Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος ἑλ.

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Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος ἑλ.

Post by Amplaos »

Ἑλληνιστῖ·

Χαῖρετε, ὦ συμαθηταί!

Ἐγὼ ἄρτι εὗρον τόδε τὸ καλὸν βιβλίον ἐν τοῖς τοῦ Γύγελος βίβλοις·
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=j51 ... ico+graece

Ἐὰν μιμνήσκεσθε ἔτι τῶν ἔργων τοῦ μεγαλοῦ καὶ "ῥᾴδιου" Γαίου Ἰούλιου Καίσαρος, ὄντων ὑμῶν μαθηταί τῆς Ῥωμαικῆς γλώσσας, νῦν οἷοί τ' ἐστε ἀναγινγνώσκειν αὐτὰ πάλιν Ἑλληνιστῖ! (Μοι δὴ ῥητέον ὅτι ῥᾴων μοι τὸ τὸν Καίσαρα ἀναγιγνώσκειν Ἑλληνιστῖ ἤ Ῥωμαιστῖ, καίπερ τούτῳ αἰσχύνομαι) Κατὰ τὴν Οὐικιπαιδείαν, τούτῷ τῷ βιβλιῷ ἔχροντό ποτε ἐν τῷ Ἑλληνιστῖ διδασκεῖν ἐν τῇ Εὐρώπῃ (οἱ γὰρ μαθηταὶ, ὡς οἴμαι, ἤδη τὸν Καίσαρα ἐγνώκεσαν τῇ Ῥωμαιστῖ μαθητείᾳ αὐτῶν).

English:
Hello, fellow students!

I have found this charming volume on Google Books:
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=j51 ... ico+graece
If you still remember Caesar's great and "easy" works from Latin class, now you can read them in Greek! (I have to mention, as much as it shames me, that I find Caesar easier to read in Greek than in Latin.)
If Wikipedia is to be believed, this version was used to teach Greek in Europe, I assume because they already knew Caesar from Latin class.
Ῥήθεντα ὑπὸ τοῦ μεγάλου ῥήτορος Δονάλδου Τρᾶμπ·

"Ἡμᾶς μὲν δεῖ τεῖχος οἰκοδομῆσαι, αὐτὸ δὲ ταχέως οἰκοδομηθῆναι."
"Συνίημι τοὺς λόγους. Ἔχω δὴ τοὺς ἀρίστους λόγους."
"Ὀλίγόν μοι ἐδανείσεν ὁ πατήρ, ἑκατομύριον δολάρια."
"Μοι δὲ ἀρέσκουσι οἱ μὴ ζωγρηθέντες."


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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

Amplaos wrote: English:
Hello, fellow students!

I have found this charming volume on Google Books:
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=j51 ... ico+graece
If you still remember Caesar's great and "easy" works from Latin class, now you can read them in Greek! (I have to mention, as much as it shames me, that I find Caesar easier to read in Greek than in Latin.)
If Wikipedia is to be believed, this version was used to teach Greek in Europe, I assume because they already knew Caesar from Latin class.
Who is it by? When was it written? It does have an extensive introduction but that introduction, being Latin, is all Greek to me.

Thanks for the link. I missed the first link to it and at first glance it looks just what I have been looking for.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

See here.

Once thought to be by Planudes.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

seneca2008 wrote:See here.

Once thought to be by Planudes.
Once being the operative word. I guess my real question is whether the style is markedly different from that used by those Greeks who spoke Attic as native speakers.

My impression (from the short bit I have read today) is that the writer (whoever it was) isn't over fond of rare words and the construction is not over complicated but the sentences are very long. They do tend to use participles less then I would expect.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

I guess my real question is whether the style is markedly different from that used by those Greeks who spoke Attic as native speakers.
Well that is a difficult question to answer. Thucydides, Demosthenes and Plato all write in very different styles and are all "native attic speakers". Lucian was not a "native attic speaker" and yet his style is famous as an example of pure attic. I think that underlying your question is some expectation that you might discover in a literary text how some particular group of attic speakers might have spoken or written "non-literary" Greek. Whilst there are some pointers in Aristophanes to everyday speech (or at least a high literary version of it) I think what you are looking for doesn't exist. Surely everyday speech in Ancient Greece was as varied as English is today.

Perhaps if you found the text not too complicated and the vocabulary not too recherché you should congratulate yourself on having made more progress than you had thought.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

seneca2008 wrote:
Well that is a difficult question to answer. Thucydides, Demosthenes and Plato all write in very different styles and are all "native attic speakers". Lucian was not a "native attic speaker" and yet his style is famous as an example of pure attic. I think that underlying your question is some expectation that you might discover in a literary text how some particular group of attic speakers might have spoken or written "non-literary" Greek. Whilst there are some pointers in Aristophanes to everyday speech (or at least a high literary version of it) I think what you are looking for doesn't exist. Surely everyday speech in Ancient Greece was as varied as English is today .
Of course Attic was as varied as Modern English, it also is true that Lucian is considered to have mastered Attic so well as to write as if he was a native speaker. Likewise many today who are not native speakers write English so well that a native speaker can not detect the difference. But it is very hard to write in a language that you are not born with and often non native speakers write in way that makes their lack of mastery of the language very very obvious - like me writing in Serbo-Croat.

It may well be that the writer, let us say some Byzantine scholar had studied the Attic texts so well that had some one from the 4th century BCE in Athens read that text they would not have realized that the writer was not their contemporary but it might well have stuck our like a sore thumb.

So does the style of the translation show clear influences of Byzantine Greek or is it so well written to the kind of thing some contemporary of Aristotle might have written.
seneca2008 wrote: Perhaps if you found the text not too complicated and the vocabulary not too recherché you should congratulate yourself on having made more progress than you had thought.
It is easier than pretty much all the other texts I have read. I said nothing about finding it easy. :)
(But thanks for the encouragement)
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

Lucian may have claimed to that his first language was not Greek and that he was a barbarian--perhaps something of a façade for an author who is usually not to be taken seriously--but he probably encountered Greek in early childhood and his education was probably exclusively Greek. In many parts of the world today, people speak one language in the home and a different language in public life with complete bilingualism. Lucian, if he even remembered how to speak Aramaic beyond household communication, was probably similar.

The ability to communicate in 5th-4th century Attic Greek, at least in writing and probably orally, too--never died out, even down into the Byzantine period. Especially during the 2nd century CE, but before and after too, authors such as Aristides, Libanius, Julian, Procopius continued to write more or less "pure" Attic Greek, and Attic Greek was the basis of elite Greek education. Ancient usage manuals for Attic Greek, listing "correct" Attic and "incorrect" contemporary usage (not always accurately) dating from the Roman period are still extant.

The corpus of 5th-4th century Attic Greek texts is today still very large, and was even larger in later antiquity: Thucydides, Plato and in particular the huge body of speeches by the so-called "Attic orators", including Demosthenes, Lysias, Antiphon, Andocides, Isaeus, Isocrates, etc. These were preserved largely for educational purposes (though they are often interesting in themselves) and were studied intensively to hone one's Attic usage and style.

In the second century CE performers such as Lysias (a stand-up comedian in his day) and Aristides traveled the Greek-speaking world delivering speeches, or rather declamations, in more or less pure Attic Greek, and drew large paying crowds.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

I don't pretend to know when Greek diverged from Attic that Attic had become merely a book language like Latin for East Med lands. But my question is not really about that. I am specifically asking whether the language of this version of Caesar's Gallic War in Greek is good Attic or is it like some of the books of Septuagint where the translators have a less than perfect grasp of Attic idiom so that their own native speech interferes with the language they use.

Is this specific book good Attic?

(Everything else while interesting is not what I need to know if I want to judge whether to use this book to aid my efforts to learn Attic)
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

(Everything else while interesting is not what I need to know if I want to judge whether to use this book to aid my efforts to learn Attic)
I dont think it will help you. Xenophon and Lysias are the best for intermediate readers. You would be better off reading Lucian than this translation of Caesar, unless you have a particular interest in the text in which case you should learn latin.

Hylander I enjoyed your post modern reading of Lucian's self-representation.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

seneca2008 wrote:
(Everything else while interesting is not what I need to know if I want to judge whether to use this book to aid my efforts to learn Attic)
I dont think it will help you. Xenophon and Lysias are the best for intermediate readers. You would be better off reading Lucian than this translation of Caesar, unless you have a particular interest in the text in which case you should learn latin.

Hylander I enjoyed your post modern reading of Lucian's self-representation.
Lysias is far too hard for me and while I can manage Xenophon even he is really too hard for me at the level I have reached.

I may master Ancient Greek before I die - I have no chance of then going on to master Latin. If I am going to read a translation I do of course have the option of reading it in English.

That you advise me to avoid this text implies that it is poor Attic but you do actually say so. Is that your reason, or are you advising me to avoid it for some other reason?
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

After looking at a paragraph or so, I didn't see anything that looked to me like it was not Attic, but honestly I personally don't have time to read at length to make sure (and I might not catch every non-Atticism, anyway). Caesar's style is very succinct and the vocabulary is somewhat limited, and it wouldn't be beyond the competence of someone who knew Attic Greek well to produce such a translation, almost word for word. But if you can read Xenophon, you can read Lysias, and you might as well go the source rather than trying to develop your skills on something derivative.

You can start out by using a translation to help you along--eventually you won't need one. There's a modern translation of Lysias by Todd with explanatory notes. I haven't looked at it, but the Texas series of translations of the Attic orators is generally pretty good.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

Hylander gives good advice. There are commentaries on lysias 1. As I have said before the first paragraph is harder than the rest of the speech and you can ideal with it after you have read the narrative. The beginning does provide lots of practice on the optative.

It might be helpful if you were to read some of lysias 1 and then post about what is especially difficult. As Hylander says if you can read Xenophon you can read lysias. If you continue to just say it's all too difficult you don't isolate what the actual difficulties are. Very few people actually master Greek even after a lifetime. But that's no reason to despair, we can all learn a bit more and try to remember what we once knew. I recently found some notes I had made on various Greek and Latin authors which I had entirely forgotten I had made! Ars longa, vita brevis. Or Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή if you prefer.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

Thanks for your replies. Especially the encouragement to post more often when I get stuck is welcome.
There are times when I have got stuck in the past and have not posted from a feeling that I should not over work the experts here. However, the main reason I don't post difficulties is because when I get difficulty is that even though I may get stuck on a sentence even spending a whole afternoon in some cases I do eventually get there. Sometimes when I give up the very process of focusing on what I don't understand so that I can pose a question allows me to grasp what I had up till then been missing.


Now on a different note I want to explain as to why I am not going to take your advice to avoid this version of the Gallic War and instead concentrate on Xenophon or Lysias.

This is an old argument and I would hesitate to revive it were it not that I simply don't understand your point of view. And I think the reason I don't is that both of you are giving me advice on basis of assumptions that are so obvious to both of you that they don't need stating.

To my mind the best way to learn a language is to read that language. By read I mean really read not decode. Any real Greek is so difficult for me that I am only decoding.

The advantages of reading as opposed to decoding to me are obvious. First it allows me to experience a greater quantity of Greek. This means that by repetition vocabulary, accidence and constructions become so well learnt that they become second nature. I also feel that there is a qualitative advantage in reading over decoding. To read a aorist optative is a much better way of fixing that form than decoding it because if is more internalized .

I should say here I do spend a lot of time learning the grammatical forms (ie declensions and conjugations). I have set up my computer to quiz myself on a list of forms and it is the first thing I do every day. It is obvious that that alone is not enough for me to learn those forms. I keep on doing this because unless I get them in my head in this way, they are not accessible when I read. It is. I believe when I read forms without having to look them up that real learning happens.

There is a belief that is so widespread to be unquestioned that THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN ANCIENT GREEK IS TO READ THE ANCIENT AUTHORS THEMSELVES. I meet it again again and is clearly so entrenched that most Ancient Greek scholars consider it to be so self evident as to require no justification.

I do have some sympathy for it. If I am reading some real Greek I have far greater motivation than when I read synthetic Greek. It is especially disheartening to get stuck on "easy Greek" like that of Morice while to spend an inordinate amount of time on a single sentence feels worth it. I however think this feeling is irrational.

A learner should be reading texts which they can actually read albeit with sufficiently difficulty that they are being stretched. If anything this version of the Gallic War is a little too difficult for me. I am more semi-reading than actually reading. However, this is still far better than decoding Xenophon.

I don't imagine that this is going to convince anyone but I do hope someone could explain the counter argument sufficiently that I at least understand why they (along with the vast majority of Greek scholars) have such faith in the original texts only method of learning Ancient Greek.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

I dont think anyone (expert or not) would mind you posting questions you are stuck on. Maybe if you cant figure something out in an hour and cant see it the next day then is the time to ask. If you were to use a commentary you would probably find enough help there but if not you can ask for more.

Reading a sentence does require analysing the function of all the words in the sentence and deciding what the meaning is. You can call that decoding if you like but I call it reading.

My reservations about an unknown Greek translation of caesar is that its very unlikely that you will find some help in the form of a commentary. Who knows what state the text is in? Do you want to spend hours working on something only to find its a misprint or something is missing. If its a literal translation of Caesar to what extent is the author imitating latin usage. If you could read latin and were interested in Caser it might be an interesting study and possibly a subject for a PhD thesis on reception theory.

On the other hand there are commentaries on Lucian and Lysias and the texts are well established. There is also no doubt that these authors are worth reading for their own sake and their contribution to Greek literature.

I think you might find it helpful to jettison the idea of "easy" Greek. All things are relative but as has been said before learning Greek is a difficult task. I also think that you have to ask yourself if your current methods are not working why not try approaching it differently. Try Lysias 1 with a commentary and see how you get on.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Markos »

daivid wrote:Now on a different note I want to explain as to why I am not going to take your advice to avoid this version of the Gallic War and instead concentrate on Xenophon or Lysias.

This is an old argument and I would hesitate to revive it were it not that I simply don't understand your point of view. And I think the reason I don't is that both of you are giving me advice on basis of assumptions that are so obvious to both of you that they don't need stating.

To my mind the best way to learn a language is to read that language. By read I mean really read not decode. Any real Greek is so difficult for me that I am only decoding.
This is precisely why the Greek Caesar and texts like it were used to teach beginners Greek in the pre-Grammar/Translation periods. Having already worked through the text in Latin, the input was comprehensible to them, and they did not need L1 lexicons, grammar books, translations and commentaries. And of course they had learned Latin itself through the Direct Method.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by jeidsath »

Warnings that such and such a language approach will lead to disaster are always overblown on Textkit. Nobody makes these sorts of statements about living languages. Becoming good at language learning means assembling a great bag of tricks and methods. You will find out for yourself which tricks work for you, and at what stages of the journey, for any particular language.

Personally, I've found the correspondence between Latin and Greek very useful for going in the other direction, using Latin translations of scripture and Xenophon.

Also, I know too many people who have learned living languages through reading and watching trash to think that the quality of the literature has any impact on language learning speed. Personally, I look for something comprehensible that I can plow through.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

I havent predicted disaster for anyone.

We have been through all this before. I simply observe that one should judge methods by the results. Do whatever you like but if you are not making progress perhaps a new approach is needed.

Hylander and mwh are ahead in both achievement and experience of the rest of the posters on this board by a country mile. Wouldnt it be worthwhile listening to what they have had to say?
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

seneca2008 wrote:I dont think anyone (expert or not) would mind you posting questions you are stuck on. Maybe if you cant figure something out in an hour and cant see it the next day then is the time to ask. If you were to use a commentary you would probably find enough help there but if not you can ask for more.
Thanks for encouragement to turn for help more often. I always use every commentary I can get my hands on but they never cover all the things I have trouble with
seneca2008 wrote:Reading a sentence does require analysing the function of all the words in the sentence and deciding what the meaning is. You can call that decoding if you like but I call it reading.

My reservations about an unknown Greek translation of caesar is that its very unlikely that you will find some help in the form of a commentary. Who knows what state the text is in? Do you want to spend hours working on something only to find its a misprint or something is missing. If its a literal translation of Caesar to what extent is the author imitating latin usage. If you could read latin and were interested in Caser it might be an interesting study and possibly a subject for a PhD thesis on reception theory.
These are good reasons. That you are only now putting those reasons does however illustrate my point that the real Greek is best bias is so entrenched (and I don't need just in your mind) that you did not initially feel the need to give those reasons.

One advantage with this text which makes it attractive over texts of simplified versions of Greek texts (ie "adapted") is that the English translations are, judging from what I have read so far, are a good guide to what the Greek text should mean.

On top of that your reasons only apply to this specific text. I still don't understand why there is such faith in the real Greek as the royal road to Greek mastery rather than the destination.
seneca2008 wrote:
On the other hand there are commentaries on Lucian and Lysias and the texts are well established. There is also no doubt that these authors are worth reading for their own sake and their contribution to Greek literature.

I think you might find it helpful to jettison the idea of "easy" Greek. All things are relative but as has been said before learning Greek is a difficult task. I also think that you have to ask yourself if your current methods are not working why not try approaching it differently. Try Lysias 1 with a commentary and see how you get on.
I have read, or should I say decoded, the whole of book 1 of Xenophon's Anabasis. I have four commentaries to help me and I do have a commentary for book 2 so if I will probably do that next.
(Lysias is probably not harder than Xenophon but as I personally read more of Xenophon he is probably easier for me.)

There are only a limited amount of easy Greek so I do tend to read more real Greek than easy Greek. You don't seem to appreciate that I have and indeed continue to use the method you advocate so if the method I actually use is failing it is the above all else the method you suggest that is failing.

I do have the feeling that I am going to run out of easy Greek and this is one reason I spend so much time reading real Greek. Much much more in fact. There is also something about reading the real thing that means I am willing to put up with battering away at a sentence of Xenophon even though that isn't really the most effective way of learning Greek.

Ideally there would be far more easy Greek so learners would be able to select those readers that were right for them. However, judging from what I have read so far this Gallic War is close to what I need.

I do repeat I do try what you advocate and I will continue to read real Greek in parallel. When I say that I don't think it is a good method it is not because I haven't tried it.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

Daivid I can only speak from my own experience of how I learned Greek. Adapted Greek was used until we could have a go at Lysias and some simple Euripides. Then some Plato, Sophocles and Homer. It was hard, it was meant to be. But having to do exams does concentrate the mind. Admittedly my Greek is rusty but it is all there still.

There are no shortcuts and no quick fixes. It is hard but not impossible. In aspiring to read say Sophocles you are trying to do something that I think few ancient Greeks could do. Most of them were too busy looking after their farms or fighting each other. :D

Dont be too down hearted!
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

I have a suggestion for both Daivid and Seneca. I've been working my way through Eleanor Dickey's new Greek composition textbook. It's not too much different from the older Greek composition texts, except that it's written in contemporary English, and there are some very useful practice exercises involving using English sentences to illustrate how Greek syntax works and how it differs from English, without translating. There are answers to part of each exercise, and once you have those down, you shouldn't have too much trouble with the rest. The book starts from basics. It's aimed at classroom teaching for adult students (unlike the older books, which are aimed at teens or even pre-teens), but it can also be used for self-instruction.

I'm doing this to refresh and solidify my own knowledge of Greek morphology, syntax, idiom, principal parts and basic vocabulary (with accents). I'm trying to go through this book fairly rapidly (before I lose interest), but you can go through it at your own pace, of course. I think this would be helpful for Daivid--composition exercises really get you thinking about and understanding how Greek works, and I think working through this book would solidify your knowledge and, by having you do a number of exercises on each syntactic "rule" so that you get an instinctive feel for it, would help enormously with your ability to read fluently. It might also be helpful to Seneca as a refresher.

It also includes exercises in analyzing Greek sentence structure that ought to be very helpful in acquiring the ability to read fluently.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by jeidsath »

seneca2008 wrote:I havent predicted disaster for anyone.
I was not referring to you in particular in the above, nor to anyone in particular. But since you bring it up, that is exactly what you did in a recent thread on the Open Forum.
seneca2008 wrote:Trying to read Latin without paying attention to "case and syntax" is a recipe for disaster.
I did not weigh in on that argument, but I thought that there were many easy-to-disprove statements being made there. Many learners of highly declined modern languages don't pay much attention to case and syntax at first as they soak up the language from their girlfriends (faster and more effectively than from grammar books). Case and syntax begin to make sense over time.

Clearly, our real difficulty with learning Ancient Greek is the lack of live-in girlfriends to speak the language with.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by mwh »

daivid, I’ve taken a look at the translation of the Caesar, and it’s good Greek, as authentic-looking as you’re likely to find. So you need have no worries on that score. It will have been used to help Latin-speakers learn classical Greek. They will have been able to read the original Latin, but you could use it for the same purpose alongside an English translation if you want.

But I think Hylander’s suggestion of working your way through Dickey is one you might well take up, and see if it helps. As someone who over the last few years has followed your painful struggles with Greek and your efforts to write it I have to admit I’m less sanguine than he is, for you’ve shown that you have persistent difficulty in internalizing the most basic grammatical principles (e.g. concord). It’s there I think your problem lies, not with your methods. It may be true that once you have the exercise answers down “you shouldn't have too much trouble with the rest,” but as you're aware you do have constant trouble with applying principles you’ve been taught (you would deny you’ve been “taught” them, perhaps rightly), let alone extrapolating from them. If it works, no-one will be happier than me (apart from yourself). But if not, don’t be too disappointed. There are worse things in the world than not being able to learn an ancient language.

But I hope that either the Caesar translation or Dickey’s composition book will do the trick. Or a combination of the two.

I’ll add that I for one don’t think that “the only way to learn Greek is to read the ancient authors themselves.” I don’t know anyone who thinks that. It may be the only way to develop a competence in Greek beyond a certain level, but there are more efficient ways of learning the grammar essential for reading ancient Greek. (With modern languages Joel is of course quite right. He’s even right about the girlfriend. That’s how I learnt Italian.)

And while I’m about it, I'll say I don’t hold with the distinction between decoding and reading. All reading (like all listening) is decoding, whether conscious or not. For most learners it gets easier with practice.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have Dickey and intend to start it when my other non classical (language) commitments allow.

I stand by what I said on the open forum. If you disagree then carry on ignoring it and I hope your soaking it up method works. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Paul Derouda »

daivid wrote:To my mind the best way to learn a language is to read that language. By read I mean really read not decode. Any real Greek is so difficult for me that I am only decoding.

The advantages of reading as opposed to decoding to me are obvious. First it allows me to experience a greater quantity of Greek. This means that by repetition vocabulary, accidence and constructions become so well learnt that they become second nature. I also feel that there is a qualitative advantage in reading over decoding.
I think you make a very good point, and I've thought about that a lot myself – the lack of easy texts in Attic is a real problem. I think you're totally right about it being more effective to be able to "really read not decode" – for that reason , I've decided not to tackle (for instance) Thucydides before I've made significant progress with my Greek. If only we had children books in 4th century Attic! Mwh is telling us that this Caesar translation is indistinguishable from "real" Attic, so it should't teach you any "bad habits". If you really find this text easier than "the ancient authors themselves", and you find it interesting enough to actually read it, I think you should definitely go for it!

I agree about what people say about Dickey – I too have started going through the book, which I find very helpful.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by jeidsath »

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
τῆς χορδῆς δήπου ἐσθίοντες γευσόμεθα; ἐγὼ δὲ ὁμοῦ τοῖς ἄλλοις συμβουλεύω τοῦτο τὸ βιβλίον.

EDIT:

Hylander corrects me, saying that my usage of ὁμοῦ is poetic, better to use ὥσπερ οἱ ἄλλοι. And συμβουλεύω advises a course of action, so it would require an infinitive like αναγνωναι, or to be changed to ἐπαινέω or ἐγκωμιάζω.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

Paul, if you don't tackle Thucydides before you can read him fluently and effortlessly, you'll never be ready to tackle him. He wasn't easy even for native speakers of ancient Greek, and for me, at least, he required a significant amount of "decoding" -- analyzing sentences word by word, clause by clause -- and frequently resorting to a translation to help me figure out how individual sentences fit together. I struggled through it two years ago, and it took me the better part of the year to go from beginning to -- well, it just drops off, and Xenophon's first sentence continues from the last sentence in Thucydides, beginnig μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα οὐ πολλαῖς ἡμέραις ὕστερον . . .
Last edited by Hylander on Thu Jul 21, 2016 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Paul Derouda »

Hylander wrote:Paul, if you don't tackle Thucydides before you can read him fluently and effortlessly, you'll never be ready to tackle him.
Of course not. But I'd say I need a couple of thousand pages of Greek before that. Not before I've finished Herodotos, significant amounts Attic prose and a few tragedies. At least. I don't expect it to be easy even then, but less hard any way. Besides, I'm not really depriving myself, since there's so much interesting easier stuff I have barely touched – Plato for instance.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by mwh »

I think there’s nothing better than Plato for showing how Greek really works.

As for Thucydides, he’s not really that difficult if you stay clear of the denser passages and the speeches (though they’re the best bits!) and stick to the plain narrative. But he does stretch the limits of the language at times, and scorns the conventional virtue of immediate clarity, σαφηνεια. Contrary to Herodotus he means reading him to be hard work, like thinking. But don’t let that be a deterrent. He was much read throughout antiquity (lots of papyri), so he’s far from impossible.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

Hylander and mwh are ahead in both achievement and experience of the rest of the posters on this board by a country mile.
I couldn't let this stand without correction. For the record, I'm nowhere near the same level as mwh, and there are others who post here less frequently than I (cb, for example) who know Greek at least as well as and probably better than I.

By the way, I hope I won't be exposing anyone contrary to their wishes if I mention that the third volume of Alberti's Thucydides text makes it apparent that someone here knows a lot about Thucydides papyri.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Timothée »

I wonder where you first got the understanding that Thucydides is difficult, Paul. Wherever you got it, I see that this bias does hold really fast. When I took a text reading course on H+T many years ago, I didn't know that Thucydides is difficult and that one is supposed to keep this in mind while reading him. I'm happy I was free from this kind of prejudice. Only on Textkit started I noting these kinds of sentiments. There's hardly better way of dissuading Textkittens from reading Thucydides, as has happened to Paul. I find this pity.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Hylander »

Thucydides is difficult. πεπονθότι πιστεύετε.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Paul Derouda »

mwh wrote:As for Thucydides, he’s not really that difficult if you stay clear of the denser passages and the speeches (though they’re the best bits!) and stick to the plain narrative.
But there's no point in staying clear of anything. I'm going to read it all when I'm ready.

And Timothée, I agree it's not that difficult in moderate doses, especially if you stick to the easier parts. But it's another thing to read a couple of dozen pages (which I've done) than reading it all (500 pages? Or more?).

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by Amplaos »

Thucydides's difficulty, at least in the 2.5 books I've read, mainly lies in the speeches and a little in the introductory parts. I do not find the narrative parts to be very difficult. The Spartans and the σύμμαχοι always ἐσβάλλουσι into Attica, everything happens αὐτοῦ τοῦ θέρους. etc.
Ῥήθεντα ὑπὸ τοῦ μεγάλου ῥήτορος Δονάλδου Τρᾶμπ·

"Ἡμᾶς μὲν δεῖ τεῖχος οἰκοδομῆσαι, αὐτὸ δὲ ταχέως οἰκοδομηθῆναι."
"Συνίημι τοὺς λόγους. Ἔχω δὴ τοὺς ἀρίστους λόγους."
"Ὀλίγόν μοι ἐδανείσεν ὁ πατήρ, ἑκατομύριον δολάρια."
"Μοι δὲ ἀρέσκουσι οἱ μὴ ζωγρηθέντες."

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by daivid »

mwh wrote:daivid, I’ve taken a look at the translation of the Caesar, and it’s good Greek, as authentic-looking as you’re likely to find. So you need have no worries on that score. It will have been used to help Latin-speakers learn classical Greek. They will have been able to read the original Latin, but you could use it for the same purpose alongside an English translation if you want.
Thanks for the verdict - that is very helpful.
mwh wrote:But I think Hylander’s suggestion of working your way through Dickey is one you might well take up, and see if it helps. As someone who over the last few years has followed your painful struggles with Greek and your efforts to write it I have to admit I’m less sanguine than he is, for you’ve shown that you have persistent difficulty in internalizing the most basic grammatical principles (e.g. concord). It’s there I think your problem lies, not with your methods. It may be true that once you have the exercise answers down “you shouldn't have too much trouble with the rest,” but as you're aware you do have constant trouble with applying principles you’ve been taught (you would deny you’ve been “taught” them, perhaps rightly), let alone extrapolating from them. If it works, no-one will be happier than me (apart from yourself). But if not, don’t be too disappointed. There are worse things in the world than not being able to learn an ancient language.

But I hope that either the Caesar translation or Dickey’s composition book will do the trick. Or a combination of the two.
That is indeed my problem, while I sometimes do get stuck because of something I don't know it is more often for things that do know but haven't internalized.

I might well try Dickey's book and certainly I might well increase the time devoted to using textbooks.

You very gently suggest it might be time for me to give up. I am rather surprised by how long it has taken for someone to suggest that and am little puzzled as to why I am not yet ready to take up that suggestion. Possibly it would be to admit so much time expended has gone to waste
mwh wrote: I’ll add that I for one don’t think that “the only way to learn Greek is to read the ancient authors themselves.” I don’t know anyone who thinks that. It may be the only way to develop a competence in Greek beyond a certain level, but there are more efficient ways of learning the grammar essential for reading ancient Greek. (With modern languages Joel is of course quite right. He’s even right about the girlfriend. That’s how I learnt Italian.)

And while I’m about it, I'll say I don’t hold with the distinction between decoding and reading. All reading (like all listening) is decoding, whether conscious or not. For most learners it gets easier with practice.
I do think there is an important difference between whether "it" is done consciously or not and that real learning happens when something is done unconsciously. As you said above, I haven't internalized concord. I know the principle but if I don't consciously check every occasion it doesn't happen.

It is also probably true that there is no sharp line between decoding and reading.
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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by seneca2008 »

Hylander wrote
I couldn't let this stand without correction. For the record, I'm nowhere near the same level as mwh, and there are others who post here less frequently than I (cb, for example) who know Greek at least as well as and probably better than I.
Hylander, I was not seeking to make invidious comparisons nor to embarrass. But in the short time i have been here you and mwh have been most prolific in commenting on language issues. You are also the two who most regularly assert the importance of proper grammatical analysis in understanding the meaning. I did not mean to impugn the abilities of other accomplished posters.
Daivid wrote
You very gently suggest it might be time for me to give up.
I dont think anyone here would suggest you give up! Just recognise that what you are trying to do is hard and not everyone succeeds equally well.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by mwh »

You very gently suggest it might be time for me to give up. I am rather surprised by how long it has taken for someone to suggest that and am little puzzled as to why I am not yet ready to take up that suggestion. Possibly it would be to admit so much time expended has gone to waste.
daivid, I’d be the last to push you if you don’t want to jump. You do obviously find it more difficult than most, but I admire your persistence, and I can’t say it won’t pay off. I was a very slow learner myself until one day it suddenly started to click, in my last year in college. But I was one of the lucky ones. Try what’s been suggested and perhaps it will enable you to break through your block. You know you can count on support here.
real learning happens when something is done unconsciously.
Now there I think you’re wrong. I don’t learn what happened in 1066 unconsciously, and I don’t learn the Greek for pomegranate unconsciously either. If you have to consciously analyze each lexical constituent of what you read, that’s no bad thing, in fact it may be exactly what you need to do.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by John W. »

Timothée wrote:I wonder where you first got the understanding that Thucydides is difficult, Paul. Wherever you got it, I see that this bias does hold really fast. When I took a text reading course on H+T many years ago, I didn't know that Thucydides is difficult and that one is supposed to keep this in mind while reading him. I'm happy I was free from this kind of prejudice. Only on Textkit started I noting these kinds of sentiments. There's hardly better way of dissuading Textkittens from reading Thucydides, as has happened to Paul. I find this pity.
Well, Cicero (Orator, 30) described the speeches in Thucydides as 'scarcely intelligible', and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Thucydides, 51) observed that not many people could understand the whole of Thucydides, and even they couldn't do so without the aid of a grammatical commentary. Instances of similar judgements, from antiquity to the present, could easily be multiplied, and can scarcely be laid at the door of Textkit - unless it has been around a lot longer than I realised!

While the speeches are particularly notorious in this respect, those passages where Thucydides speaks in propria persona can sometimes be at least equally challenging. And while much of the narrative is relatively straightforward, there are quite a few places where the text is made complicated by anacoluthon or simply by the way Thucydides chooses to express himself. One aspect of this is his penchant for extremely long sentences, in which the description of an event is often preceded by a series of clauses describing the background or motivation; for a particularly demanding example, complete with anacoluthon, see 4.73.4: οἱ γὰρ Μεγαρῆς ... ὅθενπερ ὡρμήθησαν, and the discussion of this in Maurer, Interpolation in Thucydides, 126-8.

I'm sure that no one on Textkit wishes to deter anyone from embarking on Thucydides - indeed, the (currently dormant) Thucydides thread contains around 700 posts of mutual assistance - but those intending to undertake this task should understand that, while immensely rewarding, it can at times also be extremely difficult.

John
Last edited by John W. on Fri Jul 22, 2016 8:17 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by ailuros »

was lucky enough to spend a semester undergrad with my professor reading selections from thucydides. it was wonderful, but also the hardest prose i ever read. as john w. suggests, often what seems more straightforward turns out to be anything but. even at my limited level it was fascinating to watch thucydides seemingly wrestle with his own mind. my prof, who had rock solid credentials, sometimes openly struggled right along with me (albeit on a whole different level). his enthusiasm and dedication helped me to see that even if the style is "crabbed," for want of a better word, it's only because he tries to express such difficult and subtle thoughts.

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Re: Caesar's Gallic War in Greek - Καίσαρος Πόλεμος Γαλάτιος

Post by cb »

hi all, i took a quick look at the first few sentences of that BG translation - the translator obviously knew how to write greek but some bits just felt not quite attic to me.

e.g. word choice: the perfect form κεχωρίδαται doesn’t feel familiar from plato or the orators - i’d expect more typical διαφέρουσιν or some aor/perf form of διίστημι.

the third sentence starting without a connective, πάντων τούτων κράτιστοί εἰσιν ... feels, i guess, unconnected.

doesn’t καὶ οὐ μὴ πολλάκις ἔμποροί σφισιν ἐπιμίσγονται sound a bit odd? Why οὐ μή with a pres indic verb? normally only see it with subjunctive or future, and not usually in a factual description like this – normally it starts strong denial, negative prediction, prohibition etc.

the whole long construction representing "quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important" doesn’t feel super-attic. τὰ φιλοῦντα + ἐκθηλύνειν sticks out. ἐκθηλύνειν doesn’t sound like an attic word (maybe i’m wrong but it feels like one of those constructed later words). i would have expected the sentence would have been built in another way, maybe ὅθεν ἂν ἄνανδροι γίγνοιντο εἰσάγοντες or similar.

however, this are just subjective thoughts. i spend most of my classics time reading plato and the 10 orators (other than homer) and this doesn't feel quite the same, although close.

i really emphathise with the desire to find something you can just pick up and read, rather than just continuing to push the boulder uphill, forever. i've looked myself. the closest i found were scientific τέχναι. works like euclid survived not because they were written in beautiful (literary, hard-to-read) style but because of the ideas in them. frequent repeated words and phrases make these actually readable once you get the basic technical vocab.

however i agree with the posters above who suggest persisting with the boulder and the hill. this is based on personal experience. the only way i ever got sort of comfortable with reading plato was reading plato. it didn't matter how much comprehensible input from other sources i read beforehand. same with homer and other authors. you don't ever quite break through to some point where you can pick up any book and just read (well, if you can, i'm not there and never will be). the only ground you gain is the ground you've slogged over. each author is different, and becomes a bit easier over time.

the best tactic i think is to actually read the first few pages of as many authors as you can find, and see if any are easier for you to read than the most common authors from the canon. i find aeschines easier than demosthenes. personally i find painful to read the authors who break up a sentence after every single term, like

"the best place to begin is from the beginning"

into a form where you can't remember any more what the terms of the main clause were, e.g.:

"the best, i affirm, in the sense of truly superior to the others, which are of little or no account by comparison to this, when set beside each other and compared when illuminated by the true light of reason, which clears the darkness from our eyes, just as the sun, shadows, and allows us to put things which were formerly jumbled and scattered at random into their proper order, such that they form an intelligible and harmonious system, of all places, even if we are considering common matters, but more so, and most especially, when we are delving into what is obscure and far removed from the concerns of ordinary experience, from which we may begin, for just as a sailor casts off the ropes and sets sail, so do we, in a sense, in our noetic investigations, move from a specific point and aim at another, is not in medias res or that place from which many are accustomed to begin, that is, the end or goal of their enquiry, being that which they ultimately seek, but instead the contrary, by which i mean not the end but, what is in the truest and most correct sentence its contrary, let me conclude, is the beginning".

not all authors write in this style (which i find soporific and painful), even if cicero labours on about the glory of writing copiose...

the point of all this rambling is that, if you look outside the canon, you may find genuine greek which you can read just as easily as a greek translation of a latin work. but if your end goal is to read attic, then keep cracking on with attic too. it does get easier. only took me a decade or so before i started seeing the first green shoot emerging from the soil - who knows what another decade may bring?

cheers, chad

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