[B-Greek] Can learning Romanian help you learn Greek? (was Fw: B-Greek Digest, Vol 97, Issue 7

Dony K. Donev dony at cupandcross.com
Thu Jan 6 13:19:51 EST 2011


Romanian – doubtful, but any Slavic language that subscribes to the 
Cyrillic alphabet and respectively Cyrillic grammatical rules will 
probably be very helpful, since both are largely borrowed from 9^th 
century Byzantine Greek, including, but not limited to: diphthongs, 
building of a sentence and word order within it, word formation (with 
the exception of the define article, which is a post-fix to the word in 
most Slavic languages), participles, which are so hard to translate in 
proper English with a single word, verb moods and tenses, gender usage 
and even some dynamic equivalents to list a few. This is especially true 
in Bible translation, as Slavic alphabet and grammar were formed with 
for a specific purpose as a missionary tool to translate the Bible in 
the native tongues of Slavs.

Dony Donev

http://probible.net/



On 1/6/2011 1:02 PM, Mark Lightman wrote:
> Vasile wrote:
>
> <Indeed, one cannot learn the Greek middle by trying to understand the
> particularities of the Romanian reflexive. I just meant to say that it
> could be helpful for one whose language does not have this tool to see
> how a 'living' language use some similar construction. One advantage
> is that you can ask any Romanian about the meanings/details, etc. of
> such constructions and get a full understanding of the thing. This
> idea was not prompted by some sudden inspiration of mine but by the
> fact that I noticed that many aspects related to the Greek middle
> voice are just natural to me as a native Romanian speaker, whereas for
> others a lot of analysis is necessary before it is clarified.>
>
> Hi, Vasile,
>
> There are two separate questions here, both worthy of discussion.  The first is
> whether learning a little about Romanian, or any other language, will really
> help you understand Greek any better.  Linguists like to do this.  They like to
> explain a Hebrew construction by some analogue to Navaho.  The problem is that
> one doubts how well the linguist knows either language,  and at any rate,  since
> the reader knows no Navaho or anything about Navaho, the whole thing just leads
> to more meta-linguistic abstraction, which is the argument for sticking to the
> target language.
>
> The other question is which native language will best prepare one for learning
> Greek.  You obviously know Romanian better than I ever will, so of course it is
> helpful to YOU.  And it may well be, that Romanian, since it has a middle, is
> one of the better native languages to start with to learn Greek.  I would think
> German and Russian, because they are somewhat inflective would also be good.
> Italian might be good for a vocab base.
>
>
> But I will say this.  English is probably the worse native language to have if
> you want to learn Greek.  Why?  Two words:  Word and order.   The English brain
> is programed to think that if something comes first, it is the subject.  If this
> word is CLOSE to this, it must GO with that.  It is very hard to get over this
> and begin to internalize the infinitely looser Greek word order.  It can be
> done, but Lord, it takes much time and re-programming.  Starting with a language
> with a freer word order would be a huge help, I think.  How free is the Romanian
> word order?
>
>   Mark L
>
>
>
> FWSFOROS MARKOS




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