Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 17:49:42 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: classics@u.washington.edu
Sender: CLASSICS-owner@u.washington.edu
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From: Linda Wright <lwright@cac.washington.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Announcement, Beginning Greek Group (fwd)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Forwarded for Laurence Maloney, ltm@cns.nyu.edu.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 19:07:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Laurence T. Maloney" <ltm@cns.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: Announcement
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ANNOUNCING A BEGINNER'S GREEK GROUP (starting April 14)
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A Greek study group for beginner's is starting on April 14.
If you'd like to join us, send a message saying you would
to the Organizer, Larry Maloney, ltm@cns.nyu.edu.
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We will methodically go through THREE different Greek texts,
two emphasizing Homeric Greek (Texts H1 and H2), the third
the Cambridge Greek course developed by the Joint Association
of Classics Teachers (Text A), which emphasizes Attic Greek.
We'll go through all three texts SIMULTANEOUSLY. That is, there
will be assignments from all three texts every week.
Each participant will choose which text or texts he or she
wishes to work with. Many participants plan to work with
only one of the texts, ignoring the other two, but several
people are interested in studying two texts together.
There is no `teacher'. We'll be teaching one another.
In particular, the Organizer (me) is only a beginner
at the study of Greek.
Every week, the Organizer will cut and paste responses
(grouped by text) and we'll compare our answers and discuss
them. Anyone is welcome to join us in going through one, two,
or, for the truly fanatic, three of the texts.
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Texts: Three Options
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Text A: By the JACT (Joint Association of Classical Teachers).
JACT, Reading Greek: Text, Cambridge (1978). $17.95.
ISBN: 0521219760
JACT, Reading Greek: Grammar, Vocabulary and Exercises,
Cambridge (1979) $22.95. ISBN: 0521219779
[JACT, An independent study guide to Reading Greek.
Cambridge (1995) $22.95. ISBN: 0521478634]
[JACT. Teachers' Notes to Reading Greek.
Cambridge (1986) $24.95. ISBN: 0521318726]
The study guide is optional but recommended.
The teacher's notes are optional.
Text H1: Pharr, C. & Wright, J., Homeric Greek. Oklahoma
(1986). $21.95. ISBN: 0806119373
Emphasizes the Iliad.
Text H2: Schoder, R. V. & Horrigan, V. C., A Reading Course
in Homeric Greek, 2nd Ed. Rev. Vol I. Loyola Press
(1985). $14.95. ISBN: 0829405097
Emphasizes the Odyssey.
[---, Teacher's Manual and Key. Vol . I. Loyola Press
(????) $14.95. has a complete key to all readings
and exercises.]
[---, Flashcards for Vol. I - $3.00]
The Teacher's Manual and Flashcards are optional.
ORDER FROM PUBLISHER: 1-800-256-0589 or 1-800-621-1008.
FOR SOME REASON, MANY BOOKSTORES THINK THEY ARE OUT OF
PRINT (e.g. amazon.com).
Most prices taken from http://www.amazon.com.
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Tentative Plans: Please suggest alternatives.
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Text A: The JACT course covers Attic Greek [Athens, 4th-5th
Century BC]. There are three volumes [Text, Grammar,
Study Guide] and you need the first two to participate.
The text is divided into 19 numbered Sections, divided in
turn into variable numbers of Units marked by letter.
The grammar volume contains the vocabulary and grammar
neededto read the Units.
We will cover about two-three Units of JACT every week,
at least at first.
Text H1: Pharr is divided into 77 Lessons and teaches the
Greek needed to read passages from the Iliad of Homer.
We'll take about two weeks for each Lesson (after the first
two), and beginning with Chapter 13, we'll encounter uncut,
unedited selections from the Iliad. By the end, we will have
read Book I in full, in order.
I arrived at the two weeks per lesson figure by comparing
Pharr and Wheelock. Pharr and Wheelock seem to be presenting
about the same amount per lesson and the Beginner's Latin
Group is covering one lesson every two weeks.
Text H2: Schoder is similar in structure but more modern and
present about 400 lines (original, uncut) of the Odyssey
starting after about 60 lessons, mostly from
the Cyclops' episode. Up to that point the
Greek presented is modified original quotations with
source identified (same approach as Wheelock's Latin).
The lessons are bite size, and the authors expect that
a normal course rate would be four lessons a week.
That is, 4 lessons correspond to a Wheelock chapter.
We'd likely cover 2-3 lessons a week (probably 2).
The illustrations and background information are superb.
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Assignments:
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Every week the organizer will assign you sentences
and exercises from each of the texts, about 3 or 4 per text.
If you're only interested in, for example, Pharr, you can just
ignore your assignments in JACT and Schoder or vice versa.
(It's easier for the organizer to assign everyone something
in every text and let each person ignore what isn't interesting
to them.)
You send the completed assignment to the Organizer who cuts and
pastes the responses together by text and circulates it to the
participants.
The participants then discuss the outcome and compare notes.
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Email/List Info:
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We'll do our communicating through greek@lists.colorado.edu
and a list private to the group bg1@psych.nyu.edu [not yet
set up].
Greek@lists is also used by an intermediate Greek group
and, I hope, they will be kind enough to scan our mail for
questions and errors and help us along.
To sign up to Greek@lists:
Send mail to
listproc@list.colorado.edu
containing just the line
subscribe greek <firstname> <lastname>
substituting in your own first name, last name.
[the subject field should be blank].
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Organizer: (Larry Maloney, ltm@cns.nyu.edu)
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I'm a professor at New York University,
teaching in psychology and in neural science. I've
wanted for a long time to be able to read Ancient Greek,
but have no knowledge of Greek. This study group is
run without a teacher and we teach one another.
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Tentative Dates:
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If noone objects,
I'd like to begin Monday, April 14th with the first
assignments in the two texts. The first assignment
will be due on Monday April 21th.
If lots of people can't get the texts in time, we
may slip the schedule a bit.
You should have arranged to get texts by then.
Barnes & Noble carries JACT and Pharr in New York City.
Or try http://www.amazon.com.
For Schoder, contact Loyola Press, the publisher,
directly.
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Representing Greek:
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We will likely be using the Ascii Transliteration of
Greek known as Beta Code as a standard for all
communications.
It's an encoding of Greek which is supported by the
Perseus Project [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu],
a major repository of Greek texts.
What you send out in email and receive will be
an encoding of Greek in ordinary ASCII. Here is the
first line of the Iliad as it might arrive in e-mail.
mh=nin a)/eide qea\ *phlhi+a/dew *)axilh=os
We are working on methods that will allow you to
highlight the above and have it magically turn into
real Greek characters. We'll circulate information
on how to do it for Macintoshes, Windows, and
UNIX/LINUX users shortly.
Don't worry too much about this. Beta code is very
human-readable once you know the Greek alphabet and
accent systems since most of the encodings are
obvious (it takes about 5-10 minutes to learn).
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Edgar Krentz, New Testament
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
1100 EAST 55TH STREET
CHICAGO, IL 60615
Tel: [773] 256-0752; (H) [773] 947-8105
Reply to: ekrentz@lstc.edu
or emkrentz@mcs.com (home e-mail)