[B-Greek] pronunciation for beginning Greek students

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Oct 9 06:37:25 EDT 2008


(Note: Rather than wait for him to re-send, I'm forwarding directly to  
the list a plain-text version of his message. This was necessitated by  
an unfortunately growing tendency to send HTML/MIME formatted (styled)  
messages longer than 50k to the list; since our list software requires  
moderator approval for messages over 50k in length, such messages are  
delayed until a moderator has checked and approved them. The problem  
would be avoided if messages to the list are regularly sent in plain- 
text. CWC)

> From: "Jeffrey T. Requadt" <jeffreyrequadt_list at hotmail.com>
> Date: October 9, 2008 4:42:58 AM EDT
> To: "B-Greek Mailing List" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: pronunciation for beginning Greek students
>
>
> Another related question is, should we teach beginning Greek  
> students something that they would have to change their  
> understanding of later? I’m not questioning whether or not to keep  
> things simple for a beginning student—I teach third grade, after  
> all. They learn about the commutative property of addition, even if  
> they haven’t learned algebraic representations of it. However, I  
> think that’s a separate issue from teaching students one thing, just  
> because it SEEMS easier, but is actually not true. Regardless of  
> what pronunciation is used, I think it’s important to question the  
> presuppositions of what “beginning” students should learn (and why)  
> as opposed to “intermediate” or “advanced” students. Another math  
> example is fractions. 1stgraders may not understand that 1/2 = 3/6,  
> but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach them that two halves  
> of a whole are exactly the same size. It’s very disconcerting to see  
> math taught incorrectly as a result of the teacher trying to  
> “simplify” it, and I wonder if we’ve done that in Greek classes as  
> well. Now that I’m thinking about it, whatever happened to the 8- 
> case system? When I started learning Greek, I learned all about the  
> Ablative, Locative, and Instrumental cases and the fact that they  
> had the same form as some other cases, but they served different  
> functions/relationships. Is that not considered true anymore? Or did  
> we just decide that since the genitive and ablative can both be  
> *translated* many different ways, why not just include all those  
> different ways as one case, since they all had one form? I.e., we  
> combined the genitive and ablative into one case as a result of  
> their form, even though they serve two different uses? I really have  
> no idea, just questioning out loud.
>
> Jeffrey T. Requadt
> Dietz Elementary
> (520) 731-4000
>
> "I think standards are a great idea for other people." ~ Jeff Requadt



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