[B-Greek] Allegory about learning Koine Greek

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 19 13:07:10 EDT 2009


Amos,
 
I enjoyed your allegory which fits in well with
the theme of this week's posts, "lions and tigers
and bears and sheep and monkeys."
 
Amos wrote:
 
<Further he said, the monkey who
 copied the Greek words and books
 for this school and put in the accent
 marks, for some reason put the accents
 all over the place or on almost any syllable
 rather than keeping them on the root word,
 which results in related words that should
 sound much the same, sounding very different,
 and while the main word is neither heard.
  He said possibly the secondary accents
 should have been on the syllables he put
 them on, but he said the main accent should
 be on the root word.  He said accents do make
 a big difference and if misplaced can make
 related words that should sound much alike,
 sound very different.>
 
I think you are making a different point, but I
am convinced that one of the reasons Koine is so
hard to learn and to internalize is because the accents
jump all over the place according to rules which are so
complicated that they are virtually impossible to master.
In an ideal world, I would accent every Greek word
on the last syllable except in a few cases to distinguish
words (e.g. EIMI versus EIMI.)  This (a) would make
Greek much easier (b) is never going to happen.  I guess
I would say the same thing about your proposed
pronunciation reform.  If I understand what you
are proposing, it would be rather complicated to figure
out what exactly is the root in every word, though
you are correct that for example having the stress sometimes
winding up on the augment, sometimes not, is not very
helpful.    I would  encourage you to keep thinking outside
the box and "monkeying around" with these traditions.
  

Mark L
Φωσφορος

FWSFOROS MARKOS

--- On Sun, 7/19/09, Amos Bender <bendersb at earthlink.net> wrote:


From: Amos Bender <bendersb at earthlink.net>
Subject: [B-Greek] Allegory about learning Koine Greek
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009, 7:52 AM



Hello Friends at BGreek,

I wrote an allegory about learning Koine Greek some time back. I thought of posting the whole thing here, but thought it might be best to just give my web address where it can be read.  The allegory might be offensive to some.   It speaks about dividing the syllables of the many compound Greek words so the individual words can be heard.  Regarding the many forms of a root word in Greek, it speaks about always keeping accents on the root word so all forms of the same word sound similar as they should. It also speaks of excessive grammar being a distraction rather than a help in learning a language.  It also speaks about various tools for learning Greek, which I wish were created.  You may send any suggestions or comments about the allegory direct to my email at bendersb at earthlink.net or simply leave them here.  The allegory is called "The Monkeys and their Lammar and Gammer" and can be read at http://www.biblicallanguage.net/  .   I can read
 Greek quite easily by now but have 
much room for improvement.  

God Bless
Amos Bender

bendersb at earthlink.net
EarthLink Revolves Around You.
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