[B-Greek] "Temporary Crutches" (was "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data, etc."
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Mar 28 09:03:46 EDT 2010
When thinking about fundamental problems of ancient Greek pedagogy, it
would repay the small effort expended to read carefully (or re-read)
through what Bob Funk wrote in his Introduction to BIGHG:
http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/funk-grammar/pre-alpha/
001-020 INTRODUCTION 1-30
001-002 How We Understand Sentences 1-3
003-008 Learning a Language is Learning the Structure Signals 3-14
009-020 The Aims of Descriptive Grammar 14-30
010-014 The Classification of Words and Other Elements 14-20
015-020 Syntactic Relations 20-30
I think too that these pages are instructive with regard to how pedagogy
can be informed and constructively reshaped by the study of Linguistics.
On Mar 28, 2010, at 8:49 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> On Mar 28, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Richard Lindeman wrote:
>> I think that there is a problem with Greek grammars generally, both ancient
>> and modern. And the problem is that they come off as being far too
>> authoritative. I don't see any of them entitled "Grammatical Crutches For
>> Learning To Read Biblical Greek". And yet that is precisely what they are.
>> They are "crutches" at best and their goal should be to assist a student to
>> actually read the Greek and then at some point throw the crutches away like
>> the leper hopping and dancing and praising the Lord. I think that it would
>> help a great deal if new grammars would incorporate this kind of "crutch"
>> mentality not only in the title but also throughout the book. Each major
>> new insight concerning Greek grammar should be introduced with a warning
>> about its limitations and an encouragement to just read more (perhaps with
>> an appropriate reference to specific Greek literature where the student can
>> advance his/her understanding of the subject at hand.) The grammar should
>> also encourage the student to regularly read Greek even when it makes no
>> sense at all, to just get a feel for the language and perhaps offer reading
>> assignments apart from itself that regularly exceed the stage at which the
>> learner is at. Even intermediate and advanced grammars would do well in
>> regularly reminding readers of their limitations and encouraging students to
>> read.
>
> I wholly support what Richard has said here, what I read as two points:
> (1) the grammar one learns in a primer is a crutch or a training wheel to
> get the learner "on one's feet and walking" or "on a two-wheeler and
> rolling on one's own"; (2) rules tend to be oversimplifications of authentic
> usage in the language: the student should expect to encounter contexts
> where a learned rule either does not apply or applies in a qualified manner.
>
> But there's a built-in problem that must be faced in every beginning
> language course and in every primer in a new language: no matter where
> one begins, it is, as is said of epic poems, "in medias res" -- i.e., in the
> middle of a process: the first thing you learn (after the alphabet, at least)
> won't make complete sense until you've learned two or three other things.
> Mounce's textbook presents all the nouns and then all the verbs (or vice
> versa?) -- but in fact, except in the case of a nominal sentence, you can't
> really use a noun to say anything meaningful without adding a verb.
> That's why most ancient Greek primers begin with first-declension
> feminine nouns and simple uncontracted omega-verbs. It is almost
> inescapable in presenting the elements of the language that anything
> new that you inroduce will depend partly upon somethng that you
> haven't yet got to. So: to what extent should the student be warned,
> as Richard suggests, that this lesson is a sort of "stopgap" instruction
> that will need to be modified further along the course of study.
>
> I tried to do that when I was teaching Greek -- sounding the advance
> warnings about modifications that would have to be made to the
> explanation of usage now being offered. The problem is that these
> advance warnings are more confusing to some students than they are
> helpful. Many will remember the point in the course of learning
> French the point at which s/he first grasped the principle that
> "every rule has its exception" and begins learning those interminable
> lists of "verbs that take à" and "verbs that take de" and "verbs
> conjugated with avoir" and verbs conjugated with être." This is
> a fundamental pedagogical problem in sequencing the items to
> be taught in a new language. And I would add something else
> that should be obvious: students are different from each other
> and so are teachers, and the same process is probably not going
> to work as well in every situation.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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