Re: Help with parsing

Carlton Winbery (winbery@andria.lacollege.edu)
Fri, 25 Oct 1996 10:55:35 -0600

Andrew wrote;
>Fellow Greeks,
>
>What I find the most difficult thing to do at present when reading
>Greek is parse accurately.
>
>Do any of the scholars or Greek teachers out there know of any
>good ways to learn to parse well. I can parse nouns and adjectives
>reasonably well and present tense verbs, but the other verb forms
>and especially PARTICIPLES, I have a lot of trouble with.
>
>Can anyone point me to books, sections of books or articles that
>deal with this matter well.
>Please, any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
>I think someone has the follow quote/proverb in there sig:
>
>"To translate is human; To parse, divine."
>
>Yes, I am beginning to see there is a lot of truth in this....
>
>XARIS KAI EIRHNH from another MICRO Greek.

I agree with Carl Conrad that students must learn to deal with verbs by
dealing with the constitutuent elements. I emphasize to students learning
to reconstruct the forms by using the principal parts. For the regular
verbs, the students must be able to take the stem of the verb and put it in
the identifying form for each of the six principal parts. eg. PISTEUW,
PISTEUSW, EPISTEUSA, PEPISTEUKA, PEPISTEUMAI, EPISTEUQH (for Hellenistic
Greek). For those verbs where the stem changes, students must memorize all
forms when they learn vocabulary. ERCOMAI, ELEUSOMAI, HLQON, ELHLUQA.
Sort of like "go," "went," and "gone" in English. Students must learn to
parse verbs by recognizing the PP stem and by knowing what forms are built
on each stem.

Carl,I would like to have a copy of your handout on constituent elements.
I have the requisite fonts and a Power Mac.

Carlton L. Winbery
Fogleman Professor of Religion
Chair, Division of Religious Studies
winberyc@popalex1.linknet.net
winbery@andria.lacollege.edu
voice 318 487-7241
fax 318 442-4996