[B-Greek] Paradigms or Rules primarily?

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 14 21:42:06 EDT 2008


I'm not so sure that this is an Either / Or matter.  I think that one must learn the paradigms for the various forms which will be encountered (λύω [LUW], anyone ?).  After the basic forms have been learned (or WHILE they are being learned) one should also learn to recognize what it is which distinguishes one form from another (augment, -θη- [-QH-] infix, etc).  As for K meeting S (or P meeting S), shouldn't that be reasonably easy to recognize when it's encountered.  Reading is the key.  Make sure that the students meet these forms in the literature (even if they can't quite read it but only see what happens).  If you wish, e.g., to show what happens when P meets S you can see it in ῥιπτω [hRIPTW], ἔρριψεν [ERRIYEN] (Gen 21.15 LXX). 

 george
gfsomsel 


… search for truth, hear truth, 
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth, 
defend the truth till death.


- Jan Hus
_________ 



----- Original Message ----
From: Kenneth Litwak <javajedi2 at yahoo.com>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008 6:02:12 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] Paradigms or Rules primarily?

    I will be teaching from Mounce this Fall.  Mounce seems very focused on teaching endings and rules about how vowels change, or consonants in endings drop out. This, in theory, will enable one to figure out any form even if you have not memorized the appropriate paradigm.  In principle, this seems reasonable. However, it depends in part upon learning the verbal root of every verb one learns.  

    The alternative, which is how I learned Greek, is simply to memorize paradigms.  I never learned rules for what happens when K meets S in the future or aorist, but I do know the principal parts of lots of verbs and can usually guess at what most other forms are.  

    Without creating an artificial and needless either/or here, do those of you who have taught Greek have an opinion of the virtue of learning the rules as opposed to paradigms or vice-versa as the primary way to figure out words?  I suspect that children in the Greek world were not taught the rules for vowel changes in contract verbs. They simply learned by hearing what happens when a verb whose stem vowel is O does in practice, and I'm not very convinced that learning the rules and not the paradigms is the best way to make an efficient reader, and the best way for someone to stick with Greek, I would think, is to develop some efficiency in reading. Thanks.

Ken    


      
---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek



      


More information about the B-Greek mailing list