Teaching Greek

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Teaching GreekAuthor(s): Gareth MorganSource: Arion, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn, 1969), pp. 340-342Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163205 .

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TEACHING GREEK

Gareth Morgan

T I WO YEARS OF TEACHING LATIN WITH

the Fourth Skill (Arion 6.4 [1967]) had produced enough confidence for me to want to teach Greek the same way.

That it had to be in the twelve-week maelstrom of a sum

mer session was obviously a

pity, but it had its advantages too. The method demands the alternation of intense repeti tive practice with the comparative ease of reading the orig inal authors. Reading cannot be hurried. In a summer course

the practice becomes even more intense and the reading, by contrast, is even more leisurely. The comfort and satisfaction of reading

a plain Oxford text on Day 9, with a high degree

of understanding, was almost hedonistic.

The Greek course starts with a clear advantage: there is an obvious way in. Herodotus has a fairly loose paratactic structure, a comparative absence of contraction that enables

you to treat vowel-base verbs and many of the "oddities" of the third declension as regular, and an almost complete absence of athematic forms (none in the first five thousand

running words). Above all, Herodotus writes very well, about important things, in sections that seem to fall in the

ideal range for reading aloud?the interval between one

phiale and the next. So the target for the first twelve days was set as the story of Rhampsinitus' treasury and the build

ing of the pyramids; and the stand at Thermopylae?about

eighteen pages of OCT text.

Nothing startling was discovered about Greek grammar in

the process?certainly nothing as radically different from

conventional textbook layout as the treatment of the sub

junctive in Latin. Statistical investigation only reinforced the

well-known facts about teaching the language. Of the hand

ful of subjunctives and optatives met, all but two were

intelligible by their contextual words ( okws, dv, Iva, etc. ) : but



Gareth Morgan 341

over 200 of the 926 practice sentences used in this first

section where in groups devoted to participle uses, and

many more participles occurred in exercises on other themes.

( The reader unfamiliar with the method should know that

these sentences are taken as closely as possible from the

passage that is to be read, and as far as possible with the

original word order. The average length is about a dozen

words, but they can run up to thirty.) Perhaps the least

familiar part of the course book to the traditionally trained

scholar (and I suppose that means all of us) would have

been the use of a few of the elementary linguistic terms, such as "yod marker," which can prove so useful in the

development of a sense of vocabulary.

"Rhampsinitus' Treasury" was read in a direct-speech

version on Day 8. Herodotus' text of this and the other epi

sodes followed within four days. From then on, the taped

reading of one of these episodes was played every day, often

at the end of a session.

(Incidentally, living with Herodotus in this way?five hours a

day in the classroom, and three or four more in the

evening?banishes all idea of his style being an even conti

nuum, whether of limpid narrative or bumbling breeziness.

It becomes a constant tautening and slackening. ) The second target was two speeches of Lysias?the

"Murder of Eratosthenes" and "Pancleon's Citizenship": both

good earthy speeches, full of crying babies, and barbers, and

cheese. The five days spent in practice covered only 358

sentences ( an apparent slackening of the pace ) but included

long and precise identification exercises of, for example, 150

participles. Difficulty in transferring to contracted forms was

hardly perceptible, and one or two vocabulary variants were

dealt with by using parentheses at first meeting, for example, wa7rep eiKos { oikos ) rjv.

Very little new structure was needed. An analysis of the

practice sentences shows this clearly, and since the smaller

groups exhaust all examples found in the target text, a fairly realistic picture can be drawn:

Indicatives 68

Contraction 14

Participles 80



342 TEACHING GREEK

Infinitives 88

OSTE 7 Genitive Absolute 11

Other Genitives 17

AN 32

Subjunctives 9

Optatives 18

Commands 14

Three days were spent reading the speeches, which then

took their place in the rota of regular taped performances. One or two passages of legal argument brought the first taste

of linguistic difficulty to the course, as opposed to the physi cal difficulty of so intense a program.

Medea was the next text chosen, and the transition to more

conventional methods of reading was begun, with less pre

liminary practice and more individual vocabulary work. A

prose paraphrase was used to begin . . . but this spills

over

into the second half of the summer, when another pair of

teachers took over. I had been assisted by Mike Shaw. If the

Olympics Committee ever introduces the Academic Paarlauf, I could wish for no better partner.



Teaching Greek

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