Re: Teaching accents

From: KevLAnder@aol.com
Date: Sun Sep 24 1995 - 12:43:44 EDT


Given the way Greek is taught nowadays in many colleges and seminaries, e.g.,
in summer intensive courses, students often have more than enough to
concentrate on without having to worry about rules of accents. A great number
of Greek students have never learned accents at all. I once heard about a
doctoral student at Duke who, when writing his dissertation, paid no
attention whatsoever to Greek accents. His committee had to kindly ask him to
insert the missing diacriticals. I personally did not pick up much knowledge
about Greek accents until I had studied Greek for a couple years. Ideally, if
the student is able to more leisurely study Greek over a longer period of
time (like a couple years), it would probably be to the advantage of the
student to learn accents beginning with the earliest stages of instruction.
That way those little specks on the page are not such a mystery.

However, if a student is not taught accents from the beginning, the accent
system can be conveniently studied later by consulting D.A. Carson's _Greek
Accents: A Student's Manual_.



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