21st Century Classical Greek -- Summary 12, syntax 1

Goodwin has a long section on syntax but it is fixed to concepts that aren’t accurate, things like case labels or morphology having intrinsic meaning.

You, however, know that CONTEXT IS KING. The real way to understand how to line things up together (syntax) to get meaning, is to study the expression of Classical authors and see if they share common habits. I’m still reading Thucydides and I am starting to compare him with Xenophon. Study your favorite author to find out what his habits are. If we find common habits among them, that is “Classical Greek syntax”.

Maybe.

Because as I keep pointing out with Thucydides, his expression is strongly reminiscent of the features of a clearly oral tradition, the Tannakh or Jewish Bible, and in that case you can look for a number of things. I’ve already called some of them out.

1.         The association principle. This seems to guide Thucydides more strongly than the other two that apply to the Tannakh. Material is drawn together in Thucydides because it is associated together. This is the source of numerous problems with Jowett’s translation: he transposes material, breaking up the train of thought.

2.         The chronology. I pointed out places where Thucydides clearly edited his work, such as the early Book I reference to the plague that didn’t happen until late in the war. It’s not as extreme as in the Tannakh; I have a blog posting about how the slander stories in Numbers occurred in a different chronology than it would appear from their position in the text. Thucydides has less of a chronology issue than the Tannakh because he was writing at the time of the events he reports, instead of recording an oral tradition that survived up to several millennia.

3.         The frequency principle. This, too, is more a feature of a long-running oral tradition like Tannakh; the clumping together of most sacrificial rituals from Exodus through Leviticus is a sign of their frequency, but some rituals appear toward the end of Numbers and even in Deuteronmy, this being a sign of their rarity. Thucydides does not have this feature.

Those are principles of relatively high-level structure. We tend to think of syntax as a feature of sentences and their component clauses and phrases.

The main feature of Thucydides’ work is the topic order sentence. This is partly the outcome of association; a topic order sentence follows on from material that supplies the topic. Goodwin does not recognize the topic as a different issue from the subject of a sentence nor as a subtopic of subjects. This is one reason Jowett crashes around transposing topics and breaking up the sequence of ideas: nobody recognized the importance of topic.

Topic order sentences are a sign of an oral habit of thought. The disdain of Victorian scholars for oral literature and its records, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, blinded them to the oral features of their favorite classical literature. Topic order is still ignored in language learning; most efforts aim at helping people write a language and read written material. This could be one reason learning to speak a second language is so difficult: spoken language is de-emphasized and turned into formulaic expressions. Failing to recognize it as primary and the descendant of oral culture in general, teachers can’t help students reproduce the fluidity and flow of somebody immersed in the language.

When you are told that somebody knows a lot of languages, you have a right to be skeptical. Being able to reproduce what you were taught, which often happens in classics, is a far different thing from using a language with fluency inside the culture of that language. And with Classical Greek, the culture of the language has died. But that’s no excuse for clinging to antiquated and incorrect learning material.