Mastonade difficult exercise sentence

[daivid]

This from one of the exercises half way through he gives the following in an exercise:

πῶς οὐ θεῶν τις τὴν τούτου γνώμην ἔβλαψεν, ὅς ἔλεγε μὲν ἀνόσια περὶ τοῦ θ ἡλίου τῶν τ ἀνέμων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων μετεώρων, ἐποίει δὲ πλεῖστα κακὰ τὰ ἱερά τὰ τῶν Ἐλλήνων.

My best stab is:

How not of_seeing/of_gods something the of this plan was harmed, which on the one hand wicked about the sun and the winds and the other things of the sky, on the other were faring badly the temples of the Greeks.

This sentence is made even more dificult by the fact that Mastronade throws this at you without any hint of context so I would be curious to know if this is a quote from some Greek author.

[Damoetas]

Here's a few hints:

θεῶν τις = "one of the gods" (not from θεάομαι, so nothing to do with seeing).

τούτου = "this man," who is further identified by the relative clause beginning with ὃς. The relative clause has two parts, describing what the man was 1) "saying" (ἔλεγε) and 2) "doing" (ἐποίει). Note also that ποιεῖν κακά is "to do bad things to," different from πράττειν κακῶς, "to far badly."

Those should get you most of the way there!

[daivid]

Here's a few hints:

θεῶν τις = "one of the gods" (not from θεάομαι, so nothing to do with seeing).

τούτου = "this man," who is further identified by the relative clause beginning with ὃς. The relative clause has two parts, describing what the man was 1) "saying" (ἔλεγε) and 2) "doing" (ἐποίει). Note also that ποιεῖν κακά is "to do bad things to," different from πράττειν κακῶς, "to far badly."

Those should get you most of the way there!

Yes, thanks millions, with that help the Greek does now hang together.

But does anyone know who this is a quote from. I find it hard to believe that Mastonade would have invented something so bizare himself.

[jeidsath]

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi ... 23&getid=0

[daivid]

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi ... 23&getid=0

Even though that isn't of course the exact quote it does make the idiom πῶς οὐ θεῶν τις τὴν τούτου γνώμην + verb_meaning_destruction much clearer.
Thank you.

[Qimmik]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_postill ... _lightning

[mwh]

Funny but unfair. The μεν ... δε contrast may be a little forced, but I can readily enough imagine such a sentence in a real Greek text. Mastronarde is not writing a phrase book, nor is he teaching Crystal’s “children with language impairment.” He’s teaching learners how to figure out how such sentences work. He may not have anticipated someone being thrown by θεῶν τις, but is that his fault?

Incidentally, and shamelessly off-topic, an early book by Crystal on rhythm (at least partly so; I don’t well remember it) was a real eye-opener for me, in illustrating what I now call the tick-tock phenomenon. Hearing a uniform succession of beats, such as the beating of the heart, we process it as a binary rhythm. The failure to make that diffentiation between the acoustic and the perceptual still bedevils Greek and Latin metrics.

[Qimmik]

Hearing a uniform succession of beats, such as the beating of the heart, we process it as a binary rhythm. The failure to make that diffentiation between the acoustic and the perceptual still bedevils Greek and Latin metrics.

Michael, could you explain this? I don't think I see what you're getting at.

Thank you!

[Paul Derouda]

My apologies for hi-jacking the thread for a moment.

A bit before my first child was born, the natural thing for me to do (of course!) was to go and get a book on language acquisition in children. I didn't (and still don't) know anything about the subject, so I just bought the first serious-looking book in the book store I happened to bump into. I was appalled. It seemed to me that the whole field is just a play-ground of different schools with their respective theories and doctrines, with little empirical evidence to rely or indeed interest in. A crucial question seemed to be whether babies and toddlers have all the needed linguistic input from the environment to acquire their language, or whether they have some sort of in-born capacity to make inferences even about language phenomena they have actually never personally attested. I read the book about half way and got bored of the whole field (probably undeservedly), since none of the writers seemed to have much to say with their fancy "frameworks" and what not, and rarely cited any empirical evidence for their claims.

Surprisingly enough, both my kids learnt to speak very well even without their father being an expert on the subject. But though watching them grow has been a great joy, I regret I never got to test any thrilling theory on language acquisition them...

So my question is, can you recommend this Crystal fellow (or someone else), if I'm interested in language acquisition in children, but not so much in technical jargon veering on mental masturbation?

[Paul Derouda]

Hearing a uniform succession of beats, such as the beating of the heart, we process it as a binary rhythm. The failure to make that diffentiation between the acoustic and the perceptual still bedevils Greek and Latin metrics.

Michael, could you explain this? I don't think I see what you're getting at.

Thank you!

I think this applies for instance to long vs. short syllables in verse, and even more to long vs. short vowels in normal speech. Although the theoretical, perceptual relationship of their relative lengths might be exactly defined, their true acoustic properties might be differ a lot according to context. I'm told that in my native language Finnish, a long vowel might in some context be actually shorter than a short vowel in some other context, if you measure them with a chronometer.

[Qimmik]

But Michael is talking about a uniform succession of beats--like the ticking of a clock or the second movement of Beethoven's 8th Symphony. As I understand what he's saying, even if the beats are precisely uniform, we tend to hear or perceive them as one-two-one-two, not one-one-one-one. I don't understand how this relates to Greek and Latin metrics, but my interest has been piqued.

Or he referring to 19th century German analyses that attempted to reduce every Greek and Latin meter to the regular metrical patterns of 19th century German/European art music, lengthening and shortening syllables to make them conform to regular measures in common time, 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, etc., before Bartok discovered the wonderful diversity of metrical patterns in Balkan and other folk music?

[Qimmik]

But though watching them grow has been a great joy, I regret I never got to test any thrilling theory on language acquisition them...

You should have kept them completely isolated from all human contract from birth to see what language they started speaking. I'll bet the first word they would have uttered would have been bekos, the Phrygian word for "bread," demonstrating that Phrygian is the original language.

Either that, or you should have raised them in a Skinner box.

http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.asp

This rumor was current at Harvard when both Skinner and I were there, though I never met him. Whatever else you may think about Chomsky, his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior is a classic demolition of behaviorism as applied to language.

Actually, I think there has been quite a bit of empirical research on the acquisition of language by children, though I don't know whether it supports Chomsky or not.

[Paul Derouda]

But Michael is talking about a uniform succession of beats--like the ticking of a clock or the second movement of Beethoven's 8th Symphony. As I understand what he's saying, even if the beats are precisely uniform, we tend to hear or perceive them as one-two-one-two, not one-one-one-one. I don't understand how this relates to Greek and Latin metrics, but my interest has been piqued.

That's how I understood it as well and he got my interest too. I don't know about that, I was just replying more generally with the idea that we don't perceive sounds exactly "as they are".

[Paul Derouda]

Actually, I think there has been quite a bit of empirical research on the acquisition of language by children, though I don't know whether it supports Chomsky or not.

Probably it was just a bad book. It's just that I don't have the time or the patience to go through a number of books before find a good one... I would suppose that there is more to be said about language acquisition than whether Chomsky is right or not, or whether children isolated from all human contact will automatically start to speak Hebrew (or Phrygian, according to an attractive competing theory).

[mwh]

Apologies for an excessively cryptic (and totally off-topic) post. It was the binary perception of cardiac (equal-beat) rhythm that first grabbed my attention. It’s an extremely well known phenomenon, but was little short of revelatory to me at the time. (I don’t think Crystal exemplified it by either heart beat or clock, and certainly not by Beethoven’s 8th, where 1-2-3-4 is already built in, but rather by a stick drawn along a railing, but that’s how I proved it to myself.) But I was referring more generally to the difference between the “actual” (scientifically measured) and the perceived—much as Paul has described relative length in Finnish. (Similarly in English stressed syllables can be less stressed than unstressed.) Metrists need to distinguish acoustic, perceptual, and conceptual levels, the conceptual being the generalized (“abstract”) metrical scheme (or musical time signature?) which informs and to a considerable extent controls the perceptual, with which in turn the acoustic will have no consistent relationship.

When Devine and Stephens exploded Paul Maas’s notion that the anceps had a time value somewhere between a long and a short, that was a big step forward, but today people continue to talk of relative duration and suchlike (e.g. in dactylic hexameter) without feeling the need to explain just what they mean by it. I dare say linguistics has found better ways to describe or even to make these distinctions, but respecting them clears away a lot of fog for me.

I don’t know if this makes things any clearer. Quite possibly not.

My linguistics friends are all very down on generative grammar. I don’t really understand why.

Children isolated from all human contact start speaking Martian. At least, the boys do. Girls, Venerian.

[daivid]

Funny but unfair. The μεν ... δε contrast may be a little forced, but I can readily enough imagine such a sentence in a real Greek text. Mastronarde is not writing a phrase book, nor is he teaching Crystal’s “children with language impairment.” He’s teaching learners how to figure out how such sentences work. He may not have anticipated someone being thrown by θεῶν τις, but is that his fault?

In a word, yes.
First off θεῶν is ambiguous in that it could have meant "view".
Then there is γνώμην which admittedly can only be the singular accusative of γνώμη but γνώμη has a very wide range of meanings so it is almost as ambiguous as θεῶν.
On top of that this is all encapsulated in an idiom. While it is true that "How not that some god has damaged his faculty of thinking." is quite logical, once you know, it is none the less sufficiently odd to anyone meeting it for the first time that it significantly ratchets up the uncertainty, that is the difficulty. Indeed were you to take a time machine back to Pericles Athens, then to translate the English equivalent "He must have taken leave of his senses" it into otherwise perfect Ancient Greek and try and say that to some native speakers you would initially get blank stares.
For an English native speaker it is quite alien to say "a god some" - hence the opening up of the trap of connecting τις with γνώμην. If you distract the learner with all the difficulty I've outlined above then if Mastonade hasn't encountered students who have hit a failure-to-process wall it is either because he is lucky to only have able students attending his class or he is not aware of the extent he prompts his students.

But it is the sentence taken as a whole that displays an example of My_postillion_has_been_struck_by_lightning.
People who disturbed their fellow citizens with unorthodox theories about the sun and the sky tended to be philosophers who sat around talking.
Those who went round looting temples tended to be generals who were more worried about getting enough cash to pay their mercenaries than metaphysics.

Of course, it is not impossible that, at least once, a postillion was indeed struck by lightning.
Likewise, it is not impossible that someone will yet come up with a source for this sentence in the writings, some Ancient Greek writer.
I would then still say that for Mastonade to serve up a sentence, without any kind of context, that is so unlikely to occur in reality, to learners, is an odd choice.

[mwh]

Then maybe Mastronarde is not the book for you, daivid. Different approaches suit different people.

A suggestion on method, though, whether or not you persevere with Mastronarde. Before looking words up, you may find it's worthwhile just looking at the sentence from a syntactical point of view and observing how it’s structured. Confronted with θεῶν τις τὴν τούτου γνώμην ἔβλαψεν, for example, we can see the structure of it simply by looking at the inflected forms, and we should be able to do better than “something the of this plan was harmed”—because (1) τις is not neuter, (2) τουτου and γνωμην are not in agreement, and (3) εβλαψεν is active not passive. I’m sure you're aware of all these things. Just hold on to what you know.

“Someone X-ed the γνωμη of this (man).”
Then when we hit ὅς we can see it must relate to τουτου, “of this man who.” The masculine ὅς confirms that τουτου is masc. not neuter.
(If you’re halfway through the book, you should be able to perceive this structure practically at a glance. That it tripped you up so badly suggests you may not be going about things the right way.)

Then and only then do we need to look up any words we don’t know: “Someone θεῶν harmed/impaired the γνωμη (judgment, let’s say) of this man who said … and did …”
θεῶν τις “one of the gods, some god.” (Unambiguous. θεῶν could in theory be a masc. nom. participle of a contract verb, but θεάομαι is middle not active and θεος “god” is a very well-known word and gen.+τις a very common collocation.) The word order should not throw you, τις being enclitic.

That leaves only the opening πῶς οὐ: “How not did some god harm this man’s γνωμη?”, meaning “How can it not be the case that some god harmed this man’s γνωμη?” It’s very Greek, but it makes no difference to the basic structure, and at this stage it should be the only point of difficulty.

I don’t know if this is helpful at all, to you or anyone else. Just ignore it if it’s not.

[Qimmik]

To what Michael wrote, I would add that it's difficult to construct complicated sentences illustrating complex constructions with a limited vocabulary. Sometimes this results in oddities like the sentence under consideration. I couldn't help making fun of it a little, but it's inevitable. And it's absolutely necessary to master these sorts of constructions to read classical Greek. Most of the texts that anyone studying classical Greek would want to read, as mwh noted, are written in an elevated register that makes ample use of constructions like this.

And the examples of colloquial ancient Greek that have been preserved are even more difficult--if you don't think so, try reading Aristophanes. As anyone who has ever studied a language in an academic setting and then tried to use it conversationally with native speakers in a realistic setting knows, colloquial speech is much more difficult to master than texts written in an educated register that observe careful grammar.

[mwh]

"To what Michael wrote, I would add (despite not being able to resist making fun of it a little) that it's difficult to construct complicated sentences illustrating complex constructions with a limited vocabulary."

Qimmik means making fun of the Mastronarde sentence, not making fun of what I wrote.
Or does he?

[Qimmik]

mwh: Please accept my apologies for the ambiguous parenthetical. It was meant to be deleted in my original post. I've edited my remark to make my intent clear.

[mwh]

X has been Y-ed by Z. To amplify:

There are sentences which no-one has ever uttered, or ever will utter. “Lightning has been struck by my postillion” might be one. (No longer.) But even a nonsensical sentence can be basically understood, if it’s grammatical. X has been Y-ed by Z. It doesn’t matter what particular words go into the various slots. (Well, X and Z have to be substantives, and Y a verb, obviously.) You have an infinitude of possible sentences here. Context is immaterial (il n’y a pas de hors-texte, as someone once said) when what we’re after is mastering the mechanics of the language.

With Greek, that means in the first instance registering and applying the information that the inflected forms convey—nominative or accusative (or neither) active or passive (or neither), optative or indicative (or neither), etc. etc. etc. So much data packed into each ending! After a while—maybe a long while—this processing should become more or less automatic, but till that distant plateau is joyously reached, it’s a more laborious and self-conscious process. But an absolutely essential one, if we’re to learn to read Greek.

Forgive the pontification.

[daivid]

Then maybe Mastronarde is not the book for you, daivid. Different approaches suit different people.

Well I did just intend to say there were reasons why that sentence was especially difficult for a learner at my level but I did, I confess get a bit carried away.

A suggestion on method, though, whether or not you persevere with Mastronarde. Before looking words up, you may find it's worthwhile just looking at the sentence from a syntactical point of view and observing how it’s structured. Confronted with θεῶν τις τὴν τούτου γνώμην ἔβλαψεν, for example, we can see the structure of it simply by looking at the inflected forms, and we should be able to do better than “something the of this plan was harmed”—because (1) τις is not neuter, (2) τουτου and γνωμην are not in agreement, and (3) εβλαψεν is active not passive. I’m sure you're aware of all these things. Just hold on to what you know.

My problem is that I do (sort of) know these things but not so well that I'm not easily distracted when the sentence as a whole is for me difficult. To get those things to be sufficiently second nature that I am not distracted I need more practice which means reading lots of sentences with forms of τις and οὗτος in them and that means sentences that a lot easier than Mastronarde. Mastronarde does have exercises that are very easy - single word Greek to English and the reverse. However, for me a word plucked from any context is dead and simply does not engage my memory.

“Someone X-ed the γνωμη of this (man).”
Then when we hit ὅς we can see it must relate to τουτου, “of this man who.” The masculine ὅς confirms that τουτου is masc. not neuter.
(If you’re halfway through the book, you should be able to perceive this structure practically at a glance. That it tripped you up so badly suggests you may not be going about things the right way.)

Here I confess my critique of Mastonade is very unfair in that I decided to pick a chapter in the middle assuming that if I worked through the chapter I would be able to do the exercises. I do get that Mastonade has been working up to that level of complexity and really what I should do now is go back to a point earlier in his book and proceed from there.

The reason why I probably won't do that is because I have discovered that can now in read a page of my Bryn Mawr Herodotos in a day which means that I can now read enough of him to actually getting enough practice to be useful.
Of course I do need the help of the grammar commentary included in that volume and Steadmans commentary as well.

Suddenly discovering I can do this means that the frustration that bubbled out as a criticism of Mastonade has somewhat abated.

Of course Herodotos is full of things as bizarre as postelions getting hit by lightning. However, all Herodotos' tall stories are very much cut from the same cloth so once you know you are reading Herodotos that kind of bizarreness becomes comfortingly predictable.

Then and only then do we need to look up any words we don’t know: “Someone θεῶν harmed/impaired the γνωμη (judgment, let’s say) of this man who said … and did …”
θεῶν τις “one of the gods, some god.” (Unambiguous. θεῶν could in theory be a masc. nom. participle of a contract verb, but θεάομαι is middle not active and θεος “god” is a very well-known word and gen.+τις a very common collocation.) The word order should not throw you, τις being enclitic.

Thanks for seeing through the frustration of my post and focusing my attention on the stuff I need to work on.

That leaves only the opening πῶς οὐ: “How not did some god harm this man’s γνωμη?”, meaning “How can it not be the case that some god harmed this man’s γνωμη?” It’s very Greek, but it makes no difference to the basic structure, and at this stage it should be the only point of difficulty.

I don’t know if this is helpful at all, to you or anyone else. Just ignore it if it’s not.

No, I am certainly not ignoring it - it is helpful in getting me to find something that works for me in studying Greek

[mwh]

Congratulations on the progress with Herodotos! With language learning it can often seem that we’re struggling and struggling and getting nowhere, we’re stuck at a certain level and it’s very frustrating, and then one day we suddenly start to find things easier and realize we have in fact broken through to a new level. Then it's a slog to the next one.

But yes, a big mistake to jump to the middle of the Mastronarde book. Though you’re now planning to go on with Herodotos—which you certainly should do, and you will find it continues to get easier, if only in fits and starts—it would probably be as well to persist in a more systematic approach at the same time, whether Mastronarde or something else, and not to take short-cuts (a besetting fault of mine), so that you steadily and progressively gain a comprehensive understanding of grammar while doing as much continuous reading as possible and experiencing how it works in practice. That way the grammar you learn and the reading you do will reinforce one another—a happy symbiosis.

[Markos]

A suggestion on method...I don’t know if this is helpful at all, to you or anyone else. Just ignore it if it’s not.

It's helpful, yes. Syntactic break-down, really, figuring out what goes with what, is the hardest Greek ur-skill to master, and the hardest to figure out what pedagogy and helps would work best for improvement. Any suggestions on methods here are welcome.

θεῶν could in theory be a masc. nom. participle of a contract verb, but θεάομαι is middle not active...

Plus, the α in θεάομαι usually does not contract (except in some weird Epic forms.)

[jeidsath]

What makes this sentence hard, in my opinion, is that τούτου does not refer to the upcoming ὅς. Both τούτου and ὅς rather, refer to a man who was introduced in a previous sentence. One that is not present in the example, so we are plopping into the middle of a thought here, without context. If this were a complete utterance, we would never get an individual first introduced with τούτου.