how do you learn 3rd declensions?

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Sofronios
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how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Sofronios »

requirementS to attain reading proficiency in an inflected language IS perplexing me.. :o

could anyone here share some method/s in learning paradigms especially the noun system?
I ask these because, the first Greek book I learned from is mounce, and he teaches that we should only to memorize the 'pattern' and eight rules.
but I also aware that the pattern doesnt always work for the some groups of the 3rd declension noun.
At first It doesnt mind me much, until I decided to equip myself with JACT. this is because I think I am going to read not just the NT.
and JACT further classifies the 3rd declension into 8 subgroups, from a to h.
my question is, when one is learning Greek, does he REALLY need to memorize all the subgroups?
and should I write all the subgroups declension 100 times each?
is it necessary that way, or It is enough just to know the pattern and using the article as guide?
and when you encounter new nouns, does it help to know to which subgroup does it belong?


thx in advance
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

I used Mounce as my first text for Greek, but his text has many flaws. He seems to be trying to teach the bare minimum of Greek with the least possible amount of effort, which is indicative of the times. Mounce's text assumes the learners are only interested in reading Koine, and on top of that only the NT. In the long run you really do need to learn the subtypes, which may seem overwhelming at first, but it's not really that bad.

Now, how to go about doing that? You could sit down and write them all out 100 times as you said, which would probably work, but that sounds like torture to me. I'd much rather just read through the paradigms out loud while looking at the nicely formatted tables in a good text rather than my own handwritten chicken scratch. I've done this for learning paradigms and it works well for me, eventually a picture of the table burns itself into my memory. I don't simply recite the paradigms though, I put them into very short sentences to burn the case form and function into my mind together. For instance: πολις εστιν, πολιν ορω, πολεως βασιλευω, πολει πιστευω, etc.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Qimmik »

I don't have Mounce, but I suspect learning the pattern--the basic endings--and his 8 rules would probably be enough. I can almost guess what the rules are without seeing his text.

See if you can derive the 8 JACT patterns from the pattern and Mounce's rules. That would be a good exercise to help you learn how the 3rd declension works. Then learn the paradigms. If you learn the basic pattern and Mounce's rules first, that will help you master the otherwise perplexing proliferation of paradigms.

In any case, you will find that there are a number of common words that don't completely fit the JACT paradigms in every detail, such as κυων κυνοσ. These irregularities you will have to learn as you learn the vocabulary items in question, but if you know the basic endings, these shouldn't give much trouble. After you've completed the basic work of learning the language, you'll probably forget the irregularities and maybe parts of the paradigms, too, until you encounter individual forms in reading, which will bring them back to you and reinforce them.

Ultimately you want to get to a level of reading where you recognize words and their grammatical roles without having to think about paradigms at all. Knowing the basic pattern and and understanding the rules for deriving the paradigms from the basic pattern will get you there more rapidly than simply memorizing paradigms.

I don't think 3rd declension inflection changed much between Attic and koine. In any case, though I can't claim much familiarity with the NT, mwh, who does, points out that it doesn't reflect a single, homogeneous type of Greek. A number of different registers are represented, and each author has his own type of Greek. Some tend to be more literary than others.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by jeidsath »

1) Memorize a simple sentence or phrase of real Greek.
2) Practice saying it until it comes out fast.
3) Alter it aloud, without looking at your paper. Say it until it comes out fast and natural.

Example Nominative:

Sentence (from Anabasis A.1):
Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο.

Alternate versions:

Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνεται παῖς ἕν.
Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδε δύο. (dual)

Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται ἥρωες τρεῖς.
Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνεται ἰχθύς.

(καὶ τὰ λοιπά)

For the dative:

Παρύσατις μὲν δὴ ἡ μήτηρ ὑπῆρχε τῷ Κύρῳ.

Memorize the sentence, and replace τῷ Κύρῳ with other 3rd declension nouns. τῷ παιδί, τῷ Σωκράτει, τῷ θηρί, their duals and plurals, and so on.

And so on for the other cases.

A word on what's happening here -- highly inflected languages are possible because the human brain is very good at pattern recognition. It quickly develops a sense of what sort of things go together. There a huge carrying capacity for forms learned in this way. But nothing in a noun declension table goes together as a pattern of normal language usage! What does the dative version of a noun have to do with the accusative version? If you are trying to learn your grammar directly from tables instead of sentences, you are depriving your brain of the context that it is so good at extracting patterns from.

Short version: 1) Your brain is very good at picking sentence patterns and rhythms and Beyonce tunes. 2) Your brain is very bad at memorizing tables. There is probably at least a factor of 100 difference in how much information can be picked up in either way.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Qimmik »

1) Memorize a simple sentence or phrase of real Greek.
2) Practice saying it until it comes out fast.
3) Alter it aloud, without looking at your paper. Say it until it comes out fast and natural.
Wouldn't it be quicker to just learn the basic pattern and the rules and then the paradigms than constructing sentences (which may not be good Greek anyway, at an elementary stage) for each form of each word, and spending the time and effort memorizing the sentences?

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Tertius Robertus »

and should I write all the subgroups declension 100 times each?
I did just that. :)

When(ever) a new word was introduced, I declined it 3 to 5 times, and then went straight to the exercises. In the end I think I repeated each paradigm 100 times or so.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by jeidsath »

Qimmik wrote: Wouldn't it be quicker to just learn the basic pattern and the rules and then the paradigms than constructing sentences (which may not be good Greek anyway, at an elementary stage) for each form of each word, and spending the time and effort memorizing the sentences?
No. The context helps. There has been some research on the subject:

http://ltr.sagepub.com/content/10/3/245
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/3/241.short
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

jeidsath's advice is great. Memorizing forms out of context is silly and not how the brain processes languages (living or dead). Also, I would say always, always, always read out loud (or at least under your breath if there are others around). In fact, the ancients always read out loud. Reading a text was like pushing "play" on a recording, the text was supposed to literally speak to you. Pick a pronunciation scheme and start to hear and feel the language. I agree with Joel that language is an aural not visual phenomenon. I think re-reading of simple texts (out loud) is an excellent way to cement the basic forms and syntax into your mind. The human brain is wired to process language aurally, and even when reading English you will notice that you can hear a voice reciting the words in your head.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

I’m all for reading texts out loud, except when you want to read fast; and it is perfectly possible to register the sound internally while reading silently. It’s not true that the ancients always read out loud. That’s a old myth that’s slow to die. And as for language being an aural not a visual phenomenon, let’s remember that what we have—and what readers in antiquity had—is written texts, which we receive by eye, whether or not we choose then to verbalize them. The medium is a visual one. Like Textkit posts.

But yes, I’d say read aloud until you begin to find it’s slowing you down. When reading it’s important to effect hidden elisions and crases and especially to observe syllabic quantity. (In ω φιλε Ζευ, for instance, the penult is long.)

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

mwh wrote:I’m all for reading texts out loud, except when you want to read fast; and it is perfectly possible to register the sound internally while reading silently. It’s not true that the ancients always read out loud. That’s a old myth that’s slow to die. And as for language being an aural not a visual phenomenon, let’s remember that what we have—and what readers in antiquity had—is written texts, which we receive by eye, whether or not we choose then to verbalize them. The medium is a visual one. Like Textkit posts.

But yes, I’d say read aloud until you begin to find it’s slowing you down. When reading it’s important to effect hidden elisions and crases and especially to observe syllabic quantity. (In ω φιλε Ζευ, for instance, the penult is long.)
As far as the myth of reading aloud, can you point me to some material about that? I can imagine that silent reading did occur, but I've always been under the impression that the norm was reading aloud until the early christian monasteries promoted silent reading for practical purposes (like in modern libraries.) Basically, I've always thought that while some may have read silently, it was seen as weird, just as today reading aloud is seen as weird and most read silently.

Yes, the materials we have are visual, but they don't have to stay that way with modern technology. I would encourage people to re-read a text until they can read it with a decent flow and meaning and then record themselves to listen to later. The mind learns language much more efficiently through the ear than through the eye.

As far as slowing a person down, I really can't imagine why anyone would want to read through Ancient Greek texts any faster than one can read aloud. Skimming like that is useful for reading contemporary news articles in English where you just want to get the gist of the article, but why even learn Ancient Greek if one wants to skim the texts? Even when reading English I make sure I slow down and read aloud if it's a work that I really want to absorb and reflect on.

Pronunciation of course becomes very important when reading aloud and is always a debate, but I believe that Greek (as well as Latin) can be acquired through a number of different accents. If languages can't function with different accents then English is in big trouble. I use Buth's pronunciation scheme since I'm most interested in Koine, but I use that pronunciation for Attic and the very limited Homeric that I read as well. It ruins poetry, unless I focus on stretching the long vowels to fit the meter, but otherwise it doesn't present me with any problems since the ambiguities it introduces are few.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by jeidsath »

When reading it’s important to effect hidden elisions and crases and especially to observe syllabic quantity.
I feel that I am only just beginning to be able to read simple prose with some approximation of naturalness. I don't put emphasis and breaks in the correct places until I read through it a few times.
(In ω φιλε Ζευ, for instance, the penult is long.)
And the vowel short. Everything has to come from that double-consonant or it's wrong. I go back and forth on how abrupt I make my double-consonants.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by daivid »

jeidsath wrote: No. The context helps. There has been some research on the subject:

http://ltr.sagepub.com/content/10/3/245
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/3/241.short
That second piece of research while it does indeed support the need for context doesn't seem to be good support for the specific method of learning a specific sentence with the target form.
In the study children were much better at recognizing frequently heard phrases like sit in your chair than less frequent sequences such as sit in your truck. That is to say they have trouble in generalizing from the form they have heard frequently.
This rather fits with my experience that while learning whole sentences are helpful with learning declensions that the only sure way is to read lots of stuff where the declension or to be precise sub-declension appears frequently.

There is nothing hard about 3rd declensions - what makes them hard is that there is a dearth of easy texts that learner can read in quantity in which these forms occur frequently.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

calvinist wrote:As far as the myth of reading aloud, can you point me to some material about that?
Best source is probably William Johnson’s 2000 piece Towards a sociology of reading. Gives biblio and arguments and sociocultural contextualization, and has been quite influential. Available through JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561728) if you have access to that, and probably elsewhere. Of course there's more recent stuff too. Recognition of the unextraordinariness of silent reading among the educated goes back to a piece by Bernard Knox in the 60’s. Naturally, reading cultures throughout antiquity tended to be more oral than most are today (so I certainly wouldn't speak of "the myth of reading aloud").
I would encourage people to re-read a text until they can read it with a decent flow and meaning and then record themselves to listen to later. The mind learns language much more efficiently through the ear than through the eye.
If we could listen to ancient Greeks reading, that would be great. But this way you just end up listening to yourself. You’re not learning language, you’re selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text you’ve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation. And there’s nothing efficient about so time-consuming a procedure. You could spend the time reading more. You’d be reinforcing and enlarging your knowledge of the language in the process.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

mwh wrote: If we could listen to ancient Greeks reading, that would be great. But this way you just end up listening to yourself. You’re not learning language, you’re selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text you’ve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation. And there’s nothing efficient about so time-consuming a procedure. You could spend the time reading more. You’d be reinforcing and enlarging your knowledge of the language in the process.
And when you add more people to this scenario you just multiply zero times zero and come up with another zero. I audited a course in reading NT Greek, a small group reading together, in the early 1990s. Didn't accomplish much other than demonstrating that no two Ancient Greek students sound the same even using the same system attributed to Erasmus.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by jeidsath »

@C.S. The pronunciation scheme is far less important than the prosody. If the reader is actually communicating the text rather than reading sounds, you will benefit a great deal from it. Everyone should listen to Spiros Zodhiates read the New Testament in a Modern Greek pronunciation, for example.

@mwh I thought the same thing about the reading aloud story when I read it in W.B. Stanford. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only skeptic.

But I don't know about the reading über alles advice. I've found lately that it's why too easy to just go through a text with 80% comprehension and not pick up much. Lately I've been slowing myself down, and reading the text aloud until I can read it with fluency, before going on to the next.

Here's what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoQ_qbiAdyY

Compare the first attempt to the last (0:00 versus 1:10). Can anyone really doubt that I don't pick up some real Greek in 3-4 minutes I practiced that sentence? More than just "selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text you’ve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation"? I've internalized something about the language in the above, I think.

Also, when I'm reading, I like to pick out the least familiar form in a sentence and vary the word however I can (altering number, etc. following the exercise I outlined above).

I don't think -- at my level anyway -- that this is very inefficient. And the gains seem fairly sticky.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by daivid »

mwh wrote: If we could listen to ancient Greeks reading, that would be great. But this way you just end up listening to yourself. You’re not learning language, you’re selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text you’ve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation. And there’s nothing efficient about so time-consuming a procedure. You could spend the time reading more. You’d be reinforcing and enlarging your knowledge of the language in the process.
As no actual Ancient Greeks are ever going to hear us the fact that we don't know how they pronounced Ancient Greek is a red herring. Of course it would be rather cool if 2500 year tape of a native speaker were to be found in a cave in Egypt but having that would have no bearing on the value or not of reading aloud.

I don't think it is controversial that rereading text that one has already read is valuable. I personally find both listening to a text read by someone else and reading it aloud feels sufficiently different that I feel more motivated than yet another silent read. (Even saying this much I am only speaking for myself - whether this applies to anyone other than me I can't say)

Beyond that lets admit that none of us really know. Unless there is a randomized trial we all, whichever side of the argument are putting forward plausible but untested hypothesis about how learning Ancient Greek works. I do enjoy such discussions but they can never come to a conclusion without research.

As far as I know there is no one doing research on what methods of learning Greek work best and I feel should be uncontroversial that such research would be valuable and ought to be undertaken even though we disagree on what such research would show.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/abstract55/

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/arti ... ng-fluency

Ancient Greek is at base just a language. We don't have native speakers and we don't know with absolute certainty how it was pronounced, but the techniques for gaining fluency in reading in modern languages will work for Greek as well. Re-reading aloud improved my reading fluency in Latin immensely, much more than trying to extensively read and continually look up words. When I come across a new word I look it up, but because I re-read the passage a number of times with the new word in context in sticks like glue. Anecdotal, yes, but I'm sold on it and there has been research done on it.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

Ancient Greek was “just a language.” Now it’s a bunch of texts. Of course we can try to recuperate it as a spoken language if we wish, but there's a big difference between learning an ancient language and learning a language which has a community of native speakers. That’s all too often elided on these boards. So I think you do well to confine yourself to reading fluency.

I’m all for re-reading. Comprehension of any text read for the first time will be much improved by reading it over again—as your linked “school of the bleeding obvious” research project found.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

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mwh wrote:
I would encourage people to re-read a text until they can read it with a decent flow and meaning and then record themselves to listen to later. The mind learns language much more efficiently through the ear than through the eye.
If we could listen to ancient Greeks reading, that would be great. But this way you just end up listening to yourself. You’re not learning language, you’re selfconsciously listening to yourself selfconsciously reading a text you’ve rehearsed, using your own pronunciation. And there’s nothing efficient about so time-consuming a procedure. You could spend the time reading more. You’d be reinforcing and enlarging your knowledge of the language in the process.
As someone who has spent a larger fraction of Greek study time making and listening to my own recordings than almost anybody, I'd like to add my thoughts on the benefits.

Now, the fundamental passive language skill, whether reading or listening, is morpheme recognition: identifying all those prefixes, roots, suffixes and particles as you encounter them. In order to do this at the speed of ordinary speech, you need to encounter each word many times, and internalize the grammar enough to have a sense of what is possible and necessary at any point in the sentence given what has come before. If I read a difficult passage silently several times, it will likely be slower than natural speech each time, and I can puzzle out the same construction repeatedly. OTOH, if I make a recording at natural speed and then come back to it later, then I need to raise my level of mastery of the language, simply in order to understand the words in my own recording or in the printed text as I'm following along.

Also, my old recordings are a wonderful tool for bringing back my memory after I haven't studied the language or a particular author in a while. All those sentences, and my exact pronunciations, are buried in my brain somewhere, and hearing them again brings my past work back fresh in my mind with little effort, while rereading the text would be much more like starting over again.

On the matter of selfconsciousness, I find I'm less selfconscious listening to my own recordings than I am listening to other people's. Almost all the words are pronounced as I think they should be pronounced, what's there to distract me?

Also, when I'm too tired to focus on silent reading of a challenging book, I can still make recordings, especially of adapted Greek readers, and listen to them. It's a good use of lower-quality time, and increases the time that I can spend studying Greek.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

@mwh
I agree with you that Ancient Greek and Latin must be approached somewhat differently than modern languages that have native speakers, but at the same time the texts we have are still just language. They are fragments of a language, but they are nevertheless language. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by saying they're "texts". I'm assuming your point is that all we have is written language and so there is no point to develop any aural fluency in the language. I think that listening to audio of simple Greek text (readers, Thrasymachus, NT, etc.) is very helpful in mastering things like case endings, basic vocabulary, etc. By the way, I'm not an "anti-Grammar-Translation" guy even though I like many of the "communicative" or "natural" methodologies. I say that because I get the feeling that this is where the conversation is heading.

@ariphron
Thanks for your insight about your experience with using audio. I agree with you that the best recordings are the ones you make yourself, unless of course you can find someone with a very similar Greek "accent".

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by daivid »

calvinist wrote:http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/abstract55/

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/arti ... ng-fluency

Ancient Greek is at base just a language. We don't have native speakers and we don't know with absolute certainty how it was pronounced, but the techniques for gaining fluency in reading in modern languages will work for Greek as well.<snip>.
The two links, unless I have misread them, relate to pupils learning to read in their native language. They are people who know the language very well but not how to read. This is a very different thing to L2 learners who do not know know the target language. So different in fact that I'm not sure how transferable research in teaching L1 reading is transferable to L2 learners like us. The second link is not research - it is a teacher trying to encourage a technique they think works. Teachers always think their methods work. They are very subject to confirmation bias. Hence both Christophe Rico and Stephanie Russel (whose teaching method is so grammar based that I would think it a parody of the method if I did not have a copy of her book) believe their method to be the best.
mwh wrote:Ancient Greek was “just a language.” Now it’s a bunch of texts. Of course we can try to recuperate it as a spoken language if we wish, but there's a big difference between learning an ancient language and learning a language which has a community of native speakers. That’s all too often elided on these boards. So I think you do well to confine yourself to reading fluency.

I’m all for re-reading. Comprehension of any text read for the first time will be much improved by reading it over again—as your linked “school of the bleeding obvious” research project found.
Many people learn living languages do it with the aim first of all to read that language. German for example is a very valuable to anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a classics scholar. If research demonstrated that learning German as a living language helpedreading fluency would you exclude them from relevance to learning how to read Ancient Greek?
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Sofronios »

concerning the making sentence and aural approach, is it allright to use modern Greek pronounciation?
because I got this habit of mine tend to use that. even still far from perfect
or should I switch to other?
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by daivid »

Sofronios wrote:concerning the making sentence and aural approach, is it allright to use modern Greek pronounciation?
because I got this habit of mine tend to use that. even still far from perfect
or should I switch to other?
The problem of modern Greek pronunciation is that it does not have the same phoneme mapping as the ancient written language which is based on Attic pronunciation (or possibly even earlier?). Hence τειχος will sound like τοιχος. For this reason Rico chose Attic pronunciation for his course even though the variant of Ancient Greek he teaches is later. The aim is to after all to read Ancient Greek so it is important that our speaking and listening is as good as possible representation of what we find in the texts.

Having said that if you do not make such confusions and you are only reading aloud to yourself you might consider it not worth the effort to change your pronunciation. If you intend to record and publish your readings, however, I would encourage you to go for a pronunciation like reconstructed Attic or Erasmian that does allow such distinctions to be heard.
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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

@ariphron. Thanks for sharing your experience. As I’ve said before, I think your recordings are most impressive.

@calvinist. I appreciate your response to an overhasty post. Agreed on language. I’m not against aural fluency, I just don’t prioritize it. Means of acquiring it are lacking (ariphron notwithstanding), and I find texts are more readily and more accurately understood by eye than by ear in any case (a reader unlike a listener looks ahead and takes in local context and controls the pace, and doesn’t have delivery and pronunciation problems to contend with).

@daivid. Not if it were possible to learn ancient Greek as a living language, but I don’t believe it is.

@sophronios. daivid said it.

Apologies all round for the brevity. I have to scale back my participation here.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

@Sofronios
I mostly agree with daivid about pronunciation. For native modern Greek speakers I understand why they use the modern pronunciation since it feels natural to them and is hard to pronounce words that haven't changed in spelling in a different way than they do when reading modern Greek. It'd be the same thing if I tried to read the King James Bible in a restored English accent, it would be awkward. So, I'm not totally against the modern pronunciation. But, for those of us who don't have the impediment of being native modern Greek speakers, I think it is more practical to use a restored pronunciation because it allows the structure of the language to be heard, quite literally. There are basically 3 ways to pronounce Ancient Greek that are currently used, and the biggest difference is in the pronunciation of the vowels and diphthongs:

1. Restored Attic/Erasmian (variations): α/ε/η/ι/ο/υ/ω/ου/αι/οι/ει 11 distinct vowel/diphthongs

2. Restored Koine/NT: α/ε=αι/η/ι=ει/ο=ω/υ=οι/ου 7 distinct vowels

3. Modern: α/ε=αι/η=ι=υ=οι=ει/ο=ω/ου 5 distinct vowels

I use the Restored Koine, which is in the middle, it brings in some ambiguity, but not nearly as much as the Modern pronunciation. Pick one you like and just stick with it, but I would say avoid the Modern pronunciation unless you speak Modern Greek and it's very hard to change the pronunciation.

@daivid
I think I've seen some research before on the effects of re-reading for learning a foreign language, but I can't remember where. Anyway, children learning to read even in their own language will come across syntax and vocabulary that isn't used in everyday colloquial language. "Book language", especially on academic subjects can be quite different from the everyday register.

@mwh
Understood.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by ariphron »

calvinist wrote:There are basically 3 ways to pronounce Ancient Greek that are currently used, and the biggest difference is in the pronunciation of the vowels and diphthongs:

1. Restored Attic/Erasmian (variations): α/ε/η/ι/ο/υ/ω/ου/αι/οι/ει 11 distinct vowel/diphthongs

2. Restored Koine/NT: α/ε=αι/η/ι=ει/ο=ω/υ=οι/ου 7 distinct vowels

3. Modern: α/ε=αι/η=ι=υ=οι=ει/ο=ω/ου 5 distinct vowels
The current version of the table describing my pronunciation system has 38 vowel and diphthong allophones. It isn't clear how many vowel phonemes they represent, maybe 10-15 including long and short.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by jeidsath »

Single-length vowels:
ᾰ, ε, ῐ, ο, ῠ

Double-length:
ᾱ, η, ῑ, ῡ, ω

Dipthongs
αι, αυ, ει, ευ, οι, ου, ηυ, υι, ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ

That's not even to mention single-syllable vowel combinations created through Synezesis, nor their behavior under more general vowel-vowel juncture.

It's surprising that the early Greeks were able to maintain so many graphically distinct vowels -- likely phonetically distinct -- it was probably only possible because of the vowel length and pitch accent.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

I oversimplified the "Restored Attic" system in order to make the similarities/differences more apparent. But yes, vowel length would mean that there are actually two alphas, two iotas, and two upsilons. The reason I didn't think that was important to mention is that many people ignore vowel length (not all) even though they generally follow the Restored system. They usually mark the difference between the pairs ε/η and ο/ω by vowel quality, not quantity.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

The NT read without differentiation of vowel quantity is one thing, but have you heard a modern Greek reading Homer? You wouldn’t know it was verse.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by demetri »

mwh wrote:The NT read without differentiation of vowel quantity is one thing, but have you heard a modern Greek reading Homer? You wouldn’t know it was verse.
Perhaps so. But to some these reconstructions do not sound like song either.

I always read at least twice(sometimes three times), using each. But then one can invent one's own scheme as a result, and who cares?

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

I don’t think Homer should sound like song. I do think it should sound like verse. But Greeks can read it however they like, of course. My point was simply that verse depends on meter, and meter depends on quantity.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by demetri »

mwh wrote:I don’t think Homer should sound like song. I do think it should sound like verse. But Greeks can read it however they like, of course. My point was simply that verse depends on meter, and meter depends on quantity.
Song as in melodious sound? You think the poems were recited rather than performed to some accompanying device?
I imagine we could argue the point but it's not worthy the effort here. As to "quantity" I am curious about that concept. Perhaps I have spent too much time both hearing and attempting Byzantine chant (Koine) in church and being constantly corrected by monks trained on Mt Athos - correcting modern schemes, by the way, to something neither modern nor Erasmusian.
Also, I do think pitch matters a lot (even allowing that such chant is heavily influenced by Arabic).

I'll have to practice some Homer in chant style and see what comes out.

But we digress on the OP topic...sorry.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by mwh »

Hi demetri,

It’s a long time since we were on topic here, so let's not worry about that!

Performance. It’s only a presumption, but seems likely enough, that “Homer” performed his poems to his own accompaniment on the lyre, much as the αοιδοι in his poems are described as doing. The sound will presumably have been melodious, yes, at least to his listeners’ ears (probably not to ours), but it was not μελωδια in any technical sense, and the accents seem to have been irrelevant to the versification (which is not to say they were not rendered; presumably they were, to some extent). The lyre accompaniment was soon abandoned (Hesiod and Homeric rhapsodes held a staff), and at least from that point on it would be better to speak of recitation than of song. All epic poets, Greek and Latin alike, describe their activity as “singing,” but that doesn’t mean they actually sang; singing was always accompanied by musical accompaniment. Whether they did or not (and most of them certainly didn't), it was the meter that was all-important, and that's a matter of quantity.

So, quantity. Ancient Greek verse operates with a binary distinction between long and short vowels. That’s fundamental to the prosodic system of the language. In verse, that goes along with a binary distinction between long (or “heavy”) syllables and short (or “light”) ones. Hence the metrical symbols ‒ and ⏑. All vowels were perceived as one or the other, and so were all syllables. The time relationship was thought of as 2:1. The distinction between long and short vowels (let alone syllables) was eroded over time, as you well know, but it’s fundamental to all ancient Greek verse, and was retained by the literary elite (both pagan and Christian) down to the 5th century and beyond, at least in verse.

Byzantine chant, as I understand it, is based on a tonal musical system with nothing in common with the principles of ancient versification. Musically it is possible to postulate some sort of continuity with the αρμονιαι and τονοι of ancient Greek music, however speculatively, but of course other cultural influences are dominant, and liturgical chant itself is entirely different from any conceivable performance styles of verse in antiquity.

Still, I imagine it would be fun to set Homer to Byzantine chant!

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by calvinist »

What mwh said above. I concur. I don't distinguish vowel length in my pronunciation of Greek or Latin, but in the rare instances when I read verse I attend to the long vowels. The exact pronunciation isn't as important as the fact that the meter is made apparent. Also, I think the argument that Ancient Greek (and Latin) poetry is not based on a distinction between heavy/light syllables (which implies long/short vowels) is a non-starter. It's embedded in the text; every verse shows a conscious design on the part of the author to put words together according to a pattern based upon syllable weight, not accent.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by demetri »

calvinist wrote:What mwh said above. I concur. I don't distinguish vowel length in my pronunciation of Greek or Latin, but in the rare instances when I read verse I attend to the long vowels. The exact pronunciation isn't as important as the fact that the meter is made apparent. Also, I think the argument that Ancient Greek (and Latin) poetry is not based on a distinction between heavy/light syllables (which implies long/short vowels) is a non-starter. It's embedded in the text; every verse shows a conscious design on the part of the author to put words together according to a pattern based upon syllable weight, not accent.
I do not disagree. I do think the vowel length vs. syllable length to be a non-distinction. One cannot have either without the other...or rather, to my ear they are the same thing.
Accent I do not address, but I do think pitch affected vowel/syllable length. I too often hear that we do not know how pitch sounded. Frankly, we do. But one would need to spend time listening to live modern Greek conversation (not Internet TV) or even Hindi (the sound of which I love in that it reminds me of how Greek is spoken, pitch laden. Other oriental languages are similar.) Strangely it is from female modern Greek speakers that I hear more pitch employed, much less so from men.

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by daivid »

Sofronios wrote:requirementS to attain reading proficiency in an inflected language IS perplexing me.. :o

could anyone here share some method/s in learning paradigms especially the noun system?
At the risk of being off topic by being on topic...

My preferred method would be to read lots of easy Greek that repeated examples of specific paradigms but seeing as there is a dearth of these what I am actually doing is to set my computer to quiz myself on the forms and it repeats those forms proportionately to how often I get them right or wrong.

What I use to do this is mysql database along with a php web interface. However, there are several software programs available that do the same thing.

But it only works because I do it every day. Further, I am convinced that that the only real way to learn the forms is to read them repeatedly in context. Hence if you have limited time it would be best to use it reading. I am happy to use some of my time doing this because I have enough time to read as well quiz myself in this way. And my hope is that if more of the forms become second nature my reading speed will increase.
λονδον

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by Sofronios »

thx u ppl for all the inputs and arguments.. precious!
have been sticking to this declensions, and hey its not that hard..
now I can reproduce all the 8 subtypes of JACT from memory... next I think I'll go for mastronade for enrichment(I hope enrichment is a right word) and keep the inductive and aural methods alive..

its hard and foreign but I think this rustic mind here can cope somehow :lol: :lol:
ὁ δὲ εἶπε· πῶς γὰρ ἂν δυναίμην, ἐὰν μή τις ὁδηγήσῃ με;
Qui ait : Et quomodo possum, si non aliquis ostenderit mihi ?

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Re: how do you learn 3rd declensions?

Post by ariphron »

jeidsath wrote:Single-length vowels:
ᾰ, ε, ῐ, ο, ῠ

Double-length:
ᾱ, η, ῑ, ῡ, ω

Dipthongs
αι, αυ, ει, ευ, οι, ου, ηυ, υι, ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ


It's surprising that the early Greeks were able to maintain so many graphically distinct vowels -- likely phonetically distinct -- it was probably only possible because of the vowel length and pitch accent.
Five unrounded vowels [ɑ æ ɛ e i] and five rounded vowels [ɔ o u ø y], in short and long variants, followed by [w] or [j] or no glide, and nasalized or not. That makes 10x2x3x2=120 possibilities, or 80 if you exclude nasalized diphthongs (which I suspect only occurred in cases where a nasal consonant is actually written). Of course, not every one of these occurred in the language, but of the 60 vowels and diphthongs not counting nasalized ones in this system, only a few are similar enough that it’s unlikely for a language to have both, distinguished phonemically: the main examples would be [i:/ij/i:j],[ej/ɛj],[u:/uw/u:w],[ɔw/ow]. Some versions of reconstructed Attic do not have æ or ø; if you exclude them you get 8x6=48, maybe 40 usable. The sixteen graphically distinct forms (21 with macrons) do not really make a huge fraction of the likely vowel sounds available, and it should not be surprising if one graph represented several vowel phonemes. Excluding nasalized vowels and separate allophones occurring before vowels and consonants, I use about 30 of the 50-some possibilities, or roughly two per written sign.

For me the benefit of going to ~30 vowels and diphthongs compared to simpler systems that have 10-20 is slight. Some words inflect more regularly, and the connection between different words with the same roots can be a little clearer. Most of all, using so many different vowels can make the Attic contraction rules feel intuitive rather than something rather arbitrary that you have to learn. But a listener who knows the language well would not have his listening comprehension reduced to a significant degree on listening to a much simpler system such as Buth Koine. On the other hand, I find that nasalized vowels make a big difference. I started using them in a conservative way when I made my recording of Odyssey Book 6; since then I have been trying to nasalize all α’s that are reflexes of IE syllabic [ṃ/ṇ], plus all vowels that appear before /s/ < /ns/. This makes a big improvement in comprehensibility, especially when I hear words that I do not know well, because it makes many morphological features more regular and more distinctive to the ear than to the eye. For instance: alpha-privative, nasalized [ã], is clearly distinguished from alpha-copulative. Common-gender singular accusatives are reliably marked by a nasal ending, /-n/ or /-ã/; plural accusatives by /-ns/. Active participles have /-nt-/ or /-ns-/.

Now there are two obvious questions about this. First, how can we know if there actually were so many nasalized vowels in any particular dialect, namely Attic at the beginning of the fourth century B.C.? Second, if they had all these nasalized vowels that clearly represent an allophone of /n/, why didn’t they write it as such? To get the second question out of the way, I would say that the concept of a morphophonemic writing system was slow in developing. Early attempts at using an alphabet to write Greek were more of the nature of an approximate phonetic transcription. Each letter indicated a certain sound, and people wrote down speech by writing the letters that came closest to representing the sound that they spoke. With respect to N, what you see in ancient inscriptions is that people avoided writing it except in places where they actually touched the tip of the tongue to the roof of their mouth and made the [n] sound.

For the historical development of nasal vowels, almost certainly they were present where I pronounce them at an early stage of the language, but most likely some of them dropped out, one by one, as people found that they could communicate fine without making the extra effort to observe this rather subtle distinction. It would also be natural for nasalized vowels to be avoided in singing. Then, of course, in Hellenistic times and later when more people learned Greek as a foreign language with the aid of writing, if the nasal vowel distinction was not taught, students did not learn it. Thus we can be almost certain that the nasal vowels had disappeared from educated speech before Byzantine times, and it is essentially unknowable how much they appeared in ordinary Athenian speech in the target classical times. As a result, an evidence-based approach to reconstruction such as that in Vox Graeca will tend to recommend against nasalizing any of these vowels, as the simplest rule to learn and with no particular evidence against it, whereas I nasalize all, because I think it’s the most helpful rule for listeners and it’s consistent with what’s known.

So to get back on topic, I learn 3rd declension nouns by finding a way to pronounce them so that they sound regular, even if they don’t look regular on the page.

@daivid
What is the form of the quiz stimulus and response that you settled on for reviewing noun forms? Last year, Joel and I had threads on Anki deck generators for both nouns and verbs, and we found that how the information was presented was a very personal choice: how to handle macrons, what extra information to include on the back of cards, etc. I don’t know if Joel still uses his Anki deck; I’ve gotten mine out a couple times in the last month.

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