[B-Greek] Understanding? Greek?

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at verizon.net
Wed Mar 12 14:01:38 EDT 2008


Great stuff. It reminded me of one of the best, and most difficult,  
professors I had at UCLA. I've told this story before, but in view of  
Dissen's experience, perhaps this is worth telling again and will be  
some encouragement. The class was advanced Greek prose comp, so we  
were supposed to translate English into the style of Thucydides et  
al. Thinking that I was one of the better students, I was very  
meticulous about using the unabridged LSJ, and more than once I  
protested when a word or two in my translation was marked, "I can't  
find this in Thucydides!" The fact of the matter was that I had not  
paid enough attention to the LSJ citations, but I certainly was  
careful to verify that the word in question was legitimate prose. On  
one occasion when I pointed out that the word marked was  
appropriately cited by LSJ, the professor said something like, "You  
[i.e. the class] are supposed to be scholars. You can't depend on  
LSJ; you need to read the words in the original works." After that we  
repeatedly asked the prof how he had become so proficient, and he  
eventually admitted that he had had the privilege of doing nothing  
but reading classical Greek for ten years, eight hours a day.

I figure that compares favorably to Dissen's 18 years. Of course I  
suppose that there is also the issue of personal ability, as someone  
said.

Don Wilkins

On Mar 12, 2008, at 5:58 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

> People, we poor slobs who who slaved over Greek and still cannot read
> it are evidently not alone. Read, if you will, the old curmudgeon's
> blog post this morning, the one entitled "Understanding Greek" at
>
> http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2008/03/understanding- 
> greek.html
> = http://tinyurl.com/368pgt
>
> and weep -- or sigh, or return to the grindstone.
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Ret)
>
> ---
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