It’s just another kind of a reader providing an original method of learning languages.
I really like Ilya Frank’s example texts. It would be worthwhile to create something like it for a Greek text.
EDIT: He has some examples in Russian-Greek. http://www.franklang.ru/index.php/drevnegrecheskij-yazyk/113-teksty-na-drevnegrecheskom-yazyke-adaptirovannye-po-metodu-chteniya-ili-franka
Those are Aesop’s fables I mentioned above.
I would not rely on something like this alone. I do like to try and and get the meaning without help first and using one these as your prime text is impossible. I would prefer a comprehensive grammatical commentary as with this you get to see the meaning of a specific phase but without any indication as to whether the translated phrase expresses a specific idiom that applies solely to those words or some more general grammatical principle.
Looking at a translation is often a help when all else fails and translating phrase by phrase makes it much closer to the original text is likely to make it more useful.
Overall, this something I find useful as a back up if I also had a grammatical commentary.
At the back of the Holden commentary on Themistocles (which dates from the 19th century and is very much aimed at intermediate students) there is a list of their Classical books. It had a large selection of grammar commentaries but only a handful of adapted texts.
As an experiment I had a go to see how quickly I could get to easy German texts from a introductory German text book using a well known booksellers “also bought with” list. As expected it took only a couple of clicks before I found loads of German easy readers. I did notice that the easy reading of Alice (with an easy version of the English along with a translation into German of the easy version) had several complaints about dumbing down.
What I did not get offered me is unadapted editions of Goethe with a grammatical commentary which is the equivalent how Ancient Greek is supposed to be learnt.
I looked at it, and felt that it was very closely modeled on the Morice. Some of the stories are the same as in Morice, but simplified to a somewhat lower level. Ultimately I decided that it would be redundant to read both it and Morice, and Morice was slightly better done.
Incidentally I’ve made some more audio recordings of items from Morice; most of the items #37 to 55 are in brand-new recordings here. https://archive.org/details/Morice_stories_ariphron
There are also recordings in my other items at Archive.org that I added in January but only got onto the player by doing a manual rederive task today.
I really think that audio is one of the best things to do with these adapted readers. It is realistic for modern learners to understand them by listening, which isn’t generally the case with unadapted Greek.
I’m going to look into the Farnell. I wasn’t aware of it when I made my recordings of the Phillpotts adapted Herodotus. Farnell’s is probably more useful for me, as my goal is to read Herodotus with a pronunciation as similar as possible to Attic dialect forms.
But why, when Herodotus does not use Attic dialect forms?
Working out a distinctively Ionic reading style for Herodotus involves adjusting the vowels to something slightly different from Attic, and dropping all h’s. I suspect that if I did so, it would be a lot of effort for nothing,resulting in recordings that are less intelligible, not more, and that the process would give me no more insights into Herodotus’s style.
The non-Attic vowel forms in Herodotus are orthographical convention probably amplifying a very slight difference between the spoken dialects. This is especially true of uncontracted forms contrasting with Attic contracted forms, as according to Horrocks they, along with forms such as οὔνομα and εἵνεκα, are probably in large part the work of a later editor.
It’s almost certainly inauthentic to read Herodotus pronouncing the rough breathings as [h]. However, it does preserve one more distinction that was historically observed in closely related dialects, and it is the way people do pronounce ancient Greek, over quite a large range of pronunciation systems. I think it’s helpful to the listener. The downside is that to be consistent, I have to recognize the places where πτκ would be promoted to φθχ in Attic and pronounce them as aspirates.
The main reason why I want to follow a consistent pronunciation scheme through different authors and spelling conventions is that I feel it is a better discipline to make sure I recognize two dialect variants of a word as forms of the same word.
I listened to the first story, and I think that it might be useful to give each story a few reads before recording, until you feel that you can really communicate what it’s saying. It should sound like a story, and words that fit together in the sense should fit together in the prosody. That’s what makes audio useful, you get all sorts of aural clues that aren’t present in the written text – writing is a two-dimensional medium, after all.
That’s exactly what I did. For the one you’re referring to, #17 (which I recorded recently; #11-16 are much older recordings), I read it silently on two consecutive evenings, and then made four takes in quick succession; the one I published is the fourth recording. This is on the low end for the number of repetitions that went into making one of my recordings.
I feel that my recording really does communicate what the story is saying, much as I suppose that you feel yours does. The thing is we’re using different sets of prosodic rules, so what sounds like an expressive nuance to me may sound mechanical or uncontrolled to you, and vice versa.
Your recording is generally good. It doesn’t sound better than mine to my ears, but I don’t have an objective basis for expecting other people to prefer mine over yours. You did pick one of my slower recordings. The pace of yours might be preferable. I can point out details in yours that sounded wrong to me: articles stressed too much and with too long a pause after them, for instance. Both of our readings are fairly dry and matter-of-fact, without the overt expressiveness that you hear in the recordings of Stratakis or the highly distracting attempts at expression that you hear in Daitz.
I’ve listened to most of the recordings you’ve put on line; if you’ve put a lot of thought into storytelling expression, most of it isn’t getting through to me. Wish I could help. Ultimately my audio will be useful if people like you, on extensive listening, can get a sense of how I’m trying to express the stories, and use that to help bring your own audio to the next level.
ariphron, thanks for the good reply. I agree our texts probably exaggerate the difference. And I suppose many Attic speakers read Herodotus too.
You are very kind to Joel’s presumption!
I hope it isn’t presumptuous. Ariphron has given me me a deal of good advice over time on my own audio, and I have found it useful. He listens carefully.
That said, I should be clear about what I mean by expressiveness. There is artifice – preachers often do this so that they don’t have to pay attention to what they are reading. Daitz unfortunately falls into the category. Stratakis does slightly, but his overall deliverance is so good that it doesn’t matter. For an example in English, listen to the sample audio from Griffin’s reading Gibbon: http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire-Audiobook/B00VXXUFYO/
Is Griffin paying attention as he reads? I can’t tell. He puts his artifice into individual words, and the phrases don’t communicate themselves. Here is Timson, who uses less artifice – is less “expressive” in that sense – but is in fact communicating far more expressively: http://www.audible.com/pd/Classics/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire-Volume-I-Audiobook/B00H58WV6Q
Ariphron, I listen to Greek audio in Modern pronunciations, in Koine, in Erasmusian, and audio in other languages besides. On Friday I listened to 100 Japanese haikus, trying to hear what they do with double consonant pairs and line-end syllables. (The answer is that they avoid double consonant pairs, apparently, though I’d give a lot to hear 夢人の裾を掴めば納豆かな spoken by a native. Line-end syllables are prolonged.) Your criticisms of my own audio are spot on and indeed are all things that I am working on – and will be for years, no doubt. What I said above is not based on unfamiliarity with other pronunciation schemes or even your own audio, nor is it intended to be anything other than useful.
Japanese has some very extreme phonotactics. The language does not allow consonant clusters, and I believe it only allows closed syllables in a few situations (with n?). I could look it up but I’m lazy. I just remember that Japanese was the example used when discussing phonotactics in the linguistics class I took years ago. That’s why “baseball” is pronounced besuboru in Japanese. Notice the consonant cluster (sb) was broken up and a vowel was added at the end to prevent the closed syllable bor.
I have to disagree with you there. From the sample, Charlton Griffin uses both pitch and rhythm to bring out parallel phrases and ideas in opposition, and nicely underlines Gibbon’s irony. He’s declaiming as if he had to fill a large room, for some reason, and so some of the words sound mannered, but it’s nothing I can’t get used to. I am not aware of any recording of classical Greek that is half as good. The Timson, by contrast, makes it hard to follow the argument in Gibbon’s carefully constructed periods: there are pauses in the middle of phrases that imply divisions larger than those between independent clauses, plus incidental phrases that are given undue emphasis, and sentences that sound like they’re winding down when they haven’t gotten to the point; while individual words are brought out in a way that suggests irony in places where I can’t see it.
This discussion deserves an update. I’ve made more recordings over the last month, including Morice (56-74), plus Xenophon’s Anabasis Book 1 Chapter 8, and also some adapted Herodotus: The Battle of Marathon from Phillpotts’s adaptation and the Boyhood of Cyrus (plus some other excerpts) from Farnell’s. All available here:
https://archive.org/details/@ariphron
The newest recordings reflect an attempt to make my readings more expressive and speechlike and less singsongy than before. I’m achieving this by trying to engage my whole body in sound production, so that gestures and posture can have a significant influence on the sound. There’s more attention to maintaining the purity and resonance of my voice, and I’m letting what’s comfortable for my throat and lungs influence pitch and rhythm almost as much as the accentual rules do. Listeners should appreciate the results even though the expression is still a little stiff, as the sound of my voice has become significantly fuller and more pleasing. It feels like there’s a big increase in the range of expressive possibilities due to changes in the tone of my voice, but I am not yet fully in control of the possibilities. Hopefully this goes a long way toward remedying what Joel (along with others no doubt) felt was missing from my recordings.
It’s interesting to contrast the style of the two adaptations of Herodotus. The Greek of Phillpotts is basically ordinary Atticizing Greek, and feels like a good translation: fully idiomatic and enjoyable, but with no strong character to its language, and the general impression is of prose intended to be read silently. Farnell, keeping much closer to the syntax of the original, lets the rhetorical flare of Herodotus shine through.
Much improved. Some thoughts after listening:
- (By far the most important.) If you use Audacity for recording, I suggest measuring the length of your syllables. Compare your ratios to that described for Finnish in the Quantity section (pg. 315) of Hirst’s Intonation Systems Survey of Twenty Languages. The PDF is online somewhere (or email me if you need a copy). You can find some of the examples from his list of Finnish words on forvo: sika, siika
- I enjoyed the added expressiveness, but you have also added stress. Listen to this, and note the tone, syllable length, and subordination of stress: Japanese speech contest video
- See this video on Italian’s double consonants: Double consonants in Italian. Similarly, the section on general vowel-consonant relationships here: Vowel-based/Consonant-based languages.
- Without vowel length and double-consonants, it will sound very flat for all verse reading (and good prose): Nagy’s Homer reading
- Think about oral posture. Right now it’s somewhere near the top-middle of your mouth for all of those nasal sounds that you’ve got. That sounds very un-English and all, but try moving it closer to the point where you’re just ready to trill your r’s.
Here is a list of all Reader’s I’ve found.
It’s a messy Excel file I just dumped info into. If anyone is inspired to, clean it up and re-post the link here.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98867968/List%20of%20Readers.xlsx
Just a belated (and probably unnecessary) note that your link is now dead.
REFRESHED LINK - READERS
https://www.dropbox.com/s/et6265rrbuo9ud1/List%20of%20Readers.xlsx?dl=0
I have been spending some time in the last couple weeks reading through and learning from old Textkit topics I was unfamiliar with. “Greek reader reviews” I found especially interesting and beneficial. I have a suggestion for another reader to throw into the mix, which I will do in a second reply. Here, with apologies to those of you who must be thoroughly exhausted with this topic, I’d like to add my two obols worth to the preceding discussion.
Markos wrote:
Love Greek, and do as thou wilt.
βελτίστη σὴ σοφία, βελτίστε ἀνέρ! If one’s goal is to read the unabridged texts of ancient authors (and maybe it isn’t), it is abundantly clear there are many paths to get there and no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Among the population of those who have decided to learn ancient Greek, there’s just too huge a difference in age (Bart: “I’m no schoolboy”; calvinist: “I’m teaching my 7-year old daughter”), motivation, temperament, profession, available time, previous L2 experience, etc. The best we who think we found our path can and should do is tell, humbly, what worked for us. Here I know I’m preaching to the choir.
Joel wrote:
Read lots of crap.
Bart wrote:
Why spend time on [fake Greek] when there’s Homer to be read (and reread) and Plato, Herodotus, etcetera?
Qimmik wrote:
Take the plunge.
Joel, first, I’ll go to my grave remembering that one! My own experience has kind of combined these sentiments. About seven years ago, in preparation for retirement, I decided to dust off my Greek and Latin and tenor saxophone of decades ago. The Greek and Latin went better than the tenor saxophone. My thought was, I’ll spend one year patiently working through the best resources I could find in order to bone up on my grammar and vocabulary, without worrying yet about diving into an ancient author. And, having discovered there was a world beyond Crosby & Schaeffer, I also had the explicit goal of making Greek and Latin feel more natural to me than they had (especially in the case of Latin) in graduate school. So for almost exactly a year I did just that, primarily with Adler (Millner’s recording), Ørberg, and Wheelock’s Latin Reader, for Latin, and Athenaze and Reading Greek for Greek. I stuck to my course, and I benefited from and loved all of these works. Especially satisfying was that, as measured by my internal naturalometer, the languages were feeling right to me. I also dabbled in other “crap.” How much I really needed it I don’t know, but I was hugely entertained, for example, by Thrasymachus.
My personal likes and dislikes: I love the artfully constructed and graded fictional stories of masters like Ørberg, while I’m learning or re-learning the fundamentals. To stick with Greek, I don’t find the stories in Athenaze, Reading Greek, Rouse, etc. “fake” Greek at all. They pass my Turing test. On the other hand, like Manuel in this thread, I have a particular aversion to adapted ancient text. At that point I feel like I should be reading the real thing. And I have almost zero interest in reading a Greek or Latin version of Harry Potter. That’s just me. In any case, at year’s end, I was anxious to take the plunge.
Joel also wrote:
One way to give up on fluency is to make the texts your goal instead of the language your goal.
calvinist wrote:
I think there is an interesting question that we can ask about graded readers of Ancient Greek and Latin: Is it possible to design a series of graded readers that gradually increase the vocabulary, complexity of syntax, and idiom so that by the time one has finished the series they could jump into an ancient Greek author and read it with comprehension at the first pass without vocab/grammar helps and at normal reading speed? … Of course historical background and context would still be needed for deep understanding … It would be difficult, but not impossible.
Kató Lomb once wrote:
Language is present in a piece of work like the sea in a single drop. If you have the patience to turn the text up and down, inside out, break it into pieces and put it together again, shake it up and let it settle again, you can learn remarkably much from it.
Mary Beard wrote in a piece in the TLS called What does the Latin actually say?:
People often imagine that if you ‘know Latin’ you can read more or less any bit of the language that is put in front of you (much like what you can do if you ‘know French’). It isn’t really like that at all. OK, there are some easy bits. A basic tombstone doesn’t present much of a problem … Why, I still wonder, are Latin and Greek so hard. I think it is partly that most of us, even if we have done our turn in trying to translate English into Latin, still learn ancient languages largely passively. It is both the plus and the minus of Latin that we never have to ask for a pizza, or the way to the swimming pool, in it. But more to the point is that > most of the classics we have to read in Latin, or Greek, are so damn difficult> .
To calvinist I would say, based on my experience at least, NO, NOT POSSIBLE. Not really even desirable. To Joel I would say, sounds nice … but, upon reflection, no, actually, MY goal IS the texts. Let me emphasize and underline and underscore that I’m only conveying my own conclusions based on my own experience. They don’t invalidate yours’.
In my experience, first, there’s what I call one’s “OCT moment.” I don’t care how you’ve learned the grammar, the minimally indispensable vocabulary, or whether you’ve worked your way through one or one thousand pieces of “crap.” There is still an inevitable and unavoidable gap between that and what you are going to experience when you finally take the plunge and for the first time turn to page one of an Oxford Classical Text or Teubner, with nothing on the printed page to help you except a critical apparatus. With minor exceptions, ancient Latin and Greek are, as Mary Beard asserts, difficult! What did you expect? But you know what? So what! You set out to learn ancient Greek because you passionately want to read in the original. It’s going to be difficult at first. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to do intensive reading over a protracted period of time, of course it gets better. But I totally reject the comparison between modern and ancient literature. Ancient literature is always going to be difficult. Take the plunge. It’s worth it. Language is present in a piece of work like the sea in a single drop.
On the subject of fluency. I think at some point we need to distinguish fluency from comprehension. They overlap but are not the same thing. I took two semesters of introductory Greek my junior year in college. At the same time, I took a lecture class on ancient Greek and Roman civilization and was absolutely astonished, as I still am today, at the “Greek miracle.” From that time on, I wanted to learn and understand as much as I could about those civilizations, as much as possible by reading the ancient sources. Of course I wanted my Greek and Latin to be as “good” as possible, but my goal is the texts. More specifically, I wanted my Greek to be good enough to be able to tackle without fear anything in the gamut from Homer to a Byzantine Christian Apologist. Today, I would love to learn to speak and write Greek (and Latin). I would have fun doing it and undoubtedly it would improve my experience in reading (somehow I doubt reading lots of crap would). But, first of all, I just don’t have the time or the time left to do that. And second, I don’t think this inhibits my comprehension, maybe just my speed. And I’m not into measuring my words per minute or lines per hour, for the same reason I’m not interested in an Apple watch to measure my fitbits - I don’t think I want to know!