As long as the person is following a simple text with which they are familiar, as hlawson38 with the gospels, they should be able to pick up eventually that certain forms are used when a statement with a conditional meaning would best fit the context, etc. I am basing this on my experience with other languages such as English and German, in the case of which I did pick up the conditionals without explicit instruction (I had more explicit instruction with French, so that might have also helped me in that case). More importantly, this is based on linguistic research on how people learn different grammatical constructions from context.
To give an example, take Matthew 18:16
ὃς δ’ ἂν σκανδαλίσῃ ἕνα τῶν μικρῶν τούτων τῶν πιστευόντων εἰς ἐμέ, συμφέρει αὐτῷ ἵνα κρεμασθῇ μύλος ὀνικὸς περὶ τὸν τράχηλον αὐτοῦ καὶ καταποντισθῇ ἐν τῷ πελάγει τῆς θαλάσσης.
Anyone who grew up in a Christian culture will know that Jesus often makes this kind of exhortation. They will notice that the ending ῃ is often used with the verb, from which they will be able eventually to pick up that it is used in conditional statements in certain ways. The most important thing is, one does not need to notice anyting more specific than this to understand the main idea that is being conveyed. By progressively building on this, one will eventually get the full picture right.
I would not encourage anyone to read Xenophon in the way you did. It is not necessary “to analyze every single sentence by applying the grammar [I’d] learned from Mastronarde”.
I think I expressed myself incorrectly. What I meant is not that I was able to do it for every sentence (implying that I in fact did so), but rather that, for any given sentence, I was able to do so if I so desired. (I’ll edit my original post to reflect this.) I did a few explicit analyses, textbook style, for a few sentences, especially the ones involving more subtle grammatical points, but most of the analyses I did ‘in my head’. What I did do, though, was make sure, even if only in thought, that I knew how the explicit analysis could be done, if needed, for each sentence. Whenever I couldn’t do it, I would look at the notes for help, etc. That is what I eventually found out was a waste of time. Now I only read and focus on understanding, without thinking about the grammar. I might still be paying some attention to the grammar, but in a very implicit way.
I can think of nothing more deadly than going through entire books explicitly analysing in the way you describe.
Certainly! (Unless one wants to become a master grammarian.) I’m sorry I didn’t express myself correctly in the above post.
Using a dictionary is invaluable, not only to see the range of meanings a word might have, but also how the word has been used by various authors, particularly in different time periods. It develops a sensitivity to language that cannot really be developed otherwise.
I would argue that it can be developed, by reading very, very extensively. How were the dictionaries created, otherwise? In any case, I am not sure why that sensitivity is necessary in order to read and understand what one is reading, where ‘understand’ means ‘understand what is being said, and the immediate force of what is being said’. I agree that it may be needed to appreciate the text in its full textual richness, but that is a different matter than understanding what the text is saying. I mean, I know what you are referring to. I myself quite enjoy browsing through the OED or the Robert, a fine literary text by my side. But I believe that someone who hasn’t achieved yet mastery at understanding what a text is literally saying is not ready yet to profit from the kind of deep lexicographical exploration that you are referring to.
Your appeals to modern language learning are misleading. Millions of people speak and write English without any (or much) formal grammatical study. Far fewer can understand texts written in a literary style. In fact in the UK many authors are only read in University.
I do not believe that formal grammatical study is required in order to understand literary texts. What is required is to have enough comprehensible input from those texts, as with any other variant or register, dialect, etc., of a language, literary or not. I have read, for example, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and I am able to pick up any passage of it and read it with almost the same ease as a sentence from the newspaper. Yet, I’ve never studied the grammar of 17th century English. The reason is, I think, simply that I have read a lot of philosophy in English from the Early Modern period, including the other British empiricists and Hobbes. I also have the appropriate background knowledge, since my degrees are in philosophy. What I want to emphasize is that it is familiarity with the material and practice that allows one to understand the texts, not grammatical study. I agree that, for example, knowing about the background of the Theaetetus, and even having read it in translation before (as is my case) can be of enormous help in reading the text. (And again, for the gospels pretty much all of us have just the required background, in fact, maybe an excess of background.) What I disagree with is that one should use such resources while reading the text, or immediately prior to reading it. They should, instead, be part of a general, dare I say, relatively nebulous background that one approaches the text with. The rest should be inferred from context and through educated guesswork.
As has been pointed out on this forum endlessly, modern languages are different from Ancient Greek because the former has a community of speakers and writers with whom one can directly engage. Of course there is much to be learned form the methods of teaching modern languages but we should beware of making the mistake that learning a modern language is the same as learning Ancient Greek.
I would say there is a potential equivocation here. The process of learning, as a process that takes place in the human brain, is exactly the same for every language, ancient or modern. Just as REM sleep is REM sleep, no matter what causes it or the context. That process of language learning happens if and only if there is comprehensible input, of the right kind, in the right circumstances. What is not the same, of course, is the means of exposing oneself to that comprehensible input. In the case of ancient langauges, it is much harder. I agree that in this case, one may probably need to use the help of dictionaries or translations. For instance, it might be useful to create some flashcards for vocabulary with an easy-to-understand sentence illustrating the use of the word and a simple drawing. So perhaps I should clarify that my advice is not to never use the dictionary, but that one should use it as sparingly as possible, and to avoid as much as possible the memorization of vocabulary (which is different from avoiding the review of vocabulary). Instead, one should use the dictionary as a tool to put oneself in a position to give oneself comprehensible input, such as by creating the kind of flashcard I described, adding new sentences to the flashcard as one comes across other comprehensible examples, etc.
Being “able to follow the main features of the text” in the Theatetus might satisfy you but it does not constitute understanding the text. To read something like Plato with “not a single use of the dictionary, notes, etc.,” seems to me a waste of time. Texts are not single objects but they relate to other texts sometimes in surprising ways. One can best discover this through commentaries etc. Even if you could understand every word of Theatetus, without some kind of context in, for example, other Platonic writing, I think reading it in the way you describe gives at best a partial and probably misleading understanding.
I am focusing at the moment on understanding the literal meaning of what is being said, together with some of the more immediate layers of connotative and pragmatic meaning. I agree with you on the question of the textual richness of the text, etc. In fact, I have studied Plato in detail (in translation) at several points as part of my study of philosophy. But in my opinion, it is a waste of time to try and study those aspects of the texts, with reference to the Greek, before one has mastered the ability to understand what the most immediate meaning of the text is and what its main point, at least as far as one can gather from a careful, intelligent reading of the text as a relatively self-contained work, is. To me, this would be like asking that a B2 English reader who can barely read, say Orwell’s 1984, add in the Norton Edition of the text together with a full array of interpretive essays to it. That will not help them at all at that point, even it those materials are in their native lanugage. They are already struggling to even read all the sentences. Now they are struggling to perform a complex meta-analysis on sentences which they might not even understand.
Surely one of the main reasons for learning Ancient Greek is to be able to engage with other people (and texts) in discussing what the texts we read “mean”. Just reading a text without any benefit of other people’s ideas (whether from commentaries, articles or books) seems very limiting. Understanding a text involves much more than simply understanding what the words in a text “mean”. Understanding the grammar of a passage is a prerequisite for a wider “understanding” of its meaning.
Yes, the goal is ultimately to engage with the scholarly tradition. Some of this may require some grammar, as for example, even the discussion of literature in English requires some grammar. (I do have a close friend who got a 1st at Oxford in English literature who thinks that grammar is all but irrelevant to literature, though. But I understand that it is different with classical languages, since we discuss them of necessity in a distinct meta language.) However, I think one needs first to acquire a basic reading proficiency of the most immediate aspects of a text’s meaning, and to do so it is counterproductive to focus on grammar. To me this point is almost self-evident. Compare how much easier it is for any of us to read and think about English grammar than it is to think about Greek grammar. That is not, I think, simply because Greek grammar is more complex. Some aspects of English grammar are exceedingly complex in their own way. The difference is that English is a language that we are able to directly understand, without grammatical analysis, and this makes it incredibly easier to link the grammatical explanations to the language, since those explanations are elucidating what we already implicitly grasp.
