[B-Greek] the ur-Mistake in reading Greek and what, if anything, can be done about it
John Sanders
john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Sat Jan 3 17:38:58 EST 2009
My own view is that the ur-mistake is generally a function of insufficient
oral/aural practice. If one uses a sport as an analog to language learning,
then if one studies boxing or karate, for example, one does not wish to
analyze the opponents moves; otherwise one may become rather bloodied and
bruised. The ur-mistakes you are referring to is the equivalent of being
bloodied and bruised. The response should be intuitive and automatic, and
this intuitiveness and "automaticness" is learned through practice and more
practice.
A number of years ago my wife was teaching Japanese for the University of
Washington. She was in a program that taught professionals Japanese,
individuals with PhD or Masters degrees in science, engineering, business
management, etc. One day an individual who had studied on his own, an
individual who had not gone to college, asked if she would tutor him. He
had been studying on his own from a Berlitz travel tape. For eight months
he practiced from that tape. He would record his voice on another recorder
and compare with the tape, and he practiced and practiced and practiced till
he wore the tape out.
He was not smarter that the other students, but he was more diligent in his
practicing the language. In eight months he was further ahead than students
in the regular university program who had studied for three years. He had
learned how to be intuitive and respond automatically to the language.
What I think is missing is a good program based on Dr. Buth's (and Dr.
Conrad's) idea or concept of language learning. The core of the program
will be, in my mind, a good portable language lab. I know that Rosetta
stone is a popular model for many today, but I would tend toward a blending
of Pimsleur and Fluenz. Not that the particular brands are important, just
the methodology they use. It makes no difference, though, because the
programs do not exist and someone needs to develop the programs.
Even if someone did not have much time, let us say only two 15 minute blocks
a day, then that would be three hours if they could practice six days a
week. In one year that would be 150 hours. If you took a class, 50 minutes
a day, five days a week and there were 10 students in the class and the
usage of time was very efficient so that you individually received five
minutes of direct active participation in the language and 45 minutes of
passive hearing. And if we assume that the passive hearing helps you to
gain language fluency 1/2 of the active participation, then in three years
of class time you will have achieved what you did in the two 15 minute time
blocks.
Anyway, that is what I think is the problem.
John Sanders
Suzhou, China
(on temporary holiday in the States)
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>wrote:
> 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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