[B-Greek] "WRITE, WRITE WRITE' (was "Suggestions Please!")
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon May 30 10:47:52 EDT 2011
On May 30, 2011, at 10:05 AM, Mark Lightman wrote:
> I don't know how many times we have to say this George, or in how many ways.
> If you read good Greek at the same time as you write you will catch a lot of your mistakes.
> Not all of them, but enough of them. One's written Greek starts off horrible, but it
> does get better. Everyone I know who writes and reads Greek regularly experiences this.
> With spoken Greek it's even more so the case. But you have to start somewhere.
>
> You can do it Carl's way of course, work through the comp books first and practice
> re-writing real Greek before you attempt to communicate with real people. That
> works fine. But the other way around works too.
>
> And remember, the goal is not ultimately to write good Greek but to improve your
> reading fluency. I agree with Carl that one should strive to go beyond pigin Greek,
> but as Louis points out, the important thing is to get the forms to become automatic.
> Even pigin Greek accomplishes this. Plus, one sometimes chooses to use pigin
> Greek to communicate with beginners. When you chat on line or speak face to
> face, you don't have time for anything BUT pigin Greek.
>
> If there is someone whose reading fluency has been harmed by writing or reading
> less than perfect Greek, they should come forward.
I wouldn't recommend taking one's models for writing Greek from Revelation.
Nor do I really believe that if you keep on writing Greek you will automatically
improve: that's not my experience. Personally I think pidgin Greek may be
fine for inspired pigeons, but the function of a pidgin dialect is to get minimal
meaning across with a minimal grasp of the real language. And if the purpose of
Greek composition -- writing in Greek -- is to learn how to read Greek better,
then I don't see how writing bad Greek helps one to write good Greek. Reading
and writing Greek complement each other -- or should. Careful reading of good
Greek texts, study of the phrasing and idiom and standard structures employed
by good Greek authors OUGHT to be emulated in the Greek that one writes.
That's the way I think it ought to work. And if one really writes Greek in order
the better to understand written Greek, then one ought to be thinking in the
language the way that good Greek writers think.
I think it's a mistake NOT to work through the comp books first. Those standard
structures of usage are easily learned that way and those books have answer keys
that DO assist the self-learner to correct mistakes.
Again, a word about self-instruction: if it's the only way one can acquire any
level of competence in Greek, then it will have to do. In my experience of
half a century of teaching Greek, for what it's worth, I've known less than a
handful of self-taught Greek-readers who seem to me to have developed a
high level of proficiency. For most people, learning in a classroom is far
more efficacious even though most of the industry one expends on learning
is in private study: one learns so much not only from a teacher but also to an
unimaginable extent from fellow-students in a classroom. The best Greek
class I ever had was one that I walked into one morning to find one of my
students at the blackboard drilling the class in Greek vocabulary; I soon
discovered that this class was meeting once a week in a seminar room in
the university library holding a review session of the week's lessons. Students
who work together learn from each other, and a teacher is ultimately nothing
more than a student who has gotten a headstart on the rest of the students.
Finally, I'd note that one of the finest pieces of advice about writing good
Greek was not written about writing Greek but about writing Latin poetry.
It was the Roman poet Horace, in his "Ars Poetica" who wrote to a couple
of young aspiring poets:
Vos exemplaria Graeca
nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.
which comes, more or less to this: "You've got to keep studying your
Greek models, rolling forward and backward the scrolls in your hands
by night and by day."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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