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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Jan 6 14:14:24 EST 2011


On Jan 6, 2011, at 1:19 PM, Dony K. Donev wrote:

> 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.

The subject-header is somewhat disingenuous. I suspect Mark was using
it as a springboard to his own comments on what makes languages easier
to learn.

What Vasile actually said was, "Indeed, one canNOT (my emph.) 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 ... "

My own range of experience with languages is not really very broad: Greek, 
Latin, German, French, a bit of Italian, a bit of Dutch. At least these are all 
Indo-European languages. And it was observation of how the reflexive verbs
function in these languages to express meanings that are clearly comparable
to those of middle-voice verbs in Greek that set me on my "odyssey" of 
exploration of ancient Greek voice. Particularly fascinating to me was 
contemplation of the way Latin ever more regularly came to create new
reflexive verbs to express middle notions that were previously expressed in
middle-voice forms.

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


> 
> 
> 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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