[B-Greek] Decoding?

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue Feb 1 19:21:34 EST 2011


On Feb 1, 2011, at 6:20 PM, Calvin & Ruth Mathys wrote:

> Carl,
> 
> As usual I'm not able to post directly to the B-Greek list, so I'm posing
> you the question and inviting you to post your reply to the list.  Why do
> you think the 'decoding' methodology is inadequate for learning to read
> Greek?  I ask this because I'm sure that is the discipline that I started
> with (we learnt from the JACT course).  To me, "Find the verb -- what does
> the verb tell you?" is a very good way to get to the heart of a sentence
> quickly.  I suppose at some point I moved on to parsing each word as it came
> along, and then eventually to still parsing word-by-word but doing it
> internally and subconsciously (as a native speaker does).  But do you see an
> inherent problem with the teacher instructing the student, in the early
> stages of learning, to read ahead to the verb and use that as the guide to
> understanding the whole sentence?  And later on, shifting the coaching to
> instructing the student to consciously parse each word as they come upon it
> and use the progressive increase of information to understand the sentence
> as a whole?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ruth Mathys

I wrote a lengthy response that involved much of my thinking on this 
matter a couple years ago (August 4, 2009); rather than copy and paste 
it here, I'll just refer you to the URL:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2009-August/050037.html

I'm really quite surprised that you did any such thing as "decoding" with
the JACT course; I taught from those texts for the last decade or so of
my teaching career in the 80's and 90's; it seemed to me that the great
virtue of the method is becoming familiar with standard phrasal and
clausal structures in large chunks of reading material in which those
structures appear with sufficient regularity in slightly different contexts
that one recognizes them without stopping to analyze the elements that 
constitute them.

I think the "decoding" process is fundamentally counterproductive to 
an endeavor to follow the sequence of Greek thought as the elements 
follow each other serially from the beginning of an utterance to its end.
I once had a notion of a computer program that would display Greek
paragraphs with accretions of each new word/phrase that adds meaning
to the opening of sentences. For example, the opening of 1 John 1:

Ὃ ἦν [hO HN] 
ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς, [AP᾿ ARCHS,[  
ὃ ἀκηκόαμεν, [hO AKHKOAMEN,] 
ὃ ἑωράκαμεν [hO hEWRAKAMEN] 
τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν, [TOIS OFQALMOIS hHMWN,] 
ὃ ἐθεασάμεθα [hO EQEASAMEQA] 
καὶ αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν [KAI hAI CEIRES hHMWN] 
ἐψηλάφησαν [EYHLAFHSAN] 
περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς _ [PERI TOU LOGOU THS ZWHS _]

This isn't even the whole sentence, and thus far we haven't even
gotten to the sentence's chief subject and predicate. But each segment of
this sequence is meaningful in itself and add something more to the 
totality of what preceded it. 

The "decoding" process, as I see it, has as its purpose the isolation of
those elements that would establish a word-by-word translation 
sequence for English, then putting the elements of the whole Greek
sentence into what one imagines is the "proper" sequence of these 
elements: the way we arrange them in English!

One learning to read Greek ought, I believe, to be learning to follow
the sequence of elements in a Greek utterance even as the speaker or
writer of that sequence conceived those elements in his/her own mind.
One needs to learn to THINK in Greek sequence rather than to 
TRANSPOSE the elements of Greek thinking into English sequence.

At least that's what I think.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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