic setting.

Amen. And I would have let it go at that, but for the fact that a  
happy chance this morning brought to my attention the transcript of a  
lecture on Latin (and Greek) pedagogy (http://www.bu.edu/mahoa/hale_art.html 
) about 121 years ago by a Cornell University Professor of Latin,  
William Gardner Hale. The following extract gets to the core of the  
problem; I would substitute "Greek" for "Latin" and "man or woman" for  
"boy":

======
...  The boy who comes to college with a thinking habit is capable of  
learning to read Latin (for I must now confine myself to that topic,  
though the whole substance of what I have to say applies with equal  
force to the teaching of Greek) with ease and speed;  the boy who  
comes without the habit has faults that a college course can rarely  
cure.  That the boy should be taught to think before he comes to  
college is, then, from the point of view of the study of Latin, the  
one indispensable thing.  That it is so from every other point of view  
as well, makes our case so much the stronger.

But one thing more is also indispensable sooner or later for a high  
success (and there is in Latin but one success), namely, that the  
method which the boy is taught to use in his thinking be the right  
one, – the result of the most careful observation of the practical  
difficulties to be overcome, and the most careful study of the best  
ways of overcoming them.

As we group these difficulties, placing them in the order in which  
they would be felt by a beginner, we find them to be: –
1.  The vocabulary.
2.  The system of inflections.
3.  The elaborate use of this system of inflections to express  
meaning, in place of our simpler modern methods of using prepositions,  
auxiliaries, and the like:  or, in a single word, syntax.

I suppose the beginner would think that these three difficulties  
covered the whole ground, and that if he had his vocabulary and his  
inflections secured, and understood what is called syntax, he could  
then read Latin with great ease.  But he would be very wrong.  The  
most formidable difficulty has not been mentioned.  The Latin sentence  
is constructed upon a plan entirely different from that of the English  
sentence.  Until that plan is just as familiar to the student as the  
English plan, until, for page after page, he takes in ideas as readily  
and naturally on the one plan as on the other, until, in short, a  
single steady reading of the sentence carries his mind through the  
very same development of thought that took place in the mind of the  
writer, he cannot read Latin otherwise than slowly and painfully.  So,  
then, an absolutely essential thing to a man who wants to read Latin  
is: –
4.  A perfect working familiarity with the Latin ways of constructing  
sentences.

Now we teach the first three things more or less effectively, –  
vocabulary, inflection, syntax.  Do we teach the last?"
======

I think that precisely the same point was given fine expression in the  
introduction to Robert Funk's _Beginning and Intermediate Grammar of  
Hellenistic Greek_ -- "Learning a Language is Learning the Structure  
Signals":

http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/funk-grammar/pre-alpha/intro-2.html
or http://tinyurl.com/2o645e


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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