One of the biggest obstacles to fluent Ancient Greek reading I have come up against, as I have progressively tackled harder and harder texts inside the Attic Greek corpus, has been ellipsis and laconic syntax in general.
One of the ways I have found to address this issue has been to add scholia into the margins of the texts that flesh out the sentences. Often times the missing elements are contained in the sentences preceding the problematic areas. Simply being able to find/guess the verb and insert it at the right point in the text is key and has untangled a lot of the mess blocking my fluency.
Thus the need for more varied and continuous reading.
If ever a comprehensive input method is developed for Ancient Greek, beyond that provided by Athenaze or Rouse’s program, it will definitely need to find a way of introducing points when ellipsis is commonly used and try and give the reader an instinct for this.
It makes me wonder; since ellipsis is employed so often in attic Greek, I wonder if Hellenic society permitted more opportunities for situations where people would finish each others sentences, which in English is considered annoying and relegated to the activity of lovers.
[quote=“mahasacham”]One of the biggest obstacles to fluent Ancient Greek reading I have come up against, as I have progressively tackled harder and harder texts inside the Attic Greek corpus, has been ellipsis and laconic syntax in general. /quote]
Certainly if your compare Attic Tragedy to NT narrative (gospels) you will find Tragedy riddled with riddles of that sort. Classical historical narrative is somewhat less prone to leave things out but when you come upon long discourses by participants the difficulty goes up substantially. Some discourses are highly redundant so that a missing element in one part can be supplied from another part. So the the best idea is to not stop for long when you are looking for something to fill in but read on to see if the whole discourse is coherent when it is finished.
I agree with your ideas about making notations. Been doing that for decades.
Above all, they loved to emend those texts. How those famous scholars vied with one another in that esoteric parlour-game! How they conjured with syllables, transposed lines, inverted letters, in the hope of finding themselves immortalised, in the apparatus criticus of their successors, with that noblest of epitaphs ‘emendatio palmaris’! When I first read the Greek tragedians, I was adjured to marvel at those brilliant tours de force which had made the names of Bentley and Porson and were still regularly continued, as a ritual exercise, in the pages of the Classical journals. Now (I am afraid) I view these ingenious reconstructions with considerable scepticism. My scepticism began when I had my own writings copied by a typist. > The most regular error of any typist, I then discovered, was to jump from one word to the same word repeated a line or so later, omitting the intermediate text and thus making nonsense of the whole passage. > Clearly, in such circumstances, no amount of textual tinkering can restore the original text. Assuming, as I do, that a certain common humanity links a modern typist with a monastic copyist of the Dark or Middle Ages, I now assume that such omissions are the cause of many corruptions in ancient manuscripts, and ingenious conjecture is effort wasted.
–Hugh Trevor-Roper via Laudator Temporis Acti.
That must be true to point as far as prose is concerned, but in poetry with more complex meters (e.g. Choruses in tragedy) the meter is a check against omissions of this sort, as the same metrical scheme is repeated and one can notice if something is missing. In these instances, the apparatus has “lacuna posited by Bentley”, or something to that effect. 