[B-Greek] Reading the GNT without a lexicon

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Mar 12 07:49:53 EST 2004


At 5:29 AM -0500 3/12/04, James Jackson wrote:
>I have finished reading the gospel of John and am almost finished with the
>book of Revelation in the GNT. However ch. 18 of Revelation contained
>numerous words that I had to look up in my BDAG and other Greek tools that
>I have. Is it reasonable to expect that an average person may be able to
>read through the GNT without having to look up any words? I assume that
>such personages as Bill Mounce (morphological scholar), Carl Conrad
>(long-time Greek scholar), Bruce Metzger, authors of the many Greek
>grammars that are available, ktl can read through the GNT from beginning
>to end and understand every Greek word that is written in it. The one
>piece of advice that has been given by B-Greekers is to constantly read
>the GNT. I have heeded this advice and have found it to be immensely
>satisfying and instructive. Being a layman's layman I never plan on being
>able to obtain any formal Greek education but do look forward to not
>having to look up so many words one day (except in the quest to
> further understand the significant meaning of some words).

First a persnickety question: is it reasonable to expect subject-headers
that are brief and adequate--like "reading the GNT without a lexicon"?

Now to the substantive questions? "Is it reasonable to desire to read the
GNT without looking up any words?" Certainly it is a reasonable desire, but
I'm not sure just how practical it is to EXPECT to read any and every book
of the GNT with comparable facility and comprehension without resorting to
any dictionary or reference works. There are several factors that stand in
the way of ready comprehension of the Greek text (this is probably equally
true of ready comprehension of any text in any language foreign to the
reader).

Unfamiliar vocabulary is an obstacle, to be sure, but it is one that can be
overcome by a regimen: one could start memorizing the word-lists that group
GNT words in terms of frequency of appearance, and I don't doubt that some
people can learn vocabulary adequateley that way, but my own experience and
recommendation would be to note down unfamiliar words as you come to them,
look them up as you will probably need to do, but most important, note the
CONTEXT in which the word is used in the passage where you meet it--the
PHRASEOLOGY of which it is a part; it's probably useful to keep notes of
this sort of thing as you read (I kept notebooks back in graduate school
for each new ancient author I started reading; for the GNT I found it most
convenient to procure one of the copies of the GNT with blank pages between
the pages of text and put notes on words or grammar on the blank pages
facing the line of text where the word or construction appears). But I
think it's important to read fairly large chunks of text at a time; I found
that after noting a word or phrase in a comparable context three or four
times I recognized it at once whenever I came to it again. I can't
over-emphasize the importance of phraseological(?) context for lexical
understanding.

But any approach to acquiring a command of vocabulary is more or less
useless UNLESS one has a working knowledge of the MORPHOLOGICAL PATTERNS
and SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES of NT Greek.

The morphology may be learned the old-fashioned way by rote memorization of
paradigms, a practice which is not completely avoidable, but the rote
memorization can be minimized if one grasps the patterns underlying the
morphological structures (e.g. the way -NS attaches to A-stems and O-stems
and consonant stems to form accusative plural, the way M/S/T/NT function
with thematic vowels or added I/O/AI in the verbal paradigms), and for that
one really needs to grasp the essentials of Greek phonology as it affects
spelling in the sequences of the paradigms.

The syntactic structures may also be learned the old-fashioned way, i.e.
the way Machen presents them, but my own experience is that one learns them
more adequately (i.e. so as to be able to apply them) through the
experience of exposure to progressively more complex real Greek texts
wherein like structures appear repeatedly and are clarified by the teacher
or by annotations as one reads through chunks of text.

Back in January I posted on my web-site a transcript that I prepared from
the introductory material of Robert Funk's _Beginning-Intermediate Grammar
of Hellenistic Greek_ I personally have felt that the principles set forth
in §§ 01-08 (pp. 5-11 of my transcript) headed by the caption, "How we
Understand Sentences" and "Learning a Language is Learning the Structure
Signals." Funk brilliantly illustrates his proposition by citing a
paragraph in which all the key nouns and verbs are indicated by blanks
while the "structure signals" are left in place, and he then goes on to
spell out the implications of this for learning a language, or to be
precise, for learning NT Greek.

(As an aside I might note that the same principles are involved in one of
my favorite puzzle-solving exercises, the "Double-Crostic" that appears in
the NY Times Sunday magazine every other Sunday and occasionally in the
Atlantic Monthly: it is fundamentally the positioning of "structure words"
like "of," "and," and "the" and "-s" and "-ed" that constitute the vital
clues to solving the puzzles. I've always supposed that the skills involved
in solving "Double-Crostics" were essentially the same as those involved in
reading a written text in an alien language with which one is only partly
familiar).

For any who missed it back in January or might like to see what I'm talking
about, the URL is http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/FunkGramIntro.pdf
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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