[B-Greek] Using Greek

jerry gerald_davis at hotmail.com
Fri Mar 13 21:22:19 EDT 2009


Why Study Greek at Less than the post-Doc Level?

Because it makes you wonder.

And because it gets you closer to the meaning of things, but not in amateur 
translations; rather, our level of understanding can be enhanced by the 
experience of the study of symbology and metaphor which is used to represent 
the collective human concordance.

In antediluvian times, I first studied Ancient Greek for a year and a half, 
but that was after I had already studied French for two years, but Greek was 
also after a couple years of literature and philosophy -- ya, ya -- and all 
the rest of that good ol' liberal arts stuff -- and, you know, calculus, 
chemistry, biology, anthropology -- the usual.

I had begun wondering about the imprecision of words and language before 
Greek, but my skepticism was only a budding, faint uneasiness then. The 
timing of my insight and concomitant epistemological panic was right after 
questioning such things as 'common knowledge' and 'truth', which was just 
about immediately after I had written a lot of logically convincing but 
suspicious words in support of my analyses of English and translated prose 
literature and poetic lit.

There are a few things for me that finally unstrung my sense of the 
certainty in the relationship of words (and mathematics) to meaning. Ancient 
Greek was one of those things.

We play with words, and we convince each other that we know something, that 
we know what a thing is, if we can express it with words (or with math 
symbols).

The translation of English (for a native speaker) to sense, or any other 
language to sense, is based on each person's relationship and experience 
with the words and syntax and then the arrangement of that into a semantical 
whole -- and because each person's experience is unique -- those differences 
result in each person reaching an incrementally different conclusion about 
the meaning of it. To me, it is a constant wonder that we even approximately 
understand what someone says or writes.

Every word and every character in that word is a metaphor. Can't help it. 
Symbols to represent meaning. Those symbols draw experience out from our 
minds. We need to study the symbology, in many forms, to broaden our 
understanding by expanding our experiences.

I was stuck recently when I re-read the Iliad (in translation) that Homer 
mainly communicated in long and short strings of words in the composition of 
metaphors and vivid imagery. Okay, so his was poetry. We expect metaphor in 
poetry. But in terms of metaphor density, Norman Mailer's prose is about as 
close to Homer as I know (and I have always been so respectful (envious) of 
Mailer because of that). Okay, so his was prose composition, story telling. 
We expect metaphor in literate prose.   ...you can see where this argument 
is going, all the way to the dictionary. Fill-in the blanks yourself.

So it seems to me that the closer we can come to the fundamentals of those 
symbols then the closer we can come to their meaning. Our evaluation Linear 
A and B, the Phoenician alphabet, Epic Greek, Latin, Old English, et al., 
represents our attempt to get to the meaning of things. And part of our 
understanding should be that our understanding is a bit iffy.

In many cultures we hire or otherwise enlist scholars to constantly check 
and re-check our understanding of language; and we commission poets and 
story tellers to re-transmit metaphors to us so we can check one against the 
other. We are nearly desperate for words to have meaning, for it is with the 
use words that we commonly test the truth of things. And truth makes us 
brave.


-----
jerry davis
φλόρδα, USA
 




More information about the B-Greek mailing list