Glossary
Richard Lindeman (richlind@ix.netcom.com)
Thu, 20 Nov 1997 15:18:11 -0600
>From: Carl William Conrad <cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu>
>Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 09:02:53 -0600 (CST)
>Subject: Re: Introducing the cases: round two (clarification)
...
>
>Let me add another note here, as I've been bothered myself by the
>introduction of new grammatical terms:
>
>One of the most annoying things to a student in the early stages of
>learning a language must be the fact that different teachers or
>grammarians use different terminology for the same grammatical
>constructions. The farther one goes into a language, the more one adjusts
>to this as an uncomfortable aspect of consulting reference works: what was
>once simply a matter of understanding one's native language and the target
>language (as well as one's instructor's own "metalanguage" for describing
>the grammar) has now become a matter of translating the "metalanguages" of
>one to half a dozen or more different grammarians or lexical works into
>each other. I suspect it's the old problem of the circular dictionary: you
>keep looking at one explanatory definition of a term after another until
>you ultimately return to the word you were looking up in the first place,
>only to find that you STILL don't know what it means! (This is what
>happens to me every time I attempt to tackle a new work in the social
>sciences).
I am starting to compile a glossary of Greek grammatical terms with very
short explanations to each of them... just a sentence or two to explain
them.
Is anyone aware of specific resources that I should consult in this process?
In this glossary
I also plan to cross-reference different names that are given for the same
grammatical constructs.
Rich Lindeman