…with its complex sentences that have different types of subordinate clauses and recursive subordinate clauses and various kinds of particles, check out the following sentence from “The Adventure of the Empty House” in the Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
Let me say to that public which has shown some interest in those glimpses which I have occasionally given them of the thoughts and actions of a very remarkable man that they are not to blame me if I have not shared my knowledge with them, for I should have considered it my first duty to have done so had I not been barred by a positive prohibition from his own lips, which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.
Too much emphasis maybe on Classical studies in British schools during the late nineteenth century?
LOL
Anyways, have a safe and Happy New Years everyone!
i have often asked myself why is the English from, say, 1700 - 1900 so verbose whereas the French of the same period is not. I then have asked myself could it be that the reason why Greek is so hard is that it favors the verbose form of expression that the English preferred to the simple form that the French preferred. I’m not quite sure Greek is necessarily verbose. I’m pretty sure Plutarch is but I could be wrong. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is certainly not verbose. I think the main reason why Greek is hard is because they divide the world up in a radically different way whereas the Western European languages (I cannot comment on the Eastern European languages), mostly divide the world up in similar fashions, same concepts, different words. Ancient Greek, however, is different concepts.
Probably the most interesting thing about learning Ancient Greek has been how much the whole process has made English sentences like that one far more comprehensible to me. I’ve always enjoyed classic literature, but there were always aspects of it that were challenging to understand at a first read. Those super verbose sentences with complex constructions that the Victorians were so fond of took quite a long time to get used to. Spend a couple years learning AG, though, and all of a sudden reading the same sentence constructions in your native language becomes a breeze.
My experience has been the opposite. I never had any difficulty understanding those lengthy and complex Victorian sentences, but whenever I came across similar constructions in Greek (e.g. like chapter 1 of Ephesians) I got totally flummoxed. But coming across this sentence recently in Sherlock Holmes was like a revelation as it enabled me to change my attitude to how (certain) Greek authors tend to write. So instead of seeing such sentences as puzzles (e.g. Where’s the antecent? Was it anticipated somewhere? Is this a restrictive or digressive relative clause? Where the heck is the matrix verb? etc.) I’m now trying to just READ the bloody sentences instead of analyzing them…and it’s actually not that hard to understand them, most of the time
I think one reason languages have gender is to help with this kind of thing - where’s the antecedent etc. In this regard, Greek with three genders and three numbers should allow more complexity than English. My native Finnish doesn’t have gender at all, which make it difficult to translate simple sentences like “Jack and Jane went shopping and he bought her flowers”. Not that you can’t say such a simple thing in Finnish, but you need to take a wholly different approach.
You can do that sort of thing in English without gender too:
“Jack bought flowers for Jane when they went shopping together.”
The sentence structure is completely different, but the story is exactly the same. I imagine the constructions would become rather cumbersome with more subjects, though. Does Finnish tend to avoid long sentence structures for the most part?
Well, I think you’re right, Finnish tends to avoid longer sentences. But there other possibilities for ”indexing” beside gender. Instead, we might typically say something like ”Jack and Jane went shopping, and the former bought flowers to the latter”. Finnish pronouns work a bit like the Greek opposition ουτος/εκεινος/οδε, and Latin has something similar as well I think (I don’t really know Latin).
Not that you need anyone to tell you how to read a text, but rather just to reflect on methodology a little bit based on what you said:
My usual approach to a difficult text is one I learned more or less by trial and error. I’m curious if anyone else uses a similar approach. Typically, I’ll aim to do at least three readthroughs. The first time, I’ll just plow straight through the text without stopping. The idea is to just get a general, vague idea of what the author might be saying without really trying to clarify anything or make any sense of difficult passages. The second readthrough is when I’ll try to actually break down difficult things and really take time to parse complex sentences, figure out what the author might be referencing in other works, and so forth. The really analytic stuff that requires notebooks and reference checking. The third readthrough is to attempt to read the entire text all the way through again without stopping to analyze in order to see if the thing makes sense. Usually by that time I have the text firmly in hand, but sometimes things require fourth and fifth passes to really grasp.
With complex sentences in Greek, I find this approach… kind of works? An inflected language really does seem to require a lot more analysis on the first readthrough in order for things to even be coherent at all. I’m curious if you or anyone else has a different kind of approach to dealing with AG sentences (especially long ones like your example in Ephesians), or if you use something similar.
It may also just be that I’m very inexperienced at reading AG and it will eventually be easier to sight read with a lot more experience.
