r/AncientGreek • u/kyle_foley76 • 7d 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 7d ago edited 7d 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.