[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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