ἀρχή = beginning

Homeric Greek here I come. I was so excited to hear the long-awaited Greek course would soon begin on May 23rd (Shavuos, as it turns out - I started early). There are about a dozen of us at the moment, but it's early yet (I hope enough people stick it out to keep the group going).

We're using A Reading Course in Homeric Greek (book 1), and I've heard such good things about it. It contains 120 chapters, which sounds intimidating, but the chapters are very short (meant to be covered in a 50-minute class at a university). The first 60 chapters cover basic grammar and vocabulary while the final 60 have passages from The Odyssey, introducing more grammar and vocabulary as they come up. Although there is a second book, this one is self-contained,

"providing a solid foundation for further reading in Homer or in other Greek authors. Nevertheless, the student who cannot go on in Greek beyond the present course will find satisfaction in having repeatedly seen and used within the course itself every principle that he has learned. The book, then, forms a unit in itself, offering material of intrinsic worth and interest; it is not merely a preparation for something else."

Lesson 4 was due today, and I just completed lesson 5 (due Saturday). Although all lessons are relatively short (compared to the monsters in Wheelock's Latin especially), the first five go especially quickly. (Once we get to lesson 6, when the grammar instruction starts, it goes to two lessons per week.) What? No grammar yet?

Here's what we've covered so far:

• alphabet
• sounds
• pitch & syllable length
• marks (pitch, breathing, & punctuation)

The theme of lessons 6-15 is the noun. Thanks to Latin*, I'll have an easier time with lesson 6. Greek has four cases - everything Latin does except for the ablative. I wonder if the Greek dative absorbs what would be expressed with the ablative in Latin. Surely I'll find out soon.

* As for Latin, I'm still behind Themis. I'm matching their pace but not catching up. Although I can do it on my own, it's nice to be able to compare answers and the accountability of due dates.

Alas, Hellas!

As I wrote last October about Greek vs. Latin, "In all honesty, if I could only learn one, Greek would win hands down."

Also last autumn, I posted to my (much-neglected) commonplace journal about Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. This was my favorite quotation:

More [Victorian] students could read Greek with some fluency, though the lazy or thick of mind had to help as Greek works began to be buffered by translations - into Latin. (Apparently, if one couldn't read Latin, he had no business trying to drink at the springs of Hellas anyway) [127].

My dear husband, who studied Latin for four years, thought that was hilarious. Why yes, we are geeks. Amusement aside, this excerpt spoke to me:

Greek is a more supple language than Latin; the tongue of Plato doesn't tend to lay marble slabs and erect domes the way that of Cicero and Virgil can. But its suppleness makes it more elastic. It stretches. A Greek sentence breathes in a way a Latin one rarely does. To say that the poetic mind prefers Greek while the prosaic one opts for Latin would be simplistic - and in some signal cases badly wrong - though some so claim, and a truth may lie somewhere amid the dregs. Greek nouns chime a bit more brightly; prose rhythm is smoother and usually swifter. Sounded from clear pipes, the melody of Greek intoxicates (180).

And before I forget, here's the opening paragraph from Learn Ancient Greek:

Talk about learning ancient Greek and someone is bound to ask 'Ancient Greek? What use is that?' The answer, I suppose, depends on whether you think pleasure is useful. Being a joie de vivre man myself, I can think of few things more useful than pleasure, but I do not want to stop anyone being as miserable as sin if they so choose.

Well said!

racing

Spending Chol HaMoed studying Latin - isn't that what everyone does? I thought so.

I've now finished chapter 9 of Wheelock's Latin - that's two chapters in the last week. For next week, Themis has all of chapter 11, while Prometheus is doing the first half of chapter 13. If I stay focused, I can catch up to Themis in a week. I'm so close I can taste it.

Once I catch up to Themis, I'll keep pace, doing one chapter a week. What will I do with the extra time? Stay tuned.

eating crow

I am humbled. With all that happened in the last six weeks of 2006, I couldn't get my groove back. Then since the New Year, my hobbies have consisted of baking/cooking and spending far too much time combining works on LibraryThing. Then I thought to myself last week that it wasn't that I don't have time for Latin - it's that whenever the laptop is around, any free time gets sucked into the black hole of the internet. So I've been keeping the laptop upstairs to limit the amount of time I spend online, and it's amazing how much more I get done.

It hasn't been difficult to find time to work on Latin with the laptop out of sight. For most of the day, my Latin books are sitting out on an otherwise bare dining room table; seeing them whenever I happen to walk past is a powerful reminder. I save the most demanding work for when I have a block of time when Eliza is asleep, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to translate just a sentence or two here and there when the books are already lying out.

After 4½ months off, I've had a challenging week of daily Latin. At first, I had to look up everything that I'd forgotten, but it has been getting easier with each day. I decided not to start from the beginning but rather to continue where I left off near the end of chapter six. Now after a week, I'm ¾ through chapter seven. I ordered a couple goodies to keep me motivated:

and .

My old group, Prometheus, is on chapter 12, and the newest group, Themis (started January 2007) is already on chapter 10. Prometheus is going at the rate of one chapter every two weeks while Themis has a chapter-a-week clip. Since the book is 40 chapters long, Themis will soon overtake Prometheus, so it may be that I catch up to Prometheus first even though at the moment they're two chapters ahead of Themis.

For now, I'm just taking it one day at a time. A busy holiday week is coming up, but I'll be sure to spare some time for Latin.