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

Greek Learning Greek
21

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.

22

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.

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.

23

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.

24

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.

25

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.

26

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.

27

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 . . .

28

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.

29

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.

30

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.

31

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.

32

Thucydides is difficult. πεπονθότι πιστεύετε.

33

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?).

34

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.

35

Thanks for the verdict - that is very helpful.

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

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.

36

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.

37

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.

38

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

39

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.

40

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