Lexical chains. Sleeping and waking, working and resting.

Semantic Range, Lexicography, and other approaches to word meaning - in general, or for particular words.
cwconrad
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Re: Lexical chains. Sleeping and waking, working and resting

Post by cwconrad »

Paul-Nitz wrote:Bear with me. Try this sentence out. The verbs and nouns are nonsense but the forms and structure are Greek. What can a person figure out in this sentence? [/color][/size]

ὀνάνων τὸν γάρα ὁ μιπάκος ἐταμάγγασεν ὑπὸ τῆς μιτέκῆς.
Well, we have a μπάκος who was ὀναν-ing the γάρα when he ταμάγγα-ed under the μπέκη. The problem is: ἐταμάγγασεν should be an aorist active verb but there's no object -- unless the γάρα is a common object of both ὀνάνων and ἐταμάγγασεν. Another problem: ὑπὸ τῆς μιτέκῆς looks like an agent construction, but that wouldn't work with the active verb form ἐταμάγγασεν, which is why I thought it's possibly something under which the action took place.

This is sort of like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" where we don't know what the nouns and verbs mean but there is nevertheless a reasonably clear narrative pattern.
"
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Paul-Nitz
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Location: Sussex, Wisconsin

Re: Lexical chains. Sleeping and waking, working and resting

Post by Paul-Nitz »

Wonderful! You prove the point in spades, even seeing a mistake in the structure. Yes, I messed up the case -- ὑπο τήν μιτέκην.
I took the "lemmas" from Chichewa.
"Seeing the dog, the cat ran under the bush."
Paul D. Nitz - Lilongwe Malawi
Stephen Hughes
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Single word contexts, student questions, pidgin, restricted

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Paul-Nitz wrote:As far as giving clues, how about establishing meanings with a set form like forcing the next new word to be the last in the previous sentence?
I think it is effective because it still supplies a context for understanding the Greek word to come. In the case of this exercise, the context is generally one English word.

I greatly enjoy talking about this with you and get a lot from your ideas. Now, if you don't mind, let me share three pieces of advice that I got from my teacher trainers; not using pidgin, being prepared for questions, and not making things "too interesting".

One of the most difficult things about being a language teacher is to not create a pidgin or use illogical sentences in the classroom - but admittedly there were people in the 1960's who said that that was a good thing to do. I've underlined a few places where that might be happening.
Paul-Nitz wrote:
  • Today I rode a horse.
    ὁ ἵππος threw me out of his saddle today when I was riding with my sister {1 horse or 3?}.
    ἡ ἀδελφή of me was not thrown out of the saddle, but there was a child with us.
    τὸ τέκνον almost got thrown off, but was saved by a certain man.
    ὁ ἄνηρ came alongside the child {the horse?} and saved it. His {whose?} mother was happy.
    ἡ μήτηρ thanked the man profusely and gave him some food.
    τὸ βρώματα was a very nice fruitcake she happened to have in her purse {handbag?}.
The story is interesting and graphic. If I were to use it in a class, it would be really hard or me to answer student questions, if any arose.
I know that the verb "to ride" is the perfect / pluperfect forms of ἐπιβεβηκεναι ἐπί (c. acc. / gen. of the animal)
I don't know the word for throwing a rider or for saddle (perhaps ἐπίσαγμα (LXX) - pack-saddle, or ἐφίππιον (Classicall) - saddle cloth, saddle)
Come alongside is a great graphic image but at present I don't know how to express that in Greek using a word that implies aid.
Would "saved" be ἀσφαλίζω or διασῴζω here?
I'm not sure of the word for fruitcake either, but I think I once read about one in Aristophanes (perhaps).

These words presented in these sentences would need a teacher of a much higher callibre than myself to teach them. The idea of this diglot embedding is to give the students the (false) sense that the Greek words are not so foreign, rather than to allow the teacher to be overly expressive. I'm lucky, I teach my mother tongue - the majority of English (language not literature) teachers in the world are teaching English as a foreign language - but I have to bring things down to the students' level.

There is a tendency for teachers to want to include interesting things into the classroom to make the learning go along a bit better, but from a learner's point of view the target language needs to be the focus of attention - and that necessitates that the other things need to be a bit bland. That divesting of elaboration is something that most of trainee ESL teachers that I studied with (including myself) had to go through, and it is something that even an experienced teacher has to be conscious of. Choosing learning aims sticking to them and working towards them is a little boring, but seems to be the best way to get the desired outcomes. The learners should walk away remembering the words rather than the interesting story.

As a student activity, where they know that their classmates are not going to be able to answer questions, it would be great. It could be a restricted activity where students write on the board / say a sentence that ends with an English word, that another student has to recognise from a list (or memory) and then start the next sentence with that. Restricting the activity to a few dozen words would make it workable for students.

Your sentences are really descriptive and graphic. Perhaps you could incorporate visuals along with these sentences in vocabulary instruction together.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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