RE- Accents

From: Karen Pitts (karen_pitts@maca.sarnoff.com)
Date: Tue Sep 19 1995 - 22:55:22 EDT


RE: Accents 9/20/95 10:43 AM

This will teach me to respond off the cuff after 10:00 at night.

For my students, I still think teaching accents is important, but I follow
what Carl Conrad mentioned. I teach verb accents, paying attention to where
the noun accents are and how they shift with long or short ending vowels, and
some enclitics, although mostly for recognition. My students are all adults
with full time jobs, families, or both, and everyone struggles to find time to
devote to Greek. We attempt to meet weekly, but don't do anything from
mid-Nov through Dec. or the summer. This means I get to do lots of review.

On the other hand, the ones who stick it out, do so because they believe that
knowing Greek, even at a first year level, will give them insight into the New
Testament, and they all are interested in knowing the Bible better. This
means that we do lots of things to reinforce Greek. Speaking (how do you
speak if you don't pay attention to accents? - but only using stresses, I
wouldn't know how to do pitches), writing on white boards, translating English
to Greek, coming up with silly pneumonics to remember vocab and paradigms.
For this approach, we need to know accents.

On the positive side, I was one of the guinea pigs for this class in 1992, and
have been meeting weekly with others to read the NT since August-September,
1992 (when I also took over teaching the beginning class). Our group is now
up to three lay people (all women, strangely enough) and our pastor. We've
read the first 6 chapters of Hebrews, the Gospel of John, Galatians, spot
readings through the other gospels, letters of Paul, Revelation, and parts of
the Septuagint. This fall we are going to read through the Gospel of Mark.
And I have the chutzpa to join the Biblical Greek reflector.

I still think accents are important.

Karen Pitts



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