[B-Greek] Paradigms or Rules
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Sep 15 01:14:38 EDT 2008
shalom Ken,
> 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 >
You're over halfway there. You have ennuciated a very good question
and brought in part of the answer, just how would Greeks conceive of
the whole matter?
You've also highlighted a deception for language teachers in general.
Ancient language teachers are especially susceptible because there is
no 'reality check' to wake people up and pop the bubble. It is
'logical' that rules would teach a language the most efficiently.
Rules, after all, extract the parameters of various things. They are
very compact. But they require conscious effort. They are something
applied 'to' the language from outside the communication process.
Rules are good when they are self-evident and help clear up an
ambiguity that a person can apply during 'downtime' in the
communication process, like during writing. Mother-tongue writers use
them. But rules can also BLOCK fluency, and can slow down or prevent
the very thing that language teachers want to develop. That is the
strange irony of language learning/teacing.
You mention contract verbs. It is correct that a Greek would learn be
hearing and knowing what a certain verb does 'in practice'. But you
already started too abstractly. What's a stem vowel? A Greek child did
not know what a stem vowel was. In fact, even Greek grammarians didn't
know what a "stem vowel" was. Dionysios Thrax knew that some verbs
followed certain patterns, they grouped together with like verbs. Like
BOW BOAS BOA, or XRUSW XRYSOIS XRUSOI 'to cover or make gold' or NOW
NOEIS NOEI. Greeks could refer to these abstractly, too, like TO
BOHSAI, TO XRUSWSAI, TO NOHSAI. BOAN, XRYSOYN, NOEIN.
Anyway, most second language acquisition theory is not in favor of
learning paradigms, either. Language users build paradigms from pieces
of use. They use a piece of something, A: ELABON O EDWKAS MOI. B: NAI,
ELABES. SU ELABES, EGW EDWKA. Or with children in the playground: A-SY
EPARDES. B-OYXI, OYK EPARDON, SY EPARDES. Children learn fast, adults,
too, when built in this way. But something else is building at the
same time, a fluid network is built. Eventually, the pieces fill out
the parameters of the paradigms and a whole paradigm can be presented
as a summary. If the process is done backwards it just creates lots of
stress for the language learner and in worst case scenarios, the
process trains them to analyze everything rather than develop fluency.
The absolute best example of this, is the famous story of Francois
Gouin. A Latin teacher around 1870s who went to Germany for German
learning and did everything as 'state of the art' technique. After
all, he was an accomplished, repsected Latin teacher, who knew what
language learning was all about. He failed so miserably that he
devoted himself to discovering 'why'? A side result of that quest was
the Berlitz language school. i've posted the story on this list before
and you can probably Google it easily. Every Greek teacher needs to
re-read it and take its message to heart, or else we condemn our
students to an invisible jail, in which only the best and most
motivated are able to partially escape. Some get out, but they are
wearing stripes and have a ball and chain that people ignore: "it
comes with the turf", "it's part of learning an ancient language". At
least in Hebrew people can discover the difference. People fluent in
Hebrew read much better (more material, deeper, wider, feeling
threads), have wider vocabularies, etc., than those who don't. (NB:
knowing a language fluently does not make a person a better scholar
than someone else, it just makes that person a better scholar than
they would have been.) On the other hand, to quote Bobby, "twenty
years of '(r)uling' and they put on the day shift." Or Donovan (much
lesser known today) "twenty-five years probation -- for rules and
regulations. there ought to be a stipulation. . ." (These are out of
context, of course. And I'm not against grammar rules, it's just that
they are not the 'conduit' for efficiently learning languages. At the
right point they are very useful to teach and part of the filling out
process.) I wish there were Greek centers everywhere where people
could get 'get out of jail free' cards.
May your students get to use the language in real communication.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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