Is Classical Greek fluency possible?

[jeidsath]

Coming off of a plateau, I have been happy about my language learning progress in the past month. Full verb and participle accidence finally came in across all moods, tenses, and voices, and third declension nouns a couple weeks before that. For a while my reading slowed down as my brain started to figure out what to do with all of the extra information, but it seems to have caught up again. In hopes of continued gains, I have started a “close reading” habit, where periodically, for every sentence I read, I repeat it back to myself (with the book closed) until I can say the sentence with understanding and expression. Plato and Xenophon are becoming very intelligible, though there are still sections that I have to reread a number of times. I still hope to be able to read Attic prose easily this year.

However, I came across the following today, and I thought that it might deserve comment. Is Harrower exaggerating, or is this the best that can be hoped for?

First then, we have to remember the character and condition of Greek Classical Literature. It is written in a language no longer spoken, and is represented by fragmentary portions of the works of various writers in prose and verse, differing from one another greatly in dialect and style. A Greek scholar is one who has read these authors so frequently and so closely that he is able to read them easily. No man can, on the strength of his general knowledge of Greek, read a chorus of Aeschylus for the first time with the ease that he reads a page of Wordsworth. He must attack and conquer each author separately, and in each case he will find much that his previous reading will not help him with. If one has once learned enough French to read one modern author in that language, one can go on to read another. But the surface of Greek Classical Literature is not homogeneous. Pindar, Sophocles, and Thucydides do not help one another for the learner, and, moreover, one cannot be said to be the master of these writers until one has read and re-read every word of them. It may sound paradoxical, yet it might almost be said that a man cannot be described as knowing Greek—he knows certain Greek authors. His knowledge of Greek is the sum of his knowledge of these. Fox example, the author of “Letters to a Classical Friend” makes it a ground of complaint that after taking an Honours Degree in Oxford, when he essayed to read Theocritus, he might as well have tackled so many pages of Liddell and Scott. He had expected evidently, that his previous reading would enable him to enjoy Theocritus as he might an English author that was new to him, but found himself naturally baffled by the vocabulary and the dialect. If after ten perusals he realised his expectation, he might have been content.

John Harrower, M.A., Professor of Greek in the University of Aberdeen. “The Teaching of Greek.” Proceedings of the Classical Association of Scotland, 1902-3.

[Scribo]

Hey Jeidsath. I wish I was well enough to reply more in depth but I'm pretty out of it right now. I'd simply say that knowledge of Greek - real actual Greek - has increased quite a bit in the past century or so even if only to make us aware how much we lack. But the general thrust is the same, fluency by what most people mean isn't that possible. A fluency, sure, but it's not the same thing. I could actually fill pages on this.

Also people don't grasp the difficulty of a lot of the literature. The novel? I read those without dictionaries and without even trying. Pindar? Been through the extant corpus a few times and still find myself puzzling and turning phrases in my head. This wasn't stuff spoken to at the market place between selling fish to fat house slaves. Pindar I mean, stuff like the novel? another matter.

That said the idea that authors must be read in isolation is silly and I suspect was silly even then, I'd have never taken any of my degrees if that were the case given just how much we had to read per module. Quickly re-read your post and I'd say, don't worry, you're doing fine and things will definitely improve. A lot.

[Qimmik]

The quotation sums up my personal experience very accurately. You can obtain some fluency in reading Attic prose (but not Thucydides) and perhaps Homer, but not complete fluency so as to be able to read without a dictionary or without stumbling over a sentence or a passage here and there even with a dictionary. However, many authors take a lot of hard work, especially the poets--e.g., Pindar, tragedy. I don't think it's possible to read any ancient Greek texts and get much out of them without good commentaries, which are built on a tradition and accretion of scholarship that goes back to the Renaissance and even earlier. Our understanding of ancient Greek texts is an ongoing process and never will be complete. And even supposedly "simple" texts contain many passages as to which the meaning is disputed. (Another problem: many of our texts, especially drama, are in dilapidated condition--the text itself is uncertain.)

Anyone who thinks they understand ancient Greek texts easily doesn't.

I don't want to sound discouraging, however. You can make progress, to the point where you're able to read ancient Greek texts more easily in a satisfying way. It's just that engaging with ancient Greek texts is necessarily a qualitatively different experience--one that is less immediate and calls for more effort--than reading any modern text in a foreign language. You shouldn't be discouraged by that.

[jeidsath]

I've created a pdf of the "Letters to a Classical Friend" from the 1901 Classical Review that is referenced in the quotation. Shared here. The author biographies his university education and literary life and concludes that the fluency required for an appreciation of Greek poetry as poetry is impossible. I found it a good read.

@Scribo, I'm not too worried. Even if my progress were to stop tomorrow, and I could only read the Bible and Plato and Homer, I don't think that I've lost out on the 15 months of effort. I wanted to create the thread because it seems like an important topic, rather than my own belief.

[C. S. Bartholomew]

comment deleted

[daivid]

Harrower does seem to me to be provocatively over stating his case. In my experience getting to grips with one author certainly does help with others but that each author has in a sense a dialect of their own.
And the things that make this so tend to be the things that are not really covered in textbooks - idioms, turns of phrases, oddities of word order.
It has gradually come clear to me that to make progress you need to be disciplined and stick to one author until you really have mastered them. The snag is, when reading at the level I am still at you read so slowly that after a while an author gets a bit stale. I have just switched from Herodotus to Xenophon and it may be that this will be less of a problem as Xenophon wrote so many different types of works.

This one reason that adapting texts is not such good idea. They are, basically, spoilers. What would be nice is something like a story with a plot like the romantic novels using a subset of Xenophon's constructions.

Any idea why Thycidides is so different from the other writers writing around the time he lived.

[Qimmik]

Any idea why Thycidides is so different from the other writers writing around the time he lived.

In part, I think, a deliberate choice to write about grim events in a tortured style. (Some Roman historians such as Sallust and Tacitus also cultivated a studied stylistic inconcinnity modelled on Thucydides.) Perhaps to some degree a reaction against the excessively polished prose of someone like Gorgias. But also, some elements of his style reflect the rhetorical tropes that were prevalent in his era. He likes antithesis as much as anyone--it's just that he often deliberately avoids parallelism.

Don't forget that he grew up in the mid-fifth century and belonged to an earlier generation--by half a century or more--than the other major classical Attic prose writers such as Lysias (whose aim was a clarity and simplicity that would be intelligible to a jury of 500 or so men) and Xenophon. Most of them were writing in the fourth century. Th. breaks off in 411--but of course the formative period of his life was much earlier. Xenophon would still have been a young man at the time of the Anabasis, a decade later.

[Paul Derouda]

Some authors still like to write in an opaque style. Some even do it to mask the vacuity of their ideas, though I don't think it's the case with Thucydides: see how Jacques Lacan was caught with his pants down in Sokal & Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles.

Regarding the difficulty of Greek there's one thing we shouldn't forget: we're dealing with with texts that span a millennium. If I read a text in my native language that's 50 years old, it feels distinctly quaint. Something 150 years old is easily understandable, but the usage of every second word has somehow changed since then, which makes it hard to make out little nuances such as whether the author is being ironical etc.

[CanadianGirl]

The short answer to the question, in my case anyway, is "NO!" I've given up at being good at Greek, although I'm fairly good at modern languages (French & Italian) anyway, and also , I've worked like a dog for years. When I asked my favorite professor-"When will I get past the intermediate stage in Greek?" her reply was "Never, and neither will anybody else." She was Oxford educated & the author of two or three books on Greece-I believe her. I guess I'll be content at being fairly-not really -good at Greek. Oh well...

[Qimmik]

Don't despair.

You should be able to read Homer with some fluency after a little practice. Herodotus and Xenophon, too. Then Lysias, and then on to more difficult prose. You should also get to the point--maybe sooner rather than later--where you'll be able to read the Greek novels with a substantial level of fluency.

I think it's probably true that no one reads tragedy without a certain amount of effort (except those who have read the plays over and over), same with Pindar, but that doesn't mean that the experience of working through a play isn't a satisfying experience. It's a different kind of reading experience than sitting down with, say, Flaubert or Stendhal in French, and sometimes you have to struggle (and you need a good commentary), but it's a rewarding experience.

If you come from a Christian tradition, I think you ought to be able to read the New Testament with considerable fluency--after all, much of it will be very familiar.

You will probably never be able to pick up a difficult text you're not already familiar with and simply start reading, looking up a word or two here and there, as you might be able to do with French or Italian, but you ought to be able to reach a level of proficiency where you can, with the aid of a dictionary and a commentary, engage with Greek texts in a satisfying and rewarding way. And the idea of progressing beyond the "intermediate" stage, valid as it may be for modern languages, is simply not relevant in ancient Greek. The more you read, however, the more linguistic experience and background information you will absorb, and the easier it will become to engage with the texts.

So don't despair.

[daivid]

The thing that troubles me about what Harrower says is that it is a perfect excuse for thinking everything is fine with Greek teaching and that if no one achieves fluency that is because that's just how it is.

One problem is the gulf between very easy Greek and the very difficult Greek that most Greek texts that have survived. When I was learning Serbo-Croat most of my reading were books for teenagers or even targeted at a younger age group. They were books I could read with little effort so I was able to read a great quantity of them. That quantity was the key IMO to me being able to read the more sophisticated works of history that was my real aim to be able to read.

I find Greek reading is either very very easy or so hard that I might as well just read the real Greek texts. A quantity of good intermediate texts is a serious lack in the resources available to those leaning Greek. Writing good Greek is not easy but when, Andrew Wilson, the translator of Harry Potter into Ancient Greek comes up with something that is just as hard, possibly harder, than the real stuff, when he is so inordinately proud of the magical words he has dug up from obscure magical works then it does seem worth repeating that we don't need more difficult Greek we need more intermediate Greek

Of course for modern writers to write in Ancient the danger of interference from their modern native languages is huge. I have dug up some 19th century books of Greek writing from that era. The problem was that the language did seem to have echoes of Victorian novels. Partly, I suspect, it was because writing good classical Greek was not really the aim but a bit of look at me - I'm writing Greek. But now with the internet it ought to be possible for people with different native languages. It is a lot easier to spot interference from language that is not your own than your own as the idioms of your own language are so second nature that your are unaware they even exist.

When every possible teaching method has been tried, and not before, will it be possible to say Classical Greek fluency is not possible.

[Victor]

When every possible teaching method has been tried, and not before, will it be possible to say Classical Greek fluency is not possible.

It's always going to be possible to say fluency in Ancient Greek is achievable. Likewise, it's always going to be impossible for anyone to be able to say they've achieved it.

[Azkerb]

A point that is never broached with regard to Greek texts (or indeed any pre-modern texts) is the lack of punctuation to aid the rendering of sense. Even the little that is used is sometimes dysfunctional. On a recent reading of Herodotus, I found that adding my own commas in pencil helped enormously. Modern editors continue to be reluctant to add these for us; it's almost as if they want to keep the language abstruse. That this doesn't have to be the case, look at modern editions of Shakespeare's plays; the punctuation you see in them is not original, but clarifies the sense much better; and this is poetry where the sentences are short. In long prose sentences, as in Herodotus or Thucydides, that go on for half a page, there is a crying need for some poise and decorum by way of a few minuscule twirls.

This criticism really applies only to prose. In poetry, the caesurae preclude any need for punctuation marks. I can well understand specialisation in Homer. Yes, here fluency beckons.