From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 06:53:27 EST
At 11:11 AM +0000 12/8/99, Steve Puluka wrote:
>Thank you Blahoslav and Steven Craig Miller for bringing this back to the
>text at hand. As a beginner in Greek this is what I was looking for but I'm
>afraid I am only **beginning** to understand.
>
>Carl, could you explain a little about what goes through you mind when you
>say one reading "feels" more natural than another in the grammer? And
>perhaps how you would translate these two alternatives?
>
>How do you nurture this sense of feeling natural in the Greek grammer? Are
>there exercises or other techniques that you recommend for your students?
Steve, you really do put me on the spot with this question, but I think I
have said this before: writing grammars is an analytic and synthetic
process of carefully examining as many instances of particular
constructions as one can find or thinks significant and representative and
determining as precisely as possible how and why they work to convey a
particular nuance of meaning. But what I am calling a 'gut feeling' about a
construction one takes a quick look at and 'feels' that one understands is
a consequence of several years of reading large amounts of texts in the
language in question. I've been reading Greek since about 1952; in the last
ten years or so I've had a sense that I can read it fairly well and fairly
easily. What I think that means is certainly NOT that I have come to
UNDERSTAND the logic of all the different constructions, but rather that
I've acquired the 'knack' of semi-automatic conversion of Greek and English
phraseology back and forth into each other. I suppose this means that one
is understanding the "deep structure," but I've never felt altogether
comfortable with that notion because it still seems to me to involve too
much of an intellectual process and I rather think this is more a process
of habituation to syntactic patterns repeated an indefinite number of times
in sufficiently comparable contexts that the sense 'seems' to be
immediately apparent. Isn't that really how we learn our native language?
Certainly not by studying grammar books. Grammatical analysis is a
second-hand reflective approach to how we communicate with each other, and
often (more often than we care to admit?) it is a guessing game, a highly
speculative enterprise, one that is nicely suited to such a forum as this
one where people engaged with particular texts can share their slightly
different ways of analyzing a construction. I do that too, and I do it all
the time--but when I'm first looking at a Greek text that I haven't really
analyzed, I have a 'gut feeling' about what it is conveying. I think I am
right not to put too much TRUST in that feeling, because such feelings can
and very often are misapprehensions; one wants and ought, if possible, to
be able to analyze the construction in the text in question and demonstrate
how and why it works. Nevertheless, I confess, without feeling guilty about
it, that my initial response to the text is a "feeling" about what it
means--and I rather suspect that there's nothing unique in my responding to
a text this way. There's also nothing mysterious about such feelings being
more often right than wrong the longer one keeps reading Greek (or whatever
language): unless one is somehow fundamentally stupid--incapable of
learning from mistakes, the accuracy of immediate apprehension of meaning
ought surely to improve incrementally commensurate with the amount of the
text one is reading.
I hope that helps to clarify what I've meant, but essentially this is
something that can't be taught out of books but something that one acquires
through continuous reading of lots and lots of continuous narrative or
expository Greek prose (or verse). And one would be stupid not to consult
grammars whenever difficulties are manifest or the sense of wonder is
stimulated by a strange or wonderful turn of phrase; ultimately we really
do depend upon what we've learned from two millennia or more of lore about
the language passed on from one generation to another--which is why I can't
help being a little amused at the banter about some brand new grammar or
way of doing grammar: I think we do learn new things incrementally about
how Greek works, but most of what we know about how Greek works and how it
means is what we have learned from countless unnamed persons who have been
learning and teaching the language for many centuries.
That's my 2c worth, and I suspect, Steve, that it doesn't answer your
question at all, but it's an attempt at an honest answer.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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