Anonyma from Epigrammata Graeca

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
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Joel - The last thing you need is another suggestion. So here it is :laughing:. Really more a question than a suggestion, though.

Why do people voluntarily learn ancient Greek? At one extreme, for the language itself. Some people simply enjoy mastering a foreign language and happen to pick ancient Greek as an especially cool one to learn. They seem more driven by the self-satisfaction of mastering the language than by any particular author or subject-area interest (epic, tragedy, philosophy, history, …). At the opposite extreme, some badly want to read Plato, or the New Testament, or tragedy, or whatever in the original language, enough to endure the drudgery it takes to do so. For most of the hundreds of ancient Greek students and autodidacts I’ve known (including myself), it seems to be a mix of the two.

In the years I’ve enjoyed “following” you on Textkit, it has always seemed to me that you are an example of the first. Your goal seems to be to eventually become fluent enough to be able to randomly pick a piece of Greek (say an anonymous epigram) and have the self-satisfaction of reading it “like English”. And you seem to be fixated on measuring your progress to that end; you would even prefer to chart it quantitatively. If you have a special passion for a particular author or genre, I’m not aware of it (which is not to say you don’t have a wide range of interests, which I’m often instructed and/or entertained by).

Which is fine. Personally, I think the anticipation of reading ancient Greek “like English” is an illusion, and I am fortified in this belief reading Michael’s description of how he reads a tragedy “for fun”, and how he would read a newly discovered tragedy, and the reasons in general why with ancient Greek we are often seeing/reading through a grass darkly. But certainly regardless of what our individual end goals are, we all want to become as fluent as possible.

So my question would be, have I described your goal in learning ancient Greek at all accurately?

And would you be willing to at least consider reorienting your strategy as follows?: Pick a work or part of a work of moderate length that you’re especially interested in, and make it your goal to master it (as far as one can, seeing it through a glass darkly). Not to improve your Greek, but to master the work (obviously the former will also happen). Take whatever time and make whatever effort it requires to do this. Use all the resources at your disposal - LSJ, Smyth, commentary (ies), a translation as a last resort - just as any of us would have to. Come back and tell us, not how you have improved your mastery of the passive forms, but what your understanding is of the content and literary style of the Theaetetus (for example).

Just a thought.

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This point is vastly overstated and I really do not think it should be leveraged to assure jeidsath that the only reason he does not feel any comfort or clarity reading Greek is because it’s entirely impossible. (Which, I believe, is the implication underlying your message)

Actually I can’t understand why mwh posted that at all in amongst a number of his posts which remonstrate Joel’s elementary mistakes.

The truth is that we face cognitive problems even when processing English text. (This particularly obvious, when reading poetry, for example.) Of course a new Greek tragedy would come with enormous challenges, principal among them textual issues. It is these, rather than corpus size, which make tragedies hard in my opinion (pace mwh); particularly “thoroughly” edited ( :unamused: ) tragedies are not necessarily that hard.

jeidsath can go infinitely further - a fact about which no-one is more vocal than mwh - before he should be hearing people expounding their opinions on the limits of possible fluency in ancient Greek. The main gist of most posts above has rightly been to point out that it is not “the anticipation of reading ancient Greek ‘like English’” which is an illusion, but jeidsath’s mistaken belief that he is able to do this (or has even taken substantial strides towards doing this) with Plato but cannot now transfer that to verse.

I highly commend Sean’s excellent first post above and would say that more judicious choice of training text is not Joel’s (main) problem.

Composition practice needs to be taken seriously until the grammar is completely mastered. However this happens, it has to happen. All of that ‘comprehensible input is everything’ stuff will be found to hold no water. (If you wish to make a test of this, I propose an experiment to those of you who are essentially fluent in Latin but with little to no experience of Italian: you should be able to understand Italian with little effort already, after a bit of practice to adjust to the accent; see how far you get purely listening to lots of Italian, and then try speaking and tell me which of these you felt most impacted your Italian.)

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… reading Greek is because it’s entirely impossible. (Which, I believe, is the implication underlying your message)
That’s neither what I explicitly said nor implicitly meant. But let’s not make a big deal about it.

Randy

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This is still continuing?

Hylander was mistaken to think that I can’t recognize active from passive automatically. What I said that was that it not internalized. These are two different things. My form recognition is decent enough. But when listening or reading, I sometimes need a second or third re-listen or re-read before I notice the exact force of the verb. This is especially a problem when I am reading beyond my comfort zone, as here. I have drilled the forms more than most classical students, I suspect.

Randy and Sean’s advice on how to suck eggs is not well-considered. They think that because I’ve been trying to read large amounts of texts without looking up words since late August (not even three months) that I have never used the LSJ or commentaries to master a text? This leap of ilogic is bizarre to me. Their other advice is similar.

Callisper makes the claim that “jeidsath’s mistaken belief that he is able to do this (or has even taken substantial strides towards doing this) with Plato but cannot now transfer that to verse.” Callisper’s mistaken belief that I have said that I have made “substantial strides” to reading Plato like English makes me suspect his English-language reading comprehension. And still, I imagine that if I were to spend a couple of weeks reading epigrams, they would be immensely more understandable. In fact, it would be surprising if this were not the case.

It would be wrong to lock this thread to give myself the last word. So if Hylander, or Paul, or mwh, wishes to have it they may, as I consider them personal friends, and I hope that they feel the same towards me. Though I also hope that they have already said what they want to say. Others will likely get any contribution shipped to the Academy.

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I will give you three final pieces of advice, all of which I’ve offered before, in friendship.

  1. Be more careful when you read or translate. Pay more attention to grammar and syntax.

  2. Use the dictionary when you don’t know the meaning of a word and even if you think you do but don’t understand it in a way that makes sense in context. You claim you’re not guessing, but that’s exactly what you did with γεγύμνασμαι – you guessed “stripped” because you saw the root γυμν-. But this word, especially in this context, has nothing to do with “naked”. LSJ is your friend. It will show you the range of meanings a word may have. If you don’t use the dictionary, you will not really learn words. Your attempt to read without the dictionary by – yes, guessing – based on roots isn’t working, as this exercise has shown.*

  3. Try to make coherent sense of what you read. If something doesn’t seem to make sense, go back and rethink it. Look up the words in the dictionary. even those you think you know. Don’t be satisfied until you really understand what you’re reading and it makes sense. Engage with the Greek.

  • I will admit, to my shame, that when reading I don’t often resort to the big LSJ. It’s too big and bulky, and the on-line version is difficult to use and often doesn’t work properly. I use the Intermediate Liddell and Scott, which is much more compact but has most of what’s in the big version though without cites to specific passages. (The elementary version is not very useful.) But I’m not a real scholar, just a casual reader of ancient Greek for pleasure.
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Everything Hylander says here is true and applicable. If I may supplement slightly…

  1. Be more careful when you read or translate. Pay more attention to grammar and syntax.

This is especially important for intermediate and above students. When you get to that point, you feel like you really know stuff. The tendency of the student at this level is to settle on the first possible reading that suggests itself. But ancient inflected languages are complicated, there can sometimes be more than one possible reading of a text (which context usually resolves to one), and authors can be tricky and do unexpected things. That’s why we need to be on guard and “pay more attention to grammar and syntax.”

  1. Use the dictionary when you don’t know the meaning of a word and even if you think you do but don’t understand it in a way that makes sense in context. You claim you’re not guessing, but that’s exactly what you did with γεγύμνασμαι – you guessed “stripped” because you saw the root γυμν-. But this word, especially in this context, has nothing to do with “naked”. LSJ is your friend. It will show you the range of meanings a word may have. If you don’t use the dictionary, you will not really learn words. Your attempt to read without the dictionary by – yes, guessing – based on roots isn’t working, as this exercise has shown.*

At the risk of beating a dead horse (well, maybe not big enough to be a horse, squirrel maybe?) I think there is some value in starting this way. Trying to figure out as much as you can and making educated guesses based on roots and so forth can get you a long way and help improve your ability to do Greek, but it can’t stop there. It’s a first draft, and then needs to be vetted against the available resources. Doing both also accelerates the learning process. There’s nothing like having an “aha” moment when you’ve gotten something wrong and corrected it, and then the next time you see it thinking “I’ve got this!”

  1. Try to make coherent sense of what you read. If something doesn’t seem to make sense, go back and rethink it. Look up the words in the dictionary. even those you think you know. Don’t be satisfied until you really understand what you’re reading and it makes sense. Engage with the Greek.

“If it doesn’t make sense, you know it’s wrong. Go back and rework it. If it makes sense, it might be right – check it anyway.”