What I like about my Greek class

A big part of the appeal of this course for me is that I'm now taking it as a linguist whereas before, in 1997, I was taking it one who randomly acquires information. Before, I was memorizing paradigms because that's what I was supposed to do. Now, I'm wondering where the paradigms came from. Like, there are a gazillion verb endings and permutations of those endings. There are 3 types of accents. And we just have to know them from memory and regurgitate them on demand. And when a student asks why Greek words are constructed the way they are, the answer is a smile and a shrug. My mind is spinning, trying to see the rhyme and reason. I want to write rules for everything.

One student brought up the modern day pronunciation of the Greek theta, which doesn't sound like the th in the. Modern Greek pronounces theta as an aspirated t. He was wondering why we learn it as th, what the precedent is for that. Got me curious. I did some digging. Get you curious? My first response to his question was to draw up a phoneme chart, seeing how nicely the theta fits in the fricative row with the phi and chi as taught in our class. But the modern pronunciation of aspirated p for phi and k for chi would make just as symmetrical a chart. Hmm. What's up with all this? This student, the Ryan who helped me move in the day I arrived, has a Mounce book he's going to show me that explains the phonology of Greek in a way that will purportedly eliminate most of the memorization.

And phonetics is helping bunches. It's kind of frustrating to see other students transliterating with English spellings and then reading back what they wrote with a different pronunciation which is allowed by the English orthographic rendering. A prime example is the rendering of chi as the English ch in transliteration. But instead of flowing out as the ch in chemical (or Christ, for that matter), it usually comes out as the ch in cheese. Whereas I just wrote the IPA version next to the Greek letters. I'd love to teach everyone IPA but there'd be no point at this point. It would be counterproductive, eh? "Hey ... here's a brand new alphabet that you can learn to help you learn this other brand new alphabet."

Have another quiz tomorrow: 22 new words and 3 paradigms. Am just about ready.

And earthlink email sending is back on line. Yay!