About to toss my copies of Mastronarde and H&Q

Greek Learning Greek
1

Lukas’ current post regarding Unit 30, sentence for reading number 13, has brought me finally to a crisis in my approach to learning Greek. This is a big deal for me and I am on the verge of tossing both my copy of Mastronarde and H&Q and admitting to myself that I have been played, and going back to learning Bulgarian from FSI, free material circa 1960.

I dare not run the risk of raising this issue within his post lest I be labelled a “cook too many,” so I have created a new post.

The sentence under discussion in Lukas’ post contains “… τὴν τῶν πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον ἐπιστήμην.”

As I pondered sentence 13, this phrase jumped out and assaulted me as it brought back the painful and, until then, supressed memory of a horrible discrepancy with which I grappled in vain when I started learning Greek from these two books.

I see that the noun ἐπιστήμην is related to the verb ἐπίσταμαι, understand. So the Spartans understand things about war. This makes (I think) τῶν πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον an objective genitive, since that is what is understood by the Spartans.

The genitive, τῶν πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον, is in the attributive position, coming directly after the article τὴν.

So what does Mastronarde have to say about this when he introduces the objective genitive in unit 10, page 86?

“The object of the action referred to by a noun expressing a verbal notion may be expressed by the objective genitive (normally in predicate position).”

He then gives this example: “φόβος τῶν Ἀθηωαίων,” fear of the Athenians. The genitive in predicate position as per his teaching.

H&Q has a completely different introduction to the objective genitive on page 243:
“A noun or pronoun in the genitive case can also indicate the object of a verbal action denoted by a noun. This usage is called the objective genitive. The genitive stands in the attributive position.”

Not normally as in Mastronarde, no wiggle room in H&Q.

The example given to illustrate this:
“ὀ τῶν θεῶν φόβος,” fear of the gods, attributive position as per their teaching.

And this is not the only glaring discrepancy between Mastronarde and H&Q that I have noticed, but perhaps the worst. I read both books extremely carefully and cross-reference everything. At times I almost feel that those two books are teaching different languages, and that has worried me from day one. One wrong? Or maybe both wrong?

I searched through the forum and found a post from 2019 by Lukas entitled “Objective Genitive?”

Lots of confusion about attributive versus predicate postion. The only statement in the post which was authoritative and concise was probably this by mwh:

Lukas wrote:
Tue Sep 03, 2019 8:20 pm
So if a noun comes before the verbal noun, it is subjective genitive, and if it comes after it is an objective genitive?

mwh: No, not at all. It’s not a matter of position. It’s a conceptual distinction.

A conceptual distinction, nothing to do with position. Too bad Mastronarde and H&Q couldn’t have come clean.

I used to think that Mastronarde was a tremendous book, but now I’m wondering if that wasn’t simply because I didn’t have any knowledge when I started reading it, and was thus a rather easy mark. Sort of like how the “experts” on the internet can convince people who have no solid education.

I remember a few years ago when I was in a group learning Latin and the fellow beside me, who was a university grad student in classics, leaned over and whispered: “when learning Latin you must never use a book written after about 1930.” I think this was because I had mentioned that I was using Wheelock.

Maybe the advice was only too true and I have wasted my $44.95 for Mastronarde and $52.25 for H&Q, as sold new on Amazon, when I should have spent the same amount buying used books published around 1895 from used book sellers.

2

I read a post on a strength website a while back about someone who was getting ready to toss his nice expensive rubber Olympic lifting bumper plates because he was getting up past a 500lb deadlift, and couldn’t fit more weight on the bar unless he switched to iron plates. He didn’t have room for both in his house, and he was upset that he had wasted time and money on expensive plates instead of cheap iron.

I had had the same problem at the same weight, but what I did was to buy two iron plates and just use them instead of the last two bumper plates. It was far easier and more efficient to make the necessary fixes to an existing investment than to start from scratch.

I am often amazed (πολλακις εθαυμασα τισι ποτε λογοις…) at the “explain don’t show” method of teaching Greek when I see it in action. And Mastronarde and H&Q are serious devotees of that method. But a few of the people here do amazing things with it. You have to take in a language at every pore, as Gildersleeve says. I personally couldn’t tell you what an objective or a subjective genitive even was unless I have an example in front of me, and it’ll be out of my head tomorrow.

3

Hi katalogon, I wouldn’t throw them out yet. Books like those basically only teach you how to spell words and some basic vocabulary, a little basic syntax. To find out more about word order, you need to consult other sources on word order specifically, and do a lot of reading.

Equally books like Wheelock do a similar job for Latin, but for word order you need to work through Spevak, Devine & Stephens (hard to read but full of useful patterns - eg there is extensive analysis on the positions of subjective and objective genitives in Latin in that book, and the blank front papers and endpapers in my copy are scrawled over with my notes on the patterns and exceptions) etc. and do a lot of reading (there are aspects of Latin word order that have not been covered in the works to date - it’s still a relatively new field).

I wouldn’t reject a book because it doesn’t do a good job in areas not core to the work (eg word order in Mastronarde) - if however a book fails in its core area, time to find another.

Cheers, Chad

4

I had a similar horrifying experience with Latin.

At first I loved Wheelock. I loved memorizing all of the grammatical rules.

I especially loved the beautiful simplicity of the rule on interrogative pronouns:

quis for M. and F. in the singular
quid for N. in the singular

No need to distinguish masculine and feminine in the singular, that is absolutely clear. Quis is all you need. I had that memorized.

Then I decided one day to try reading Lingua Latina, Familia Romana. No sooner had I arrived at chapter two, when I read:

Quis est Marcus?
Quae est Iulia?

That was traumatic. It caused me to abandon Lingua Latina and in fact, I stopped learning Latin for a period because trust had become a big issue.

I eventually tossed Wheelock and Lingua Latina and continued learning solely out of my copy of Allen and Greenough, 1903. I had to laugh when I read a post on the forum in which someone had commented that his father or grandfather had said that Allen and Greenough was used as their textbook, and that it was hard to believe such a thing could be true.

5

Hi katalogon:

Well, I hope I did not cause the desire to throw out any books. There is no such thing as a perfect textbook. Sure I struggle with Dr. Mastronarde’s book, but I would struggle with any textbook. It is difficult to understand in spots but has a lot of valuable information also. Even if you did not read anymore of the text, there are valuable appendices in the back.

I hope you keep your books and hang in there.

6

Lukas, quite the opposite, I’m relying on you to keep me going. When you ponder the sentences for reading, I’m doing the same thing, and I’m studying the thread of discussion.

7

Maybe you should also stop to think a little about your expectations. Human language is not mathematics. People use languages to communicate and also in living languages today we can observe that speakers usually agree on most rules in broad terms but certainly not in every detail. What is acceptable for one native speaker isn’t for another. One way to look at “a language” is to see it as the ensemble of all the utterances made in this language in spoken or written form. That’s the material a linguist/scholar works with if they want to describe the workings of a language. Of course, difficult questions arise already there: Will they include only a narrowly defined time span in their base material?, What about utterances by non-native speakers?, Only serious literature (whatever that is)? and so on and so forth. Whatever their decisions, they will face a formidable task. They are trying to create an abstract system of rules that describe extremely varied and at times even contradictory instances of a living thing that is evolving and being used by all sorts of people recflecting their heterogeneity.

This won’t be possible with a set of simple rules. If we stay within the boundaries of traditional grammar, we find that the best extremely competent people could come up with are lots and lots of intricate rules with probably even more exceptions. The full set of those can be very helpful to the scholar who already knows their way around a language. But you cannot teach them like this to a beginner. The creator of a textbook faces yet another difficult task. They need to simplify without distorting and they need to focus on the most important things rather than lose their way in a web of rare details. And different textbook authors will make different choices about how and what to explain at what point in how much detail. Any textbook will only get you so far as to have a basic understanding of the most common phenomena you will encounter in the wild. At some point you will have to accept the fact that surpises will be waiting for you that were not covered in the textbook: exceptions to many rules, dubious passages that are hard to interpret and scholars have been arguing about for centuries, bad transmission of texts that make all the above mentioned points even more difficult.

But that’s no reason to lose heart. Finish your textbook, be sure to study what you need to study but keep an open mind. Be prepared to find new and surprising things not covered by your rules and also to go wrong sometimes. Don’t stop asking people with more experience for their advice and use your best judgement in interpreting the text in front of you. :slight_smile:

8

Neither of these textbooks are grammars nor should you expect them to be. They are to set the beginning student on the right path. It wouldn’t be helpful to students to aim for a comprehensive and detailed approach on every issue. Such a textbook would become unwieldy and self-defeating. Students would get lost in the woods. Dickey in her Prose Composition book warns her readers about the exceptions, often not mentioned, to the rules she presents. She even places this warning on its own page in capitalised bold letters.

Mastronarde’s presentation of the “position” of the objective/subjective genitive accords with that in CGCG p 332-333

"Attributive Genitives
28.15 Most attributive genitives (—»30.28-9; e.g. possessive’, Subjective’, objective’
genitives) can occur in both positions:

ό δήμος ό των Αθηναίων. the Athenian people
ο δήμος των Αθηναίων the Athenian people
το Παυσανίου μίσος . the hatred of Pausanias
το μίσος των Λακεδαιμονίων the hatred of the Spartans

Note 1: The difference between the two constructions appears to be that in attributive
position, the genitive is presented as (more) vital for the identification of the head noun (for
example, when the Athenian people are contrasted with another people, the attributive
position will be used). But often the distinction is slight. Also —>60.15."

But you see even here there is a qualifying “most”.

H&Q’s presentation is a little contradictory. They claim that one can make a distinction between the two on the basis of attributive / predicative position yet also claim “Context usually allows one to determine whether such a genitive is subjective or objective.” If the former were a hard and fast rule the latter statement would not be needed.

It’s easy to carp about textbooks and their mistakes, even venerable grammars are not without errors. Dickey has a short list of the errors in Smyth. Everyone makes mistakes. I am sure, mirabile dictu, even MWH has made a few…

It’s a sign, Katalogon, of your progress in mastering Greek that you notice these inconsistencies. I doubt it’s worth expending so much effort on such a small issue. Just because a book gets something wrong or isn’t very clear doesn’t invalidate all the good things that it has to say.

9

If ever there’s conflict between H&Q and Mastronarde, follow Mastronarde. He knows Greek better than almost anyone. Admittedly the comprehensiveness of his treatment does not make things easy.

Smyth is an authoritative grammar (essentially German), but shows its age, and now we have the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (essentially Dutch) that seneca references. That should displace Smyth for most purposes, though as “Classical” acknowledges it’s more restricted in range.

10

Just get through Mastronarde fast (4-6 months, 2 if you can, 1 if you can) and start reading as much as you can as soon as you’re done. You’ll never need a textbook again.

11

I’m glad somebody stated this expressly. Not so much here, but on other forums and Facebook, I hear people saying “Well, I worked through this beginning text, and then I did this one, and now I’m reviewing the first one.” My response is always "Why? Keep them for reference, sure, but read, read, and read some more actual text. That’s how you get good at the language. Composition, attempts at a “conversational” approach can be helpful supplements, but engaging what actual ancient authors wrote is the main thing.

12

mwh on Mastronarde:

He knows Greek better than almost anyone. Admittedly the comprehensiveness of his treatment does not make things easy.

Mastronarde is like your wise old dad. All the things he tells you are valuable; later on you will see just how valuable. But at a certain point you’ve got to get out and start living life on your own. Then, if you’re smart, you’ll go back from time to time and seek his advice on some things. Eventually, almost everything he says will make sense to you.

Mark Twain:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

13

I agree that texts need to be tackled as soon as that’s practicable. Indeed Mastronarde suggests Lysias 1. and then Plato Apology on his accompanying website http://atticgreek.org/downloads/downloads.html.

I am sure you don’t believe Barry that it is right to encourage anyone to attempt to go through Mastronarde as a beginner in 2 or 1 months, let alone 6. I thought Kurma was joking but as you seem to be taking him at face value, I thought I would post something. M. does in my view need additional reading material - something like Athenaze would be great but its a dense book which repays close attention and rereading not rushing.

You are right however that the forum is too full of plans to do things. All that is required is steady patient application and that’s hard enough without overwhelming oneself with ambitious long term plans.

14

Oh, I wasn’t focusing on the time frame – I am not familiar with Mastronarde except what I’ve heard about him on Textkit. I simply meant yes, get through your beginning text in as timely a fashion as possible and then launch!

15

I also don’t know about the speed (the consistency is more important), but also want to recommend reading actual Greek as soon as possible (by the time the the aorist and participles have been covered, you’re probably ready to dive in, frankly).

I’ve been focusing on just reading stuff for the last year, and am constantly surprised by how much my comprehension has improved. In the meantime, I’ve pretty much ‘forgotten’ all the grammar I have learnt. But then again, I hardly know anything about English grammar either.

In short, I have no idea what an obnoxious generative is, but I can understand ‘ό δήμος ό των Αθηναίων’ well enough.

16

Andriko,
FYI, an obnoxious generative (unlike an objective genitive, a well-defined and sometimes useful grammatical term) is a Chomskian formula that generates such sentences as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It’s obnoxious inasmuch as it’s very irritating, obviously.

But seriously, you must make sure you don’t really forget your grammar, even if you forget the terminology. Your reading competence depends on it.

17

I quite agree mwh. I shouldn’t be too flippant!

18

I would not toss H&Q quite yet. It is a good textbook albeit with some flaws. Translation from Attic Greek to English (or any other language) is more of an art form than a science. For instance, Ἐρυθρὰ θάλαττα can be translated as Red Sea (meaning the modern Persian Gulf), the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Erythras (a king mentioned in Persian mythology). I am part of a study group on the Kosmos Society website and I have found that translation is very frustrating be it Attic to English or English to Attic. Once I begin to think in Attic (admittedly more of a pipe dream than anything else) I suppose that translation shall become easier.

19

Mastronarde has 42 chapters, somewhere about chapter 33, I began to dread turning the page to a new complexity, especially since the previous-learned precepts and paradigms faded from memory so quickly.

So, I made a trial of Plato, but it was like hitting a wall, reminding me of the experience of encountering Flaubert in an undergrad French course. So I put Plato aside for the time being, and more or less by chance, took up the NT, with the gospel of John. I worked my way through John, and now I’m well into Acts. I’ll get back to Plato some day, if I’m given the time and old age doesn’t take away my brain. I’m a history guy, and there’s no question that the NT is a historically significant book. So there is much for a history guy to think about.

When Flaubert humbled me, I turned to the Simenon Maigret crime novels, and read dozens of them, one after the other. They were the first unadapted French fiction that I could sight-read. Eventually I turned back to Flaubert and Proust, and to other classic French novelists. So, hopefully, I can make this work again with Greek.

20

I found a similar issue, and found that it helped to slow down the pace I was working through the text book a little bit, but in the end I just pressed on and didn’t worry if some details escaped me. The stuff in those last chapters is (if I remember), stuff that doesn’t actually come up so often as to be a major impediment to reading Greek.

What really helped was pushing through it, then working through Dickey’s ‘Greek Composition’ for a few chapters (I got to about chapter 7 when time got in my way), and always having Morewood’s Greek Grammar on me if I was commuting somewhere.

As for Plato - did you try starting with shorter dialogues? I first read Euthyphro, and also Crito and half of Helm’s annotated ‘Apology’. I think they are approachable with patience, and am now slowly working through Symposium (time in the way once again), and the biggest issue with Plato is the varied vocabulary more than anything.

A lot of the later chapters of Mastronarde come into their own when you are using them in wild Greek, in my experience.