[B-Greek] Analytic versus Natural Reading; the case of ANOIGW
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Apr 27 08:15:37 EDT 2009
Glad to see Carl up early and answering emails.
[Lightman]
>> My title makes it sounds like this is going to be a long, boring,
>> scholarly post. Don't worry; I'll make sure it's not scholarly.
[conrad]
> Well, scholarly it's not.
>
>As best as I can figure out, you instinctively recognize what forms of
ANOIGW/ANOIGNUMI at sight without any need to analyze them. That's
very good. On the other hand, you have to do a double-take and
intensive analysis whenever you come to a form of hISTAMAI, hISTHMI,
to the extent that you have to know whether ESTHN is a "second aorist"
in order to understand that it means "I stood" or "I came to a halt,"
and distinct from the first aorist ESTHSA meaning "I caused to stand"
or "I made come to a halt." My judgment is that you really don't
understand the verb hISTAMAI/hISTHMI and its morphology as having any
logically-interrelated semantic pattern; rather the forms of this verb
are like entries in a telephone directory to you. To be sure, ANOIGW/
ANOIGNUMI is a common enough verb, but hISTAMAI/hISTHMI is an
important and recurrent everyday verb, which means that not knowing it
is a real stumbling block to reading and understanding ancient Greek.>
>
>You've got to know verbs the way you know people or a terrain with
distinctive but recognizable features and traits of character. I think
that Humpty Dumpty had it right when he told Alice in "Through the
Looking Glass," "“They've a temper, some of them -- particularly
verbs: they're the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with,
but verbs — ; however, I can manage the whole lot of them!
Impenetrability! That's what I say!”>
[Lightman]
>> You have your analytic Greek readers. They have to know not
>> only what every word means, but what its form is, and why it has that
>> form. Then you have your natural readers, who are content
>> with understanding the essence of a passage, and don't care
>> much for parsing or morphology or grammar.
[RB]
I am uncomfortable with the analytic/natural definitions. I don't
think that they really describe what goes on with fluent use of
a language.
When I read my morning newspaper I do not parse verbs, (it's
Hebrew) but I can certainly parse them if anyone were to stop and ask.
My wife sometimes does (especially since there are no vowels).
I would pause, of course, and shift into a different mode. That ability
to step back and look at a language apparently comes with post-
puberty maturity. Kids, say 11 and under, can't usually fathom what
is going on when language is turned in on itself to discuss the
conduit rather than the contents.
If a person learns a new verb they really don't know it until they can
use it in multiple contexts with the right prepositions and collocations.
And
that means knowing its forms in various tenses moods and aspects.
And ANOIKSAI can be more than tricky.
John 9.14, 17,30
ANEWKSEN . . . HNEWKSEN
ἀνέῳξεν αὐτοῦ τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς ... ἠνέῳξέν σοῦ τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς
He opened his eyes . . . he opened your eyes
HNOIKSE
... ἤνοιξέν μου τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς .
. . . he opened my eyes.
I would recommend learning to say one of these myself, say ἤνοιξε
HNOIKSE, but recognizing the dialectical variants as well. Sooner or
later one of those variants will slip into your own speech anyway.
You note that I skipped the eymological discussion, surely important as
soon as one head back to AEOLIC and EPIC, but not necessary for
everyone in a synchronic dialect.
Carl's verb ISTAMAI/ISTHMI presents another twist. The plain verb
is really STHNAI~ESTANAI (aorist~perf!) but any vocabulary built off
a prefix+STHNAI becomes
+STHNAI ~ +ISTASQAI.
like ANASTHNAI ~ ANISTASQAI
Greeks like to keep us BARBAROI on our toes.
[I list the aorist infinitive first as more basic, then the open-ended]
ERRWSQE
IWANHS
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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