[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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