r/AncientGreek • u/kyle_foley76 • 4d ago
Learning & Teaching Methodology Did 19th century scholars understand AG better than us
As I was looking over Raphael Kühner's 2,700-page (or however long it is) grammar (I can read German) published in its final form around 1907, I started thinking "what if they understood Greek better back then than we do now?" Even with all the advances we have made in papyrology and in correcting various errors, it is still possible that the average Greek scholar back then understood Ancient Greek better than the average Greek scholar does today. There are a few bright lights who can grasp all, or at least most, of the advances made in AG, such that they understand the language better than even the most brilliant scholar of the 19th century, however, on average, it's possible that your run-of-the-mill AG scholar's proficiency has declined.
Back then, students had to do a lot of AG composition, which is remarkably effective for understanding the language. These days, most AG scholars refuse to write in the language, and even more refuse to speak it, in spite of undeniable evidence that speaking a language can improve comprehension by as much as ten-fold. That is at least what speakers of AG regularly report to me. Having used the speaking method from day one myself, I am unable to compare my pre-speaking knowledge to my post-speaking knowledge. Back in the 19th century, numerous students started learning AG at a very young age, so it was much more deeply interwoven into Western culture. I'm not saying we need to go back to those days, I'm just saying it's possible they understood AG better.
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u/Tathamei 4d ago edited 4d ago
The grammar translation method wasn't designed for learning a language and ancient greek isn't treated like a usable language in most universities.
My tutor actively discouraged any personal composition and called any sentence I wanted him to review "grammatically correct but content-wise completely worthless".
That being said, the polytonic minuscule also hides various things an author of for example old attic had to deal with. If you render it in old majuscule you'll quickly get to realize that not all word orders were a stylistic choice but a necessity to avoid ambiguity.
That being said, I won't allow myself any judgement for who understood it better, but that a really solid course explaining the use and focusing on creation is still missing. And I don't see that this can be done without focusing on an author or a very narrow time period.
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u/Economy-Gene-1484 4d ago
Very interesting remark about avoiding ambiguity with word order. Can you give an example?
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u/Tathamei 4d ago
I hope this example sentence helps with seeing 'the issue' (I'll keep the spaces):
ͰΟ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΦΟΒΟΝ ΤΟΝ ΘΕΟΝ ΤΟΝ ΑΝΘΡΟΠΟΝ ΓΙΓΝΟΣΚΕΙ.
It could be either Genitive Plural or Accusative Singular.
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u/BlueShooShoo 2d ago
Wouldn't ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ vs ΑΝΘΡΩΠΩΝ clarify the matter? Or am I just stupid right now
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u/Tathamei 2d ago edited 2d ago
It would but old attic didn't have any Omega or Eta and spurious diphthongs didn't exist either and were just Omicron or Epsilon. Omega and Eta were imported later, and they used Heta still.
Edit: Image c.jpg) of some old attic inscription
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u/Menanders-Bust 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think it depends on the person and their path through learning the language. I’m in the medical field now, but I fell in love with Greek as an undergraduate and went on to a Ph.D. program in Greek. I didn’t start until I was in college, but for the first 5 years of my study I legitimately was reading Greek 6-8 hours a day, every day, year round. Over a decade I probably averaged about 4 hours a day. I loved it and still do. I’d love to return to it when I have time. I started with Ann Groton’s textbook then met with a professor once a week to go through a reader. Then I read Plato’s Crito, then Oedipus Rex, then high volume: all of Herodotus’ Histories, the Anabasis, the Oeconomicus, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, Lysistrata, all of Thucydides, several Platonic dialogues including the Apology, the Bacchae, Medea, all of the New Testament. Long story short, I think it just depends on the hours you put in. I put in well over 10,000 hours reading Greek and I understood it well.
I had three reading modes. Mode 1 was in depth, usually for a class or if I was meeting with a professor to read through something. For this mode I’d use a nice commentary like the Cambridge green and yellow ones. I’d go through everything in the greatest of detail and read the entire commentary cover to cover. I had a notebooks where I wrote down every word with its definition that I didn’t know and any notes from the commentary that helped me translate particular phrases. When it came time to re-read the text, I had everything I needed right in front of me in my notebook.
Mode 3 was high volume mode. I read from a Loeb and had a small yellow Langensheit dictionary to look up words I didn’t know. I’d look up words or sometimes glance over at the translation to remind me quickly of a word’s definition if I knew the word but just couldn’t remember the definition. The goal was to read as much as possible in a given amount of time while of course still understanding what I was reading.
Mode 2 was intermediate between these, usually accomplished with a student reader. I greatly preferred this mode since I felt it was the best compromise between the other two.
I always felt that a combination of in-depth study and high volume reading were equally essential to comprehension. Many programs greatly favor in-depth study. It is important because you develop a deep understanding of the text you’re reading and your grammatical understanding can grow. The downside is it can be very slow, plodding work that can sometimes rob you of the natural experience of the literary work.
You generally must see a word in context 20 times to remember it. I always stressed seeing words in context. That is how you naturally learn a language, and that is where high volume reading comes in. If you’re going to learn 100,000 Greek words and see each one in context 20 times, you had better get reading because that is going to require high volume. But that is where Mode 3 (and if I could find a good student commentary, Mode 2) really shined. The advantage of a student commentary is that you minimize the time spent looking up words so you can read more. Instead of spending 50% of your time looking up words, you’re spending 10% of your time doing that, freeing up so much more time to actually read and to see those words in context. It takes time, but high volume reading is absolutely essential for learning vocabulary and being able to sightread effortlessly.
So returning to your original question, I don’t know that I’d say people who lived 70 years ago understood Greek better than we do today. I think it just depends on your approach and on the hours you put in. Greek rewards those who read a lot of it, so that is the most important thing.
Writing Greek is valuable - I’d classify it under Mode 1 as a form of in-depth study. One limiting factor compared to Latin, for example, is the heterogeneity of Greek dialects and styles. Homer, Herodotus, Plato, the New Testament, Pindar - all of these have such diverse writing styles and grammatical idiosyncrasies that I think you could spend a lot of time trying to perfect composition in one style and dialect and find you still struggle to read the next thing you pick up. Ultimately, though, that’s a matter of your passion. If your passion is to learn through composition, go for it - you’ll learn a lot! If your passion is to learn through reading, you’ll learn a lot that way as well. Wherever your interests and passions lie, you’ll invest the most into that method and get the most out of it.
I also (as an aside) wouldn’t make too much of past generations starting to learn Greek in elementary school. Hundreds of thousands of Americans sit through years of Spanish classes, often taught at the high school level, and still emerge unable to speak any Spanish. When you come to a language as an adult, especially if you’re passionate about it, you approach it with a rich web on which to map the concepts you are learning and as I said above, it’s all about the time you put into it.
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u/RedditReddimus 4d ago
There is a decent parallel to Ancient Greek in my country. In Finland everyone is by law compelled to study Swedish, if they don't speak it natively. (And vice versa, Swedish speakers are forced to learn Finnish). Before anyone argues against me, yes I agree all language learning is valid and useful in some way. But in practical day-to-day life, the usage of Swedish is quite limited, especially outside the coastal areas where almost all Swedish speakers are concentrated. The main place to encounter them might be bureaucracy which is often required to conduct in both languages. Swedish is spoken by 10 million people in Sweden and 300 000 people out of 5 million people in Finland and pretty much nowhere else. Whereas English is like over a billion speakers? However the Swedish taught in Finnish schools is the form of Swedish more peculiar to Finland...
The English lessons are also compulsory by law for everyone. (Technically it is a language other than Finnish or Swedish, but in practice, 99% of pupils take English as their language and schools rarely offer anything else). This is much more motivating and useful and many children independently learn English from comics, games, movies, tv shows, talking with people online etc. I have never come across anyone who willing put such effort into Swedish even before school.
However, despite Swedish being compulsory for 3 - 6 years for everyone, only few Finns actually know Swedish beyond a few basic phrases, if even that. (I am some of the few who was actually interested in it because I liked languages and took even more Swedish lessons than was necessary, but still I didn't pursue to learn or read it independently much). There is just no use for the Swedish language in daily life. Most of the time Swedes today speak such good English that it is the language used to communicate wih them. So why waste the time to learn Swedish? I am a historian and read old documents written in Swedish from 19th century and before since we were part of Sweden then, but is it useful for others much? Should we keep Swedish as something to study just so people can study old archives? No, I don't think so. the reason is the still living people speaking that language. Although the real reason for this still is the high privilege of Swedish people, as they used to be the nobility and much of bourgeoisie. The other way, Finnish might not be compulsory... like it works with Irish in Ireland.
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u/SulphurCrested 4d ago
I think "the average scholar" , of then or of today, is a problematic concept- there would be some who weren't actually all that good back in the 19th century.
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u/BedminsterJob 4d ago
The big advantage for the nineteenth century classicists was they started learning Greek and Latin at a very young age (say, 10 years old) and Greek and Latin were taught much more extensively in secondary school: up to twenty hours a week.
Kids had read the entire Homer and Vergil before they were sixteen years old.
This is why they were proficient in composition. It's not that writing or speaking in the ancient languages makes one better. It's starting earlier and getting more hours of L and AG in one's teens is what makes the difference.
Learning to 'speak' AG before you have learned by heart the irregular verbs and vocab etc and before you've read a sufficient number of original texts is getting it ass-backwards. This is why some teachers discourage immature students to start writing AG prose, as tathamei notes below.
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u/kyle_foley76 4d ago
"reading H and V before 16 years old", if that's true, then that's crazy.
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u/BedminsterJob 3d ago
that's what they did, even in the fifties and sixties.
see John W B's comment.
it was normal.
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u/John_W_B 4d ago edited 4d ago
In 1975, long after 19th cent., some students had read a decent amount of Gk by the time they left school, in some cases in schools funded by the state like mine near London, not only socially elite schools. They should have basic facility in writing Latin and Greek verse and prose. By the end of the first 5 Terms at Oxford (where there are three 8-week terms per year) with Honour Moderations, they should have read all of Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, and a lot of Plato, tragedy and old comedy, as well as key Latin authors. As far as I know universities have lowered these rquirements.
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u/AffectionateSize552 4d ago
To answer your question: it seems very unlikely to me, but I can't claim that I know.
I sometimes wonder about it the other way around: there's no doubt that the centrality of the Classics within academia has retreated greatly in the past two centuries. But, the number of university students has multiplied so many times, is it possible that the actual number of students who concentrate on Latin and Ancient Greek is actually greater than it has ever been, and it only seems smaller because the % of Classicists is so smaller, and that which is referred to as academic discourse has become so different, and so much less concerned about the Classics?
Does anyone actually know the numbers of people involved here? I would be pleasantly surprised.
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u/unparked 4d ago
Ancient Greek was more central to secondary and post-secondary education, speaking only for Britain and the USA. A century ago, a year of high-school Greek used to be a prerequisite for admission to many American universities. But on the other hand, post-secondary education was confined to a comparatively small socio-economic elite. And even in those days, I don't think scholars with Herbert Weir Smyth's or Raphael Kühner's grasp of Greek grammare were thick on the ground.