[B-Greek] Teaching declensions

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Jun 13 04:38:45 EDT 2008


On Jun 12, 2008, at 9:03 PM, JMonte2000 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 6/12/2008 8:56:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> Kenneth Litwak <javajedi2 at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> When I  learned Greek, I was taught things like noun endings, e.g.,
>> os,  ou, wi, on, e, in the second declension.  As I prepare to teach
>> a beginning Greek class in the Fall, I am wondering about two
>> things.  Is it really the case that the noun stem of LOGOS is  LOGO
>> and the nom.s.mas. second declension ending is S rather  than OS?
>> Second, is that really helpful to present the  endings as S,O,I,N,
>> etc.?  I'm thinking that teaching  students that a second declension
>> noun ends OS, OU, Wi, ON, E,  etc. is far better, not least because
>> you can pronounce ON for  purposes of practice, as opposed to only
>> N.  Any  comments?  Thanks.
>
>
>
> Hi Ken I learned them both, knowing that the ending is S from  
> LOGOS,  and
> also be able to recognize that it's OS. But the first one I got in  
> my head  was
> the S. I did that with all of them. That's Bill Mounce's method,  
> you'll see
> how he does it in his book, Basic's to Biblical Greek 2nd edition. I  
> liked this
> way of learning them.

While it may be helpful ultimately to know the paradigms of all the  
types of declined nominals -- nouns, adjectives, pronouns, that is  
ultimately a matter of understanding the language analytically. In  
that context, it's useful to know that masculine and feminine  
nominatives very often ending in an -S following a stem-vowel A(H), O,  
I, U or stem consonant, that masculine and feminine accusatives  
regularly end in an -N following a stem vowel or an -A following a  
stem consonant (and that both derive from an original -M that becomes - 
N after a vowel, -A after a consonant), that dative singulars  
originally ended in -I, etc., etc. --

nevertheless, what students really NEED to learn in the initial stages  
is how LOGOS works in noun-adjective and noun-verb combinations, and  
how LOGON works in noun-adjective and noun-verb combinations, and how  
LOGW(i) works in noun-adjective and noun-verb combinations, e.g. LOGOS  
ESTIN ALHQHS, LOGON HKOUSA, LOGWi EPISTEUSA.

If I were starting all over as a Greek teacher, I would want to begin  
with phrases and short sentences using words in intelligible contexts  
and postpone the memorization of noun and verb paradigms for use in  
analysis of how the language works. What the students really needs to  
learn at the outset is to USE the language, not the RATIONALE  
underlying the usage of the language. But almost all primers go about  
this process backwards and present the rationale of the language as if  
somehow knowing the rationale is instrumental in being able to use the  
language. You really need to see (and hear) the materials that Randall  
Buth has prepared to have some sense of what this radical difference  
between types of language teaching is and means.


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






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