Colour-coded Greek texts

[seanjonesbw]

Is anyone aware of any attempts to colour-code Greek texts to mark, for example, main verbs, nouns in the nominative, accusative, particles etc.? I always find when I'm reading a new writer with unusual (for me) syntax that I get tired hunting around for subjects and verbs - I'd be interested to see if having them marked out with colours would make parsing a bit more comfortable.

[RandyGibbons]

Hi seanjonesbw.

Just as fyi, I seem to remember reading something like the following. I'll do my best to recall it from memory, and perhaps someone else will know the specifics.

There was a school of Hellenistic philosophy, I believe a descendant of the Peripatetic school, that published a theoretical work about the nature of writing (it might have been called Περὶ φύσεως γραμματικῆς?). Its main contention was apparently (the work has only survived in the fragmentary citations of miscellaneous scholia) that it didn't matter what order a writer wrote things in. It considered this to be a (rather distracting) secondary property of, but not the essential nature of, literary communication. From what we can piece together of this work (if I remember anything about the scholarship correctly), it was an interesting forerunner of some modern linguistic, ethical, and pedagogical ideas. Linguistic: The essence of human verbal and written communication, as reflected in the techniques of contemporary artificial intelligence, is to produce and to comprehend a subject and a verb. Ethical: In what was unusual for the ancient world, it was concerned about the comfort of the reader. Pedagogical: Here's the amazing thing, apropos of your question - Itinerant didaskaloi actually developed a color-coding system that was used in some eastern Roman provinces to teach Greek to the children of the Roman soldiers, and we actually have some papyrus fragments that, thanks to modern imaging techniques, reveal traces of different colored inks that we know were actually developed by the Ancient Egyptians.

As I said, hopefully someone else will remember the specifics of this better than I do. Meanwhile, though, I don't myself know of any modern color-coded Greek texts.

[seanjonesbw]

Thanks, Randy, that's so interesting! I'd love to read more about it if anyone did have a link to some material. In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to keep trying to comprehend subjects and verbs in black and white.

[RandyGibbons]

Hi Sean. I would feel bad if I left you believing I was being serious, when I was only pulling your leg . I'm afraid I was reacting to the notion of reading sentences by looking for their (in your wish, color-coded) parts of speech, which to me is not reading at all.

But in any case, the only thing I've ever come across resembling what you are asking for is the use of fonts in the Latin Legamus Transitional Reader Series, example from Vergil below. Personally I would rather slit my throat than try to read something doctored up like this, but ...

[seanjonesbw]

My leg is well and truly pulled

[seanjonesbw]

I disagree though that reading a colour-coded text would be "not reading at all". Each writer has their own syntactical rhythms, and when I get to know a writer I start to anticipate how the sentence is going to pan out when I start reading it, and 'feel' when the verb or subject is going to arrive. With texts like the NT there's such a lot of repetition of sentence structures that you get a really strong pulse running through the work that makes this intuition easy. With someone like Thucydides there's so much nesting of clauses going on that I, as a learner, lose track and don't have a strong feel for the rhythm of the main clause. I imagine a second-language English speaker would pause over lines like "so early walking did I see your son" or "instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung" for the same reason. It's not so much needing a crutch to identify parts of speech as having the beats of the line emphasised for you that you'll naturally anticipate when the writer's syntax clicks for you.

Obviously a colour-coded text isn't for someone who can sit in their favourite wing back chair and burn through the whole of Thucydides in an evening, but I would certainly find it helpful, reading at a much lower level, to see out of the corner of my eye that I'm going to have to wait 50 words until the end of the sentence for my verb.

[RandyGibbons]

I see what you mean, and I like your rhythm metaphors. (By the way, is your example of Thucydides hypothetical, or are you reading some Thucydides?)

Anyway, you might want to take a look at something I wrote about the kinds of sentences you're talking about. If you're so inclined, scroll down to the bottom of the post and see how you fare with my Greek example, the opening two sentences of Polybios. If it qualifies as the type of (periodic) sentence you're talking about, see what you think of the Hale + Hoyos method I'm peddling in that post.

[seanjonesbw]

I read the Hale you linked to and he's a real breath of fresh air! It reminds me of the first time I read the introduction to Pharr - I love it when classicists slag off each other's pedagogy. I completely agree with his and your distinction between syntax and the plan of the sentence - anticipatory parsing (the immediate rather than slow and methodical version) is exactly what I was talking about when I said that I relied on my intuition to let me feel the rhythm of the remainder of the sentence the further I got into it.

To put it in Hale's terms, I suppose the difficulty I have is that the more Greek the plan of the sentence gets, the more I flounder, and the more English the plan is the more I swim through the text. My other languages are Welsh and Italian, which are so much closer to the English plan (poetry excepted) that I didn't really appreciate how much I was grasping the meaning of what was being said in those languages more through anticipation of what kind of thing would naturally follow, rather than through comprehension or translation. I've probably picked up this bad habit from English-friendly koine as well e.g. όψεσθε τον ουρανόν ανεωγότα, και τούς αγγέλους τού Θεού αναβαίνοντας και καταβαίνοντας επί τον υιόν τού ανθρώπου where the interlinear can sit directly below each word.

Did you find that Hale and Hoyos worked for you? I'd certainly be willing to put in the time retraining myself if I felt like there would be payoff for the most anglophobe of the Greek writers. Reading your post, I realised that I've already internalised this method for writers that I'm very comfortable with but "keeping the mind in suspense", as Hale puts it, is a real challenge in a long sentence with a new writer. I end up with a floating mental image of Cyrus and Croesus and an island and the sea and someone moving forwards and someone else being subdued before I get the satisfaction of completing the picture, and I've usually forgotten some part of it by then.

[seanjonesbw]

P.s. Thanks for introducing me to the periodic sentence - I found this corker in the New York Times today after you mentioned it:

"By the time Origi scored the fourth — a brilliantly clever corner routine, orchestrated by Trent Alexander-Arnold — the goal that returns Liverpool to the Champions League final, that grants it a chance to avenge last year’s defeat to Real Madrid, all the color had drained from Messi’s face."

I confess I ran away scared after dipping my toe into Thucydides.

[RandyGibbons]

Did you find that Hale and Hoyos worked for you?

Yes, to the extent I needed such mediation by the time I read Hale and Hoyos, which to be honest wasn't much.

"By the time Origi scored the fourth — a brilliantly clever corner routine, orchestrated by Trent Alexander-Arnold — the goal that returns Liverpool to the Champions League final, that grants it a chance to avenge last year’s defeat to Real Madrid, all the color had drained from Messi’s face."

If I were learning English for the purpose of reading its literature and journalism with appreciation and pleasure, and not just knowing how to ask for the bathroom, I'd want to have my anticipation raised by "By the time" and deliciously held in suspense until the vivid picture of Messi's face at the end. The sentence is a perfect example of Hoyos's point about sequencing in (in his case Latin) narrative prose. Thanks!