[B-Greek] relative value of re-reading the Greek NT versus following the advice of Conrad and Buth
Eric Inman
eric.inman at wescorpflex.com
Fri Mar 7 09:59:41 EST 2008
Last fall I decided for the first time just to read the GNT straight through
from cover to cover, an exercise which I finished several weeks ago. At some
point in the course of doing that, I suddenly found that I was no longer
trying to "figure out/decode" the structure of the sentences. They were
simply flowing past and I was understanding them. After that when I came
upon a more complicated sentence that was tripping me up, I tried to stay in
the "non-decoding mode" on my first pass, and then I would go back through
it more slowly and see if my first impressions were accurate, and I found
that often they were. It seems like the two different modes of reading
involve different thought processes, with only latter one being legitimate
ultimately. Furthermore, it seems like over reliance on the former mode
could prevent one from ever experiencing the latter one. I suppose some of
the teaching approaches that have been discussed here were designed to keep
students out of that former mode.
Another thought I've had is that top-down structure analyses of sentences,
which seem to work well for English and which are well suited for sentence
diagrams, seem to often be inadequate for Greek sentences. A more general
paradigm which I sense myself using in my head is one in which certain
elements in a sentence provide some information plus define some blanks
which are to be filled in later in the sentence. It seems that this type of
paradigm can explain everything much more easily without getting tripped up
due to all the permutations of word order in Greek. Furthermore it lends
itself to an interesting measure of complexity, i.e., how many unresolved
blanks are there at a given point in a sentence. I would imagine that this
type of paradigm is discussed somewhere, and if someone on the list knows of
examples of this, I would appreciate getting the references.
Thank you,
Eric Inman
-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Carl Conrad
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 7:57 AM
To: Randall Buth
Cc: greek B-Greek
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] relative value of re-reading the Greek NT versus
following the advice of Conrad and Buth
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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