[B-Greek] pronunciation for beginning Greek students

Barry nebarry at verizon.net
Thu Oct 9 16:41:14 EDT 2008


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 6:37 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] pronunciation for beginning Greek students


> 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.

Responding to the second part of your post, when I was first exposed to the 
so-called "eight case system," I was floored.  This was actually a question 
from a Greek student at seminary who had had some prior instruction in 
Greek.  I had cut my teeth on Crosby & Schaeffer and taught NT Greek out of 
Machen, and had never used a grammar or primer that used that approach.  I 
investigated, discovering that it had quite lineage, but I strongly resisted 
it and still feel that it's a mistaken approach.  It assumes Latin as the 
foundation, in which ablative and to some extent the locative are cases that 
never dropped out of the language, as they had in Greek by the alphabetic 
writing period, although the "instrumental" in Latin is a function of the 
ablative case.  It's much better for the student to learn these as functions 
of the genitive, dative, and accusative (and often prepositions "governing" 
those cases), than to learn a complicated and abstract system that really 
has no grounding in the structure of the language as we have it from Homer 
down to late ancient times.

N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Professor, WRTS
http://www.wittenbergreformed.org
Mentor, TNARS http://www.tnars.net/
Classics Instructor, TAA
http://www.theamericanacademy.net

and me:

http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry
http://my.opera.com/barryhofstetter/blog




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