[B-Greek] the ur-Mistake in reading Greek and what, if anything, can be done about it

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 3 13:57:37 EST 2009


When I read unfamiliar Greek, I often make a sort of 
basic, fundamental mistake, what I call the ur-mistake.
  The ur-mistake is when you don’t look carefully enough
 at the Greek and your brain jumps ahead and misconstrues
 the text, mistaking the unfamiliar for something that is
 familiar.  An example:  You see the sentence hIPPEA
 ESTHSEN.  You know that hIPPOS means “horse”
 and that iSTHMI sort of means “I stand,” and so you
 construe this as “A horse stood up.”   Your brain does
 this in a split second.  Except of course that 
hIPPEA ESTHSEN does not mean “A horse stood up”
 because the word is not hIPPOS but hIPPEUS
 (“horseman,”) and it’s in the accusative not the
 nominative, so it can’t be the subject.  Plus,
 ESTHSEN is the FIRST aorist, so it is transitive,
 not intransitive.  The sentence, of course, means
 “He made the horseman stop.”  When you are
 in ur-mistake mode, you glom on to basic meanings
 of words, and little things like endings
 (not to mention accents and breathings marks)
 don’t make much of an impression on you.
   I recently read the phrase PROS DIOS
 and my brain jumped to “to Zeus.”  In
 ur-mistake mode, you don’t notice that 
PROS is here with the genitive and so the
 phrase really means the opposite of what 
you think it means, “FROM Zeus.”  You 
just see PROS, you are used to it meaning 
“to” and so that is how you read it.  The examples
 of ur-mistakes could go on and on; I’m sure you
 have lots of them too.  This morning, I read in the
 Iliad the unfamiliar word hUPERMENEI.  I should 
have noticed the accent on the last syllable, so this
 cannot be a verb.  It is dative of hUPERMENES, NS,
 “very mighty.”  But the declension of these adjectives,
 and the morpheme MENOS are not as familiar to me
 as the verb MENO, and so I ur-mistaked this as
 “he is really remaining.”   (If you are wondering 
whether there is such a verb as hUPERMENW,
 the answer is, there is now.)
 
A number of factors lead to ur-mistakes.
  A lot of Greek forms look alike, with just
 a letter or two resulting in totally different
 meanings.  This is setting aside confusion of 
similar looking words life TREPO (I turn) and 
TREFO (I nourish) or NOSOS (disease) and 
NHSOS (island) and NOSSOS (young bird)
 and NHOS (of a ship.)  I don’t know if Greek
 has more words that look alike than other languages
 or not, but it drives me crazy.  Another problem is
 that it is easy to ur-mistake transitive words for
 intransitive words.  Whenever I see any form of hIZW
 ( I CAUSE to sit down) I always ur-mistake it as “I sit down.” 
 Same with EUPHRAINW, which does not mean “I rejoice”
 (except in the passive) but “I make someone else rejoice.”
  I don’t have the statistics to back it up, but I would 
guess that the default meanings of most Greek verbs
 are causative/transitive while the default meanings
 of the English equivalents are intransitive.  So, I think
 our English speaking brains are hardwired for these
 ur-mistakes.  Same with word order.  My first Greek
 teacher warned me about this.  She pointed out that 
when I say to you “Me bit the cat” you cannot help
 but have a mental picture where I take a bite out of the 
kitty.  But of course “Me, bit the cat” simply means “The
 cat bit me.”  But in English, word order is a stronger
 indicator of meaning than grammar or even than 
what makes sense.  So I think for most of us, when
 we see a noun and then a verb, as in the example
 of hIPPEA ESTHSEN, we just automatically 
ur-mistake this into subject and predicate.
 
So the question I have is, what can be done about
 cutting down on ur-mistakes?  I find that I am
 making them less and less, but I still make them, 
and I bet you do too.  On one level, we are TAUGHT
 to make ur-mistakes.  Conrad and Buth (or maybe it is
 Buth and Conrad) tell us that we are SUPPOSED
 to read Greek quickly, that we are not supposed to
 analyze every little letter but we are supposed to try
 to read naturally and guess the meanings.  But this is
 where the ur-mistakes come in.  We see a word
 like hUPERMENEI and instead of our brain saying,
 “I don’t recognize that word.  I better slow down 
and try to figure out what it means or look it up”, we say,
 “that means ‘he is really remaining!’”  It’s like so much
 Greek is unfamiliar that we latch on to what is familiar 
(or what we think is familiar) and we go astray.  I don’t
 think I do this when reading unfamiliar English.  When I
 read Hamlet asking “Who would fardels bear?” my brain
 quickly says “What the hell is a fardel?” and I quickly,
 CORRECTLY guess the meaning because I KNOW I
 don’t know what it means.  In ur-mistake mode, I would
 confuse “fardel” with “barrel”, allow word order to cause
 me to ignore the fact that “Who” is the subject, and ur-mistake
 this as “Whom would the barrels carry?”  If this seems
 farfetched, examine some of your own recent Greek ur-mistakes.
  ( A fardel, by the way, is a burden.)
 
The only way it seems to me to cut down on ur-mistakes
 is to read MORE slowly, to examine every word very 
carefully with your eyes before allowing your brain to
 deceive you.  But this seems counter-intuitive if the
 goal is to read quickly and naturally.  Maybe ancient 
Greek is not meant to be read quickly and naturally?
  Or maybe ur-mistakes are necessary parts of the
 learning process that go away after a century or
 so of reading Greek.  But if anyone has any tips for
 reducing ur-mistakes, let me know. 
 
Mark L         


      


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