Re: deponency

From: Paul F. Evans (evans@mail.gld.com)
Date: Tue Jan 21 1997 - 10:03:36 EST


<html><html><head></head><BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><p><font size=2 color="#000000" face="Arial">Carl, et. al.,<br><br>As I am want to do, let me display my rank ignorance once more. &nbsp;In the intersting discussions on deponency, you, and others, have made refernce to &quot;morphology.&quot; &nbsp;I am sure that I could find a definition for this just about anywhere, but could you define the term in the context of these discussions? I am one of those &quot;mechanical Greeks&quot; you speak of (please, list, &nbsp;I am not trying to introduce a new sub-category of Greek student) and I am trying to &quot;re-conceive&quot; of NT Greek in the sorts of terms that this list uses. &nbsp;I think that it would be a mental liberation to me I f I could move away from the rather stilted models to which I have beome attached. &nbsp;However, it is scarey too, because I am a rather mechanical thinker.<br><br>And please, rant on. &nbsp;Your ranting makes more sense than most of whatever else I have heard!<br><br>Paul F. Eva
ns<br>Pastor<br>Thunder Swamp Pentecostal Holiness Church<br>MT. Olive NC<br><br>&quot;Endeavouring to make use of &nbsp;NT Greek in a real life ministry!&quot;<br><br>&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;<br>BUT I'm really contending over something different, I think. I believe that<br>the way traditional grammarians have used the term &quot;deponent&quot; has hampered<br>the pedagogical enterprise of explaining to new learners of Greek exactly<br>how the ancient Greek voice system worked. And, however subtly, it fosters<br>the notion that grammatical structure of a foreign language is a sort of<br>catalogue of the queer things that the foreign language does differently<br>from the way one's native language does them. It fosters a notion of<br>language learning as acquisition of a mechanism to transform the &quot;alien&quot;<br>thought-patterns of the other language into the &quot;natural&quot; thought-patterns<br>of one's own--or, as Edward Hobbs says, learning how to translate Greek<br>rather than learning how to read it.
<br><br>I'm ranting, of course, and it's perfectly obvious that Stephen Carlson has<br>never suffered from these &quot;deficiencies&quot; (as I call them) of the<br>traditional pedagogy of Greek grammarians. I mean that in all earnest.<br>Somehow, by the grace of God, some people learn Greek in spite of those who<br>teach it.<br><br><br>Carl W. Conrad<br>Department of Classics, Washington University<br>One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130<br>(314) 935-4018<br><font color="#0000FF"><u>cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu</u><font color="#000000"> &nbsp;OR <font color="#0000FF"><u>cwc@oui.com</u><font color="#000000"><br>WWW: <font color="#0000FF"><u>http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/><font color="#000000"><br><br>&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;<br><br></p>
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