Sentence Length (wasThe Little Prince...in Ancient Greek)

Greek Learning Greek
1

It depends what your aim is and who your target readership is.

The advice that has stuck in my mind (gleaned from How to be a writer books) is that an average of 15 word sentences but to mix in short and long sentences.

After reading your post I did a google search to see what reason someone might advocate long sentences. The page I found basically said that short sentences set the reader up to expect a contrasting long sentence and the writer should use that long sentence to pack in a lot of action. I found that especially striking because I had just re-read Anabasis 1.5.8.

This section has 3 sentences. The first sentence is 18 words and sets the scene: A wagon has got stuck in the mud Kuros snaps that his highborn followers had better get the wagon free quickly.
Then comes a short 8 word sentence ἔνθα δὴ μέρος τι τῆς εὐταξίας ἦν θεάσασθαι. (“Then might be seen a specimen of their ready obedience”).
Then he hits the reader with a huge 61 word sentence in which he describes how the nobles round Kuros rush headlong into the mud with no regard for how their fine clothes will get dirty and the wagon is freed in no time. The very fact that this all happens in one sentence coveys the speed of action.

Of course it wasn’t Xenophon who decided where to insert the full stops but lets assume that the Byzantine scribes who did were able to guess where Xenophon would have put his full stops.

But Coderch is not claiming that Greek writers occasionally slipped in a long sentence now and then. When he says that the short sentences of the French original would not sound Greek if he used the same structure for the translation. He is saying the average sentence length in Ancient Greek is longer than French. Donovan also argues the same justifying his claim that this the result of Ancient Greek being a synthetic language: http://kart-hadasht.co.uk/anc/greeklang/greekcomp.php#sec2.

I calculate the average sentence length of the first book of Xenophon’s Anabasis as 24 words so on the face of it Coderch and Donovan are right.

But just because advice-to-writers books recommend a sentence average of 15 words doesn’t mean all English writers stick to it. See here for some examples:http://countwordsworth.com/blog/average-sentence-lengths-of-famous-novels-and-authors/
However, even Moby Dick, by Herman Melville at 21 is well short of Xenophon.


But who is Xenophon writing for? Those in Ancient Greece who could even read were a small section of the population. But underlying attitude of Xenophon’s Anabasis is starkly elitist. Greek leaders who while outwardly pretending to respect democratic forms manipulate the men into doing what needs to be done win his admiration. It is likely that Xenophon writing for a highly educated elite rather than the average literate citizen. Long sentences are arguably appropriate for such a readership.

But Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote for children. Hence he used much shorter sentences. We don’t (as far as I know) have any Ancient Greek Children’s books but to me it is obvious that if one turns up it would have sentences appropriate for children learning to read - that is to say with short sentences like those of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry rather than the long ones of Coderch’s translation.

2

Demosthenes’ and other orators’ speeches have many long sentences involving complicated syntax that leave Xenophon’s straightforward narrative in the dust as far as length and complexity are concerned. The speeches were aimed not at an elite audience, but at a democratically constituted jury or assembly composed of hundreds of ordinary citizens with little or no formal education, and the speeches frequently appeal to their democratic sympathies and ideology. The speeches were intended to persuade, and they would not have been persuasive if the audience could not follow the long sentences and complex syntax.

Long sentences with complex syntax in an elevated and poetic style far removed from everyday speech permeate Attic drama – comedy and tragedy – which were aimed at the whole population, not at an elite audience. These people had been attending dramatic performances since they were children, and participating as choristers, to be sure, and the dramatic style must have been not too difficult for them, as adults, to understand.

Drama, as well as other oral/audial activities such as listening to declamations of Homer and participation in democratic assemblies, was the education of the Athenian people, even if they didn’t have much opportunity to read literary texts or even any formal education. Attributing the complexity of ancient Greek texts to the myth that they’re aimed at an elite, highly educated audience is false and misleading.

For the most part, the long sentences and complex syntax of ancient Greek are manageable because they consist of shorter segments that flow quite naturally. There are also many markers that help the readership/audience along: among other things, particles and the complicated morphology of nouns and verbs. The structure of Greek sentences in manageable segments makes sentence length an inadequate and misleading measure of intelligibility.

Modern readers need to master the technique of reading ancient Greek prose by . . . well, reading ancient Greek prose. At first, a certain amount of “decoding” is necessary, but as the reader progresses – by reading more and more Greek – decoding becomes less and less necessary, and the reader learns to take the words as they come in the order they’re presented, and to rely on the markers that guide the reader through the sentences. That’s part of the process of learning to read ancient Greek with a certain degree of fluency, to internalize the grammar (and vocabulary) and get beyond subjecting the text to word-by-word grammatical analysis. It’s essential to have the morphological forms securely under your belt.

The technique of decoding can never be completely abandoned, however. As any good commentary on an ancient Greek text will show, there are many passages everywhere in the corpus of ancient Greek literature that remain obscure and whose meaning is disputed among modern scholars who know ancient Greek backwards and forwards, and in particular many passages where the transmitted text is uncertain. In those passages, the modern reader has no choice but to fall back on grammar and dictionaries, and consciously analyze the words on the page.

The scholars from late Antiquity and the Byzantine era who added punctuation knew what they were doing. They were closer to ancient Greek than we can hope to be, and their education trained them in 4th century Attic Greek, not the language they spoke in the streets. They could probably speak a reasonably pure version of Attic Greek (using an evolved pronunciation). They had read an enormous amount of Attic prose, both from the classical period as well as from later Atticizing periods, much more than we can hope to read. Sometimes their punctuations can be improved, for example, by changing statements into questions, but in general the received punctuation is helpful.

3

I’m also not sure about Xenophon’s ideological bias in the Anabasis. Later, certainly, he became a Spartan apologist, but the Anabasis shows an army with a democratically elected leadership that generally exercises its authority not by force but by the same sort of rhetorical persuasion that prevailed in the Athenian assembly.

And what’s more, it’s wrong to assume that the Anabasis was aimed at an elite audience. It was more likely aimed at a much wider audience, not necessarily through reading, but through public performances.

Oral declamations were a feature of Greek life down to the end of antiquity. Even after the disappearance of democracy in the post-Alexander world, Greeks continued to enjoy oral performances. In the Antonine period, rhetoricians such as Aelius Aristides made huge amounts of money traveling around the Greek world and delivering performances, to large paying crowds, of epideictic speeches in flowery language that hewed closely to 4th century Attic, with long sentences and all the complexities of syntax – speeches that had no purpose other than to entertain.

X’s vivid and exciting narrative electrified the Greek world and exposed the weakness at the heart of the Persian empire, showing the way for Alexander later in the century. It undoubtedly was intended to reach, and did reach, many more Greeks than a narrow elite. It was one of the core texts that cemented pan-Hellenic patriotism.

4

Hylander has said it all. But just to add a comment on this:

We know how ancient Greek children learnt to read. It was how they learnt to write. They were taught the letters of the alphabet. (Sometimes they copied sentences like “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This has all the letters of the alphabet.) Then they were taught to write syllables. They copied tables of syllables. They copied from a teacher’s fair copy. Then they progressed to reading and writing lines from Homer. No-one wrote children’s books.

5

You’re right, the speeches of Demosthenes do not at all fit my argument but they were spoken and for native speakers the spoken form is a lot more digestible. And I do wonder whether the speeches of some of the other orators who were very successful in their day yet did not get their speeches preserved - Kleon for example - wouldn’t change the picture a great deal.
I was assuming that the Anabasis would have been read. If that is so then very few would have been able to read his book. Books were extremely expensive so most of those who had basic literacy would have had little chance to develop their skill. You may be right that I am wrong to assume that Xenophon’s works were not being publicly preformed. But are you on any stronger ground in assuming they were? Is there any evidence that Anabasis was preformed in Xenophon’s lifetime?
I have read that the Anabasis was written quite some time after those events and that seems to me plausible even though I doubt that anyone can really know. He did indeed support Sparta but Hellenica isn’t shy about criticizing Spartan actions when they were too blatantly tyrannical. His portrayal of the 30 tyrants shows him someone who rejects extreme oligarchy yet his hero is not the democrats but moderate oligarch Theramenes. His problem with the thirty is that they were so blatant about it.
Contrast the actions of Klearchos at the time of the mutiny. He promises to join them and organizes a democratic debate as to what to do next. But Klearchos the whole time is working for Kuros not the mutineers (even if Kuros doesn’t grasp this). The democratic debate is in fact nothing of the sort with the radical voices being agents of Klearchos. It is the form of democracy without the content. It is oligarchy dressed in the clothing of democracy.

It doesn’t seem to me that with a message like that Xenophon would be keen on his work being preformed and so giving the game away.

(I don’t doubt that the Byzantine scribes did a good job - It just that I was conscious that any calculation on the texts as we have them must be somewhat provisional.)

6

Daivid, you evidently haven’t gotten beyond the first book of the Anabasis. I apologize for spoiling the story for you, but let me fill you in.

The Greek mercenary army under Cyrus defeats the forces of Artaxerxes, but Cyrus is killed in the big battle, leaving the Greeks stranded deep in Persian territory. Invited by the Persians to a parley, Clearchus and the top Greek leadership are never seen or heard from again. So the Greeks are not only stranded, they are leaderless. They elect Xenophon and others as their leader and fight their way north through hostile territories, harassed for a while by the Persians, ultimately reaching the Greek colonies on the Black Sea. That’s the exciting part of the Anabasis.

Most importantly for the present discussion, along their way up to the Black Sea, decisions are made by acclamation of the entire assembled army on a quasi-democratic basis, guided to be sure by Xenophon’s persuasive speeches (in Xenophon’s telling), but definitely not under compulsion of an iron-fisted command.

As for the question of whether or not the Anabasis was performed orally, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t. As I mentioned, there was a widespread culture of oral performances of written texts throughout the Greek world in antiquity. It was in that medium, as much or more than through books, that people had access to the cornerstones of Greek civilization, Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, etc.

The Anabasis seems to have resonated strongly, and widely, with Greeks from all over: a brave, smart, resourceful and tough band of Greeks – and not just Greeks, but Greeks from many parts of Greece that had traditionally been hostile to one another, a pan-Hellenic army – working together in harmony and overcoming adversity in an environment that pitted them against cowardly, treacherous, weak and effete barbarians. (There’s more to the Anabasis, and ethnic cooperation eventually breaks down after the contingent reaches the Black Sea.)

This was consistent with propaganda for the Macedonians Philip and then Alexander, who held out the possibility that if they could just unite all the Greeks in a single commonwealth, they might be able to overcome and conquer their long-standing enemy, the Persians (as they in fact did, though not exactly in democratic commonwealth).

It’s safe to assume, with a high degree of confidence, that the Anabasis was intended to reach, and did reach, a broad segment of not just the Athenian population but the whole Greek world, through declamatory performances, as much as or more than through books. And the Anabasis’ story of Greeks vs. barbarians became one of the defining texts of Greek identity not just in its fourth-century context, but throughout Greek history.

7

Re: performance. It would be very easy to convert the Anabasis to a movie or TV mini-series script. If anybody from HBO is reading this, Anabasis could be the sequel to your critically acclaimed (money-losing) Rome.

Re: Sentence length. Given the heavy use of participles in Greek, I would think that the language’s sentences couldn’t help but be longer than in English. If someone wanted to write a very simple Greek story, they might copy Mark: καὶ…καὶ…καὶ…καὶ…καὶ… But I don’t know of any example of Greek without participles and connectives between every sentence. Do any exist?

And it was the remaining leadership class (which almost certainly included Xenophon) that was really in trouble if there was to be a surrender or a mass defection, because the members of leadership would be the ones to get the axe. Xenophon first had to sell the idea of advancing everybody up one rank to the new leadership class (a dangerous promotion if the Greeks were to surrender). After this, it was these newly promoted leaders, not the soldiers, that chose the new generals.

There is some art in Book III when Xenophon convinces the soldiers to stick with their new self-appointed leaders. It’s possible that the Persian king would have sold all of the low-ranking soldiers into slavery had they surrendered, but mercenaries might have been more useful to him than slaves.

8

The Warriors is somewhat inspired by the Anabasis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_(film)

9

How about sex? Can you imagine an HBO episode without abundant lovemaking? They would have to add a large number of female characters - I don’t remember a single one in the story as told by Xenophon! (Well, there’s Parysatis for sure…)

Participles and connectives: You can’t have Greek without them, and anyone who studies Greek will have to accept that, the sooner the better. You can have simple Greek stories with them, though.

10

There is plenty of sex in the Anabasis. The queen Epyaxa and her affair with Cyrus is the definition of HBO-worthy. And Cyrus had two other mistresses besides, who are in the sacked Greek camp. One is rescued “naked” by the Greeks. There are camp followers mentioned throughout. Their abandonment in the mountains would be quite the scene. The plight of the village girl, caught while her husband of one day is out chasing rabbits, is tragic. The dancing girl in book VI would be a sight. Hellas, wife of Gongylus, comes in only at the very end, but seems to be quite the woman.

Those are just the women that I can think of off the top of my head. There may be others.

EDIT: There is also the tribe of hippies that the army runs across who publicly proposition the camp women, and who are equally willing to have sex in public. Nor would HBO shy away from the gay captain with his special boy scout troop, nor from Meno and Aristippus.

11

First off: my claim that Xenophon used long sentences because of his elitist outlook is untenable. Wasn’t Aristotle nicknamed “the reader” because he read books at home which Plato’s circle regarded as a bit anti-social? If so, Xenophon must have envisaged his books being read out loud. I would still suspect he had in mind a small symposium of the elite rather than public readings along the lines of the performances of Caesar’s Gallic war but to claim that difference in audience explains the long sentences is on shaky ground (okay, if you insist, quicksand).

But really what I am trying to argue is that Greek with short sentences is still good Ancient Greek. Look at the example I quoted from Anabasis. Just before the really long sentence there is a really short sentence. Xenophon racks up such a high average because the long sentences outnumber the short sentences and some of them are really long. He does, however, include a lot of short sentences and that contrast of short and long sentences is very effective.
But it was a choice. He could have written simply using short sentences. Had he been writing for children he might have.

Serbo Croat has the same complicated morphology of nouns and verbs yet the books I read in that language do not have any longer sentences than English (true, there are certain highly regarded novels that I avoid and I suspect sentence length is one of the reasons I avoid them). Serbo Croat writers tend not to be keen on participles and if you wish you could explain the greater tendency for long sentences in the extant texts to that. But Serbo-Croat novels for children have very short sentences because even if complicated morphology of nouns and verbs allows a writer to use long sentences it doesn’t oblige them to do so. And writing with short sentences is the easiest way for a writer to make their writing accessible.

And yes you are right, applying intelligibility scores designed for English to Ancient Greek is not a good way to compare the two languages. But to repeat myself, w_hat is at issue here is whether Ancient Greek writers were obliged to use long sentences not whether they could_. As it happens, even in English, it is possible to write very long sentences. You can google it and you’ll find there are some English language writers that think its cool to write huge sentences (in one case a novel that consisted of just two sentences). Sentence length is a choice whatever the language.

I agree. However, what is at issue is how to achieve these desirable goals. In learning to read Serbo-Croat I must have read about a hundred novels for children. If I add up all of the Ancient Greek from the extant texts that I have read it would not come to a single one of those novels. Yet the time devoted is about the same. I have also spent a similar amount of time attempting to memorize vocabulary and morphological forms using both rote learning and quizzing myself - only that doesn’t seem to work. Only reading the vocabulary and morphological forms in context seems to work so we all agreed that the way to learn Greek is to read as much Greek as possible.

There are a number of ways of writing Greek that will enable a learner to read it faster and so ensure they get a greater quantity read Greek under their belt.

  1. Use vocabulary the the learner already knows. This really means high frequency words from the extant texts. Most modern textbooks make a heavy focus on those words so someone writing Ancient Greek today can be pretty sure that a learner will have encountered most of the most frequent words. This should be uncontroversial and as there are several lists available it is easy enough for a writer to avoid more than the occasional rare word.
  2. Use word order typical of the the learners native language. I think we can agree that is not a good option. Reading such a texts probably does help the learner to internalize morphological forms so reading such a text may help a learner to progress to more difficult texts. But I agree that this is something to be avoided as much as possible.
  3. Use short sentences. Whatever the language is in question, shorter sentences make it easy to read.
    So what is wrong with option three? Participles do make it obligatory to use long sentences. Take Plutarch: Themistocles 2.4 τούτῳ μὲν οὖν ἤδη πολιτευόμενος ἐπλησίαζεν. This has only six words yet has two clauses any it would be difficult to render τούτῳ as one word in English - I can’t do better than “to this one” and ἐπλησίαζεν really needs a pronoun in English. And what about Μολών λαβέ? There is a reason why laconic refers to the Spartans’ brevity of speech rather than their fighting ability.

(In the couple of days I took to think things through, this thread has taken an interesting direction onto sex in the Anabasis so I hope that this post is not now off topic)

12

Here’s what you could try. Get a copy of Dickey’s book on Greek composition and work through it from beginning to end without rushing. You’ll also need a hard copy of Smyth if you don’t have one. There are solutions to half the exercises in the back. If you put in the effort – and it’s not a small effort – I think you will find you’ll be able to read Greek much more fluently. In the later chapters there are exercises in the analysis of Greek sentences which I think you’ll find very helpful in internalizing the ability to read and understand those long Greek sentences.

Translating progressively more complex English sentences into ancient Greek in a structured format will give you a real command of ancient Greek grammar, syntax, vocabulary and idiom – from the inside rather than from the outside, so to speak – far more effectively than haphazard, naive and thoroughly unidiomatic efforts at writing ancient Greek such as in general (Bedwere is an exception) characterize the composition sections of Textkit. But again, this is hard and time-consuming work. Best go slow.

While you’re working through Dickey, you could supplement it with A LIttle Greek Reader, by Morwood and Anderson, instead of attempting to read other texts:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-little-greek-reader-9780199311729?q=morwppd%20little%20greek%20reader&lang=en&cc=us

It consists of short selections of ancient Greek prose and poetry with copious explanatory notes that illustrate the key grammatical constructions of ancient Greek. As you work through Dickey chapter by chapter, you could read the selections in the corresponding chapter of Morwood and Anderson to reinforce your learning.

A hard copy of Smyth is essential for anyone who wants to get to an advanced level in ancient Greek. But Morwood has published a short Greek grammar that very clearly and succinctly lays out all the really important points:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/oxford-grammar-of-classical-greek-9780195218510?q=morwood%20grammar&lang=en&cc=us

Again, it’s not a substitute for Smyth (or Goodwin), but it gives puts everything essential at your fingertips.

13

I don’t want this thread to be sidetracked onto my personal problems but I appreciate the time you have taken to give me your advice so I have posted a reply here http://discourse.textkit.com/t/advice-for-ag-study/15186/1

But I would be interested in your thoughts on the value of Ancient Greek written using short sentences.

14

I wonder if the concept of sentence made any sense to the Greeks. Remember that they didn’t have punctuation or even spaces between words (and of course a large fraction of them couldn’t read anyway, but that’s not my point).

  1. The sky is blue, and I really like it (1 sentence)
  2. The sky is blue. And I really like it (2 sentences)
  3. The sky is blue. I really like it (2 sentences)

In these particular (simplified) examples, the question whether there are one or two sentences makes sense only in writing. When speaking, you would probably use some sort of connective and avoid 3) most of the time; but in writing, English and other modern European languages use modern punctuation marks, which makes the connective “and” redundant here. Quite often, sentence length is related to this sort of thing in Greek, and has nothing to do with complexity.

Why is Greek then so difficult? A few guesses:

  1. Modern European languages, even originally unrelated ones, have converged, and tend to express ideas similarly, even if the words are different. This applies, among others, to English, French, Finnish, German and probably Serbo-Croat as well, although I couldn’t tell. Ancient Greek precedes this convergence, but already in the New Testament the language is much closer to what we’re used to. This is just my gut feeling though, I’m no linguist and I have no knowledge of non-European languages. [EDIT: I have (had) very faint notions of Sumerian. Compared to Greek, it’s a nightmare.]
  2. Even if we work hard, we just don’t have the same incentives to learn ancient Greek as we have for modern languages. We don’t buy groceries in ancient Greek, the police and the doctor don’t speak ancient Greek. Ancient Greek is never the means to achieve something else, but we have to read it for it’s own sake. When we’re reading ancient texts, we’re passing a large part of the time reading commentaries in a modern language. Even when the incentives are there, a large fraction of people never learn foreign languages. I have seen many intelligent people who have been in Finland for 5, 10 or 20 years without learning anything beyond hello and goodbye.
  3. What we call ancient Greek actually spans many centuries. There are small differences between authors, epochs, and genres, and we have to get used to them every time we start to read something new. Written English has been pretty stable for centuries, but I’m sure that if you take something written in, say, the 18th century, you’ll have to pause to think now and then. The meanings of words will have changed a bit, the constructions will be slightly different etc.

Short sentences: There’s nothing wrong with short sentences – I think that what’s problematic is so-called simplified sentences that are really masked English. If we were to translate μολὼν λαβέ into English, “Come and get them”, and then back into Greek, there’s a high likelihood that we come up with something like ἔρχεο καὶ λαβέ, which I think isn’t Greek at all, and that’s the sort of thing that we want to avoid.

Joel: My memory played a trick on me. It seems that the only thing I remember about the Anabasis now is the poison honey.

15

There is something in that. Quite often it is possible to replace a colon with a full stop but mostly the syntax is too complex to allow this. More like “pleasing to me was the taking-on a-shade-of-blue sky” or something. But yes sentence length is not everything. Xenophon of Ephesus seems to have just as long sentences as the Xenophon the writer of Anabasis but he is much easier to read because his sentences are syntactically simpler even when it isn’t possible to split them.

Coderch and Donovan very much do say there is something wrong with short sentences - see my initial post. Coderch is so convinced of this that he made the sentences of his translation a great deal longer than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s French version. It is indeed difficult to avoid interference from your native language and that danger is ever present for anyone writing Ancient Greek. But clearly Coderch and Donovan don’t think it is impossible to avoid that. They do however define short sentences as interference and that’s what I wanted to take issue with.

Why don’t you try writing something? You at least should be able to avoid writing masked English.

16

Masked Finnish is hardly better! I have actually tried occassionally, and I find it very difficult, as well as time consuming. I find it profitable if I can check my mistakes or have someone check them. Dickey’s book has a key that does the job, and I feel I learnt a lot by doing exercises there, but it was also exasperating because I made mistakes in nearly every sentence. I didn’t get very far, but I’ll get back to it sooner or later.

17

A hint in conclusion. The one unfailing way to learn composition–to which all notes, and lists, and books are but secondary–is careful, constant study of the great Greek writers. Whatever Greek books you read, always have them at hand when you are doing composition, and constantly refresh your mind and taste by reading a few lines or sentences. In this way progress will be made, almost unconsciously, with surprising rapidity.

–Sidgwick

18

Just take a look at the “long” sentence that follows ἔνθα δὴ μέρος τι τῆς εὐταξίας ἦν θεάσασθαι.

ῥίψαντες γὰρ τοὺς πορφυροῦς κάνδυς
ὅπου ἔτυχεν ἕκαστος ἑστηκώς,
ἵεντο
ὥσπερ ἂν δράμοι τις ἐπὶ νίκῃ
καὶ μάλα κατὰ πρανοῦς γηλόφου,
ἔχοντες τούτους τε τοὺς πολυτελεῖς χιτῶνας καὶ τὰς ποικίλας ἀναξυρίδας,
ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ στρεπτοὺς περὶ τοῖς τραχήλοις καὶ ψέλια περὶ ταῖς χερσίν·

εὐθὺς δὲ σὺν τούτοις εἰσπηδήσαντες εἰς τὸν πηλὸν
θᾶττον ἢ ὥς τις ἂν ᾤετο
μετεώρους ἐξεκόμισαν τὰς ἁμάξας.

The sentence articulates itself (with or without punctuation). It may be long but it’s not complex. Its structure is absolutely clear:
(a) ῥίψαντες …,
ἵεντο …,
ἔχοντες …·
(b) εὐθὺς δ’ εἰσπηδήσαντες …
… ἐξεκόμισαν ….
A bipartite sentence, actually two sentences: two main verbs, both 3 pl., attended by participles referring to the subject. Basically very simple syntax—not even a genitive absolute. The only difficulty is the vocabulary (and maybe the two minor clauses with τις ἄν, ὥσπερ ἂν δράμοι τις and ὥς τις ἂν ᾤετο, but those don’t affect the main run of the thing).

The Greek invites/encourages/forces us to read it bit by bit.

ῥίψαντες γὰρ τοὺς πορφυροῦς κάνδυς “tossing their purple kandus”
ὅπου ἔτυχεν ἕκαστος ἑστηκώς, “where each happened to be standing”
ἵεντο “they rushed”
ὥσπερ ἂν δράμοι τις ἐπὶ νίκῃ “just as one might run on the occasion of a victory”
καὶ μάλα κατὰ πρανοῦς γηλόφου, “and down a πρανὴς γήλοφος (a steep hill),”
ἔχοντες τούτους τε τοὺς πολυτελεῖς χιτῶνας καὶ τὰς ποικίλας ἀναξυρίδας, “having (i.e. wearing) these costly chitons and fancy anaxyrides,”
ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ στρεπτοὺς περὶ τοῖς τραχήλοις καὶ ψέλια περὶ ταῖς χερσίν· “and some even streptoi around their necks and pselia around their hands;”

εὐθὺς δὲ σὺν τούτοις εἰσπηδήσαντες εἰς τὸν πηλὸν, “and immediately jumping with these into the mud,”
θᾶττον ἢ ὥς τις ἂν ᾤετο “quicker than as one might have thought”
μετεώρους ἐξεκόμισαν τὰς ἁμάξας. “they lifted out the chariots μετεώρους (up in the air).”

We should be able to read it without translating, while picking up on things a translation doesn’t capture.

No Greek, no Greek child, would have the slightest problem understanding it. And nor should we, such is the nature of the language. There’s a reason there are no children’s books in ancient Greek. There was no need for them. Greek has syntaxis built into it. Of course parataxis is possible in Greek, and these two sentences could theoretically be split into six:
ερριψαν γὰρ τοὺς πορφυροῦς κάνδυς ὅπου ἔτυχεν ἕκαστος ἑστηκώς.
και ἵεντο ὥσπερ ἂν δράμοι τις ἐπὶ νίκῃ καὶ μάλα κατὰ πρανοῦς γηλόφου.
και ειχον τούτους τε τοὺς πολυτελεῖς χιτῶνας καὶ τὰς ποικίλας ἀναξυρίδας.
ἔνιοι δὲ ειχον καὶ στρεπτοὺς περὶ τοῖς τραχήλοις καὶ ψέλια περὶ ταῖς χερσίν.
εὐθὺς δὲ σὺν τούτοις εἰσεπηδησαν εἰς τὸν πηλόν.
και θᾶττον ἢ ὥς τις ἂν ᾤετο μετεώρους ἐξεκόμισαν τὰς ἁμάξας.
(The full stops could just as well be commas.)
But anyone who wrote like that would be laughed to scorn.

So as everyone has said: If you want to write Greek, read Greek, and if you want to understand Greek, read Greek.

19

You do realize that this is Stephen Krashen’s Input hypothesis?

20

I can get the meaning after much toil. The trouble is that it that when I come back to the same text and try and read it I am back to square one. When I read Xenophon the language part of may brain gives up and I have to translate and only then the fog gradually clears. Because I have to translate I don’t internalize so I don’t improve from this quasi-reading.

and from an earlier post:

Teaching children to read by giving them unabridged Homer is like giving English speaking children Milton’s paradise lost to read. That method must have failed in many cases. But in Ancient Greece it wasn’t much of a problem being illiterate. Maybe amongst rarefied circles round Plato being illiterate would have raised an eyebrow but even amongst them literacy would not have been held against someone who had shown his valor in battle and could play an instrument well. It’s not hard to see why such a poor way of teaching literacy survived. Scrolls were expensive so specially written books for children would have seen as an excessive expense. Hence, sadly, I should probably give up hope of an Ancient Greek children’s book turning up in the sands of Egypt.

Many children can still succeed in gaining literacy even if the education system is so dysfunctional as to attempt to teach using books for adults but many will fail. (I suspect I would have been among those failing). But before the printing press and before mass education no one would have felt that a problem.
After all any dyslexic upper class Athenian could have just bought a slave for that sort of thing.
(Of course the concept of dyslexia didn’t even exist until after 1880)


Yes, I love it!!! (I do understand why it is better the way Xenophon wrote it - see below- but by better I mean for the native speakers that he was writing for. What you have written is just the kind of thing needed for learners)

I don’t doubt it. My fear is that Coderch did not ask how to write something that would be useful to learners but how to write something that would not be laughed to scorn by Plato and his friends. And modern writers who write the modern equivalent of the Ephesian Tale are also sneered at (but such books still sell in much greater numbers that great literature).

I don’t write Ancient Greek to learn, I write to have something I can actually read. So I agree with that 100%.

But if nothing else, when you read as slowly as I do it is impossible to stack up more than a miniscule quantity of read texts despite much time devoted. Simpler texts allow more to be read and so more is learnt.