Anonyma from Epigrammata Graeca

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
41

I think mwh, Hylander and Paul make a very good case for why you should make use of the resources available to enrich your reading, and how to go about it. It’s not mutually exclusive with high speed, lower comprehension reading if that’s what you prefer. I may be wrong, but it seems like you consider commentaries a crutch for those who can’t work things out on their own, rather than the guiding hand of someone with a career’s worth of experience (who can be ignored or disagreed with as well, don’t forget).

I’m full of analogies in this thread, but to go back to your original post it comes across like a budding pianist who’s asked for help from a professional with a tricky piece like a Bach Partita, then when they meet he tells the professional that he’s never attempted the piece and is going to sightread it for the first time there and then.

It’s to be expected that the playing will be full of flubs, but are the mistakes useful? The limited time and patience of the professional would be better spent if her protégé had already practised the piece, read a little about it, maybe listened to a couple of recordings by other pianists and used that to inform his playing (lexicon, commentaries, translations…). She could offer deeper insight based on the bits the learner was still struggling with rather than pointing out the mistakes he could correct on his own.

I have nothing to offer when it comes to the Greek, but I suspect that those who do would be able to offer more useful advice if you followed up your sightreading with a bit of graft, rather than them having to wade through the flubs first. Then you could start playing your own interpretation of Bach, the sweet sum of everything you’ve thought and felt about it, which is surely more satisfying?

42

Don’t forget also that you are dealing with a very high register of the language. Think about how literary analysis and criticism is done in English. Now add the layer of an ancient language which we don’t have nearly as full an access as we do with a modern language. Using the full resources we do have available is essential.

Joel, everybody is giving you good advice. By all means, read through passages without using resources. See how much you can do. Try to figure out stuff from context without translating. That’s how I start with a passage I’ve never read before, and it’s both fun (if that’s the kind of fun you like!), and it helps incrementally to improve your Greek (Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Coptic… :slight_smile: ). But you can’t stop there, and you really need to go back and use your lexicons, grammars and commentaries to vet what you’ve done.

43

A couple of years ago I tried to read the Phaedo for fun, just to see how much I could comprehend through multiple re-readings. There’s a thread about it. It was fun and I’m glad that I did it, but it was hard going, slow, I had to skip many lines, and I could barely follow the argument after a certain point. Now, it reads pretty easily, there are a few words that I don’t understand, some sentences need two or three reads, but the argument is fairly clear throughout.

It’s only been recently that I’ve been able to follow Homer and Herodotus and Euripides without lots of dictionary and commentary work. I attribute this to an increase in language ability.

So I’m sorry, but Michael and Hylander have been giving me this advice for years now, casually predicting terrible things about my progress, and they aren’t bothered about always predicting wrong as far as that goes.

Further, the exaggerations about “always guessing” on forms, etc., are a little wearying. Sean’s advice is simply fatuous.

If anyone else has a better way to start off a thread than a quick translation for other people to correct, they should start out their better threads. And if anyone wants to give advice on my rate of progress, I recommend that they post a few attempts at their own unseen translations so that we can all level-set.

44

Charming!

My suggestion is in my example above - do the quick translation, correct it yourself with a lexicon, grammar and commentary, then post it to see if people can spot any more issues. I don’t see how asking other people to do the work correcting a rough draft is better for your learning than doing it yourself.

45

Joel, you bring a lot of enthusiasm to Greek, and I don’t want to dampen it. But I would like to persuade you, for your own benefit, so that you can get something of real value out of engaging with Greek, that your approach is not working as well as you think it is – your disastrously error-ridden efforts at translation in this thread demonstrate that beyond any doubt – and that you should do what everyone else is urging you to do, which is to take advantage of dictionaries and commentaries, and above all to pay careful attention to grammar and syntax.

I’m not hopeful, however, that any amount of persuasion will get you to step back and rethink what you’re doing, so I’ll shut my mouth, except to add that Sean Jones is spot on.

46

A few thoughts:
Joel is not going to give up his approach. He is driven by the constraints of time, the demands of a growing family, and apparently a profound belief in his method.
Hylander will continue to correct Joel’s mistakes, because he also is driven by a sense of responsibility for what is posted on this board and what he perceives to be the mission of Textkit: People should be able to come to Textkit and get helpful, correct and reliable information in the field of classical languages.
mwh will also continue to correct Joel’s mistakes because he too cannot abide something being published that is incorrect and misleading. He also has the experience of a lifetime of teaching (and learning) to know what approaches work and which ones don’t and knows that this particular method is doomed to failure. I suspect that someone operating under this philosophy wouldn’t have lasted a semester in one of Michael’s classes.
Approaching the other end of my life, I am keenly aware of how precious my remaining time is and how I want to spend it. Hylander and Michael are in the same situation. I think we should consider that when we make demands of their time. I’m sure Michael didn’t contemplate a retirement where he’s still correcting homework, nor Hylander having to work so hard to preserve the integrity of a platform he is deeply committed to.

47

Thanks to Hylander and MWH for their sobering, enlighening and relieving words about using assistance in reading Ancient Greek texts. They bear repeating.

MWH

If they use assistance, how much more do I, floundering seemingly forever in intermediate stages as I am, need to have assistance.

48

Hi all, this is a very interesting thread. There are two objectives at play, both valid: reading accurately, and reading naturally. I think all agree that they are not incompatible. Joel is trying to work on the naturally objective. Posting translations, however, invites criticism according to the accurately objective.

Maybe a middle ground, Joel, would be to represent the outcome of your naturally efforts in a way other than translations? (Plus, keep at the accurately objective in parallel.) Just a thought. I laud efforts at both objectives.

Like others, I sometimes read texts without support. I do this very slowly: the difficulty here is slowing down my reading, rather than rushing ahead when I start to stumble. The best way I’ve found is to write out a text carefully with a pen.

Most of the time I’m nose-deep in a text with all the resources open: LSJ, commentaries, articles and books on the content (on philosophical texts in particular), Denniston and others on particles, grammars, etc. I also regularly do corpus searches (in addition to dictionary work).

Sometimes I read the dictionary itself in short doses: this sounds strange but is really helpful (especially the OLD), and I look up all the words in the examples.

There’s no royal way; or if there is, I haven’t found it.

Cheers, Chad

49

I have worked my way through a number of grammars. I have put in a good amount of composition work. I have read with the commentaries and dictionaries, and know how useful they are. If, in my judgement, another read through Smyth at this time is going to be less helpful for me than a lot of reading, that is really my own judgment to make.

And if all of you, as you say, do exactly the same from time to time, then there you go.

CB mentions finding another way to demonstrate outcomes than translation. Haven’t teachers in other languages already come up with the answer to this? They use tests like the SAT language subject tests (or even the SAT Reading test meant largely for native speakers). Sections of text to read followed by comprehension questions. They are timed and done without dictionaries. If anyone wants a quantitative measure of these accuracy skills now under discussion, this sort of thing would be easy enough to prepare. I would personally find it useful for self-evaluation, as quantitative measurements of progress are hard to come by.

50

I have never read through a grammar, simply used them for reference (though I’m tempted to read through the New Cambridge Grammar if I can find the time). If you read grammars you get good at reading grammars. If you read Greek you get better at reading Greek.

51

Joel, why don’t you try posting translations of a few more epigrams or other shorter pieces using the dictionary for words you don’t recognize and paying careful attention to grammar and syntax, as well as to coherence and tone? Just to see how well that approach works for you.

52

How about the National Greek Exam? I think there are exams offered for Homer as well as Classical Greek. I know past versions are available, but probably without answers. It may be possible to sign up to take the current year’s exam, which of course would be graded.

53

If you want a test of your accuracy skills, you already have one at the head of this thread. You can see what a hash you made of that epigram. Such elementary blunders, and so many of them!

54

https://www.aclclassics.org/Exams/National-Greek-Exam

55

Sure, can you post one? I’m currently across the country from my copy of Page. As far as “paying careful attention to grammar and syntax”, are you suggesting something in particular? Like going back and double-checking each word one by one? I’m always will to try anything.

Yes, exactly like that. I’ve downloaded the Attic Prose package to see what it was like (only $10 from their site). A more advanced version of that would be neat.

Anyone who didn’t make elementary blunders their first time opening Page’s OCT is welcome to spill their secrets.

56

What has Page’s OCT to do with it? This is an epigram, not the first you’ve seen, and one that you chose yourself as being something you wouldn’t need a dictionary for. There’s nothing grammatically challenging about it, and it makes a good test of elementary reading competence. Yet you took ἐρῶ as meaning “I speak,” you took both πεπάλαικα and πείθων as passives—and much more besides. I don’t mean to put you down, and no-one is saying that you haven’t made significant progress, but any first-year Greek student would do better than that. You would have done better yourself if you’d only learnt the basics. You don’t need to work your way through “a number of grammars” for that, let alone to take “another read through Smyth.”

57

Other than what we’ve had threads about here, I’ve never read anything from the Greek anthology. And those, if I recall, were mostly a few years back. Maybe I am wrong.

I actually thought “I will speak”, not “I speak”, and wrote “no longer speak” because it’s better English than “no longer will speak.” But otherwise you are correct about my blunders. Still, why did I take both πεπάλαικα and πείθων as passives? How do I fix that? It’s nothing to do with not knowing the conjugations – in this instance – as I can recite them back as well as anyone.

My belief is and has been that they aren’t internalized enough yet. When I ran into a an unknown word, πεπάλαικα, and was trying to understand it in context with the surrounding words, I was thinking of wrestling, and the dative πόθοις τρισίν next to it, and the person, and that it was a current state, but obviously the active/passive character of the verb was not really in my head. (If you want to impugn my ignorance, I’ll give you a real example: why does a verb like that take a dative person and not an accusative? Is it because it’s a contest verb and not the action of wrestling?).

So how do I fix this lack of internalization? I try a lot of things, and watch carefully for what makes my comprehension increase. What has solved the issue on a lot of related issues is sensitizing myself to things that I am currently dull towards, generally through repeated exposure.

Paul asked something earlier that is another chance to talk about my ignorance:

However, you have attained a level of Greek where you should know that even if γυμναζω meant “to undress”, there’s no way that it could take a genitive object to take the meaning “I’ve stripped for a whore”; it should have made you pause for a moment and think about what was wrong with your interpretation.

I thought that the genitive was signalling that it was being used as a verb of pursuit. And while “undress after a whore” didn’t make perfect logical sense, it didn’t throw up alarm flags for me either.

58

Well, maybe we should all cool down a bit around here? This is supposed to be fun anyway! Different people have not only different methods but different goals as well, Joel included. I enjoyed the beginning of this thread, it’s a nice poem Joel found for us and it was fun to correct his mistakes and have mine corrected after that. I was also the first to make the mistake of turning this to a “what’s the correct way of learning Greek” thread, something we’ve been going through a hundred times before to little avail. Shouldn’t we turn back from “how to learn Greek” to just “learning Greek”?

59

I agree with Paul that he’s completely to blame and we should all just get on with our lives :upside_down_face:

60

Of course, Paul is to blame, as usual.

Joel, I think your last post suggests how you went wrong, and how you can do better. Let me make a few suggestions.

If you don’t feel you’ve internalized the forms sufficiently well to recognize them without thinking, then you really need to analyze verb forms – to think about the voice, mood and tense. This is an exercise that those of us who learned Greek in school did over and over, and that’s how we internalized the forms.

You should also look up words you haven’t encountered in LSJ. I don’t need to tell you this, but many words, especially verbs, have extended meanings that aren’t necessarily apparent from their etymological base, so it’s not always possible to get at the meaning in context by identifying the root. As mwh notes, LSJ gives you a range of meanings, along with grammatical complements and context. That will help you find the right meaning. In this instance, looking up παλαιω ανδ γυμναζω, instead of trying to fit the meaning with the etymological bases, could have made your life easier and guided you to the correct understanding.

I thought that the genitive was signalling that it was being used as a verb of pursuit. And while “undress after a whore” didn’t make perfect logical sense, it didn’t throw up alarm flags for me either.

But the fact that “undress after a whore” didn’t make perfect logical sense should have thrown up alarm flags. If your interpretation doesn’t make perfect sense, that’s precisely the point where you should ask yourself whether it’s right and analyze the sentence word for word.

The most common use of the genitive is the genitive of “possession.” Before attempting to understand a genitive as a complement of a verb to which it doesn’t seem to fit very well, it would be better to try to find a noun that it might depend on.

I don’t want to belabor this any more, but I think your attempt to understand where you went wrong is instructive and might help you do better.