καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Anything related to Biblical Greek that doesn't fit into the other forums.
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
I think this is very much a question we need to be able to answer for beginners if we let them read Greek texts. Participles are everywhere. But I think there is such a thing as a beginner-level explanation.
A beginners level explanation for participles reduces to a way to fudge an understanding of them by having a few clever ways to translate them. The explanations of how to really understand them in terms of the Greek grammar is not easy.
I'm inclined to agree with this judgment. There's a comparable issue in elementary Latin: Real Latin involves subjunctive usage in simple everyday usage but it is put off in the teaching of Latin so long that beginning students suppose only long-winded orators use the subjunctive. My first Greek was Mark's gospel, my first participial construction Mk 1:3 φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ. In John's gospel we don't confront it until `:6 Ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος, ἀπεσταλμένος παρὰ θεοῦ. Then there's Lk 1;1 ... διήγησιν περὶ τῶν πεπληροφορημένων ἐν ἡμῖν πραγμάτων. Shall we talk about chapter 1 of Ephesians? Which lesson in a primer of Biblical Greek first talks about participles? If we distinguish τὰ στοιχεῖα from τὰ λοιπά, I think that participles tend to fall in with τὰ λοιπά -- and yet Greek discourse is hardly conceivable without them.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by Stephen Hughes »

I think that my response in the Decker's alternate way of teaching endings is appropriate for beginners because it relates their knowledge of English to the situation in Greek. In terms of Educational theory thatt is called scaffolding.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4158
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Hughes wrote:I think that my response in the Decker's alternate way of teaching endings is appropriate for beginners because it relates their knowledge of English to the situation in Greek. In terms of Educational theory, that is called scaffolding.
Yes, that was good. And you clearly know a lot about teaching beginners and other levels.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by cwconrad »

I think the more serious question here is what we understand a "beginner" to be. I've generally thought in terms of someone in the equivalent of a first-year or first-semester classroom course or who is still working through a primer textbook and hasn't yet become familiar with use of standard reference lexica and grammars. In that sense Perkins is not a beginner. I don't think we have any formal description of what a "beginner" in Greek is. Some of those whom we call "beginners" are perhaps no more than "dabblers" who might or might not undertake the serious study of Greek but haven't yet decided whether they are sufficiently committed to what it requires of them; some of them want to resolve doctrinal questions of their own by trying to understand the grammar of the text they're worrying about but really don't want to know how and why that text yields the sense it does (e.g. getting baptized on behalf of the dead). At any rate, what gets posted in "What does this text mean?" may come from people who are well past "beginners" and from people who are not "beginners" at all.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4158
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by Jonathan Robie »

cwconrad wrote:I think the more serious question here is what we understand a "beginner" to be. I've generally thought in terms of someone in the equivalent of a first-year or first-semester classroom course or who is still working through a primer textbook and hasn't yet become familiar with use of standard reference lexica and grammars. In that sense Perkins is not a beginner.
No, he isn't. I do think we should move his thread and declare him a non-beginner, but real beginners will ask questions about texts, that's one of the things that draws them here, and we need to support that.
cwconrad wrote:At any rate, what gets posted in "What does this text mean?" may come from people who are well past "beginners" and from people who are not "beginners" at all.
Sure. And some threads (and people) should be moved out of the beginner's forum. The main reason for the beginner's forum is to help people who aren't really ready to participate in the other areas without disrupting them. And to focus on their questions and their needs.

To me, the most important thing is to stick with the person who raised the question and the questions they are raising. We can all hijack threads sometimes, talking about what we are most interested in rather than what the person is posting about. That happens in the non-beginner's area too -- I once hijacked one of Stephen Carlson's threads on discourse analysis because of some unrelated stuff I was working through on my own.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: καὶ τὰ λοιπά

Post by cwconrad »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
cwconrad wrote:I think the more serious question here is what we understand a "beginner" to be. I've generally thought in terms of someone in the equivalent of a first-year or first-semester classroom course or who is still working through a primer textbook and hasn't yet become familiar with use of standard reference lexica and grammars. In that sense Perkins is not a beginner.
No, he isn't. I do think we should move his thread and declare him a non-beginner, but real beginners will ask questions about texts, that's one of the things that draws them here, and we need to support that.
Real beginners will and so will pseudo-beginners -- particularly people who who want to assure themselves or demonstrate to others that the Greek text "proves" what they claim the verse means. It's not always clear at the outset, but I'm inclined to think the authentic beginner is more likely to ask HOW the text means rather than WHAT the text means. I suggest (tentatively) retitling the subforum "How does this text mean?" Perhaps we might even suggest that beginner's questions should focus on morphology, vocabulary, or syntactic relationships rather than how to convert the text into the best English.
Jonathan Robie wrote:
cwconrad wrote:At any rate, what gets posted in "What does this text mean?" may come from people who are well past "beginners" and from people who are not "beginners" at all.
Sure. And some threads (and people) should be moved out of the beginner's forum. The main reason for the beginner's forum is to help people who aren't really ready to participate in the other areas without disrupting them. And to focus on their questions and their needs.

To me, the most important thing is to stick with the person who raised the question and the questions they are raising. We can all hijack threads sometimes, talking about what we are most interested in rather than what the person is posting about. That happens in the non-beginner's area too -- I once hijacked one of Stephen Carlson's threads on discourse analysis because of some unrelated stuff I was working through on my own.
I'm glad to see you confess that you have yourself "hijacked threads." I know that I have done so and I think it's a frequent occurrence in the kinds of threaded discourse in which we engage here: something in the latest post piques our attention and we start talking about that particular item, whether or not it was uppermost in the post to which we're responding. Sometimes that's annoying, but often it turns out to be a creative and helpful tangent, as is the case in good conversation that rambles. There have been times when we've recognized this and split off a tangent into a new thread. I don't think it's very easy to lay down rules about how the progress of a thread must move -- but I do agree that where there's a serious query raised by the original poster, we ought seriously to endeavor to be helpful to the questioner. Yet we may have different notions about how best to help the questioner -- as when the question involves tense and aspect and participles, for instance.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Post Reply

Return to “Other”