Emily Fleming

Finished reading: Ancient Greek Alive by Paula Saffire 📚

LibreOffice Writer estimates about 15,000 words of Greek text, counting the scripts at the beginning, the folk tales, the poetry, and the thesauros at the end of the book. The texts more or less all met my bar for “compelling input”, i.e., if I had encountered them in my native language, I would have found them acceptable to read. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I admire the authors' decision (borrowing a contemporary slogan) to “shelter vocabulary, not grammar”–or at least, not so severely that the results are unrecognizable as Greek. The Greek sections add up to a nice reader for students who are looking for more comprehensible input. Admittedly, it would be difficult to justify the purchase ($50 for a new paperback from UNC Press!) for a 15,000-word mix of a handful of culturally significant authentic snippets and some charming easy Greek folk tales. The best bet for the student working their way up to more fluent reading is to do what I did: check it out of the nearest university library.

Altogether, I consider the grammar/vocabulary sequence of Ancient Greek Alive as the best existing textbook for a Medulla-style curriculum in Ancient Greek. That said, the Greek text is (in my opinion) no more than a tenth of what a first-year student should be offered as reading material. If anyone is thinking of writing novice Greek texts, I would encourage them to take a look at AGA and consider trying to work with this textbook’s core vocabulary. It will probably suit you better for storytelling than any equivalently-sized textbook vocabulary list on the market.

I mentioned a few downsides in prior posts about the book. One that didn’t come up is the quality of the copy-editing in the third edition. My impression, from poking around online, is that the numerous errors in the book (mostly Greek accent typos, but with an eye-catching tangle in the English-language background section “The Personal Muse”, pp.152-3) are a feature limited to this latest edition. While I am dreaming of a world in which Ancient Greek is taught through acts of meaningful communication, I shall also express the hope that renewed interest in this textbook might result in UNC Press bringing out a more tightly edited fourth edition.

For all that the Greek readings in Saffire & Freis’s textbook possess real charm, spending more time with those texts has made me realize how tricky it would be to re-draft my little historical reader to align with its vocabulary progression. The trouble is that the stories are just so very short, often on the order of about 100-200 words long. And for all that I like very much the idea of the Thesaurus at the back, the amount of unfamiliar vocabulary in them is probably just too overwhelming for a beginner student. The NT selections are not so bad on this front as the ones from Heraclitus; at least, the NT verses selected tend to feature much more internal repetition of words. I acknowledge that the Thesaurus sections were chosen mainly for their foregrounding of certain grammatical structures, and that the authors of Ancient Greek Alive don’t (presumably) see vocabulary acquisition as a goal for that section. But that makes no sense. When you read, it matters whether or not you know what most of the words mean. When most of the words in a sentence have to be glossed for you–and the same is true of the next sentence, and the one after that–it is hard to see how a student will be able to internalize the grammatical structure with which they are being presented. This is just silly. The same, by the way, is true of the lines from Sappho which constitute the student’s second poem to be memorized–and this for a poem that’s already in Aeolic.

I still think this book would work okay for a student who loved to memorize and found it quite easy to do: you would simply have the student more-or-less memorize the folk tales as well as the Thesaurus selections. If a student was willing to memorize everything, then they’d eventually end up able to read Greek. However, this textbook offers nowhere near enough material–and too much of it, much too difficult–for a student to learn by reading. Even then, I still think that a student would learn better from reading exponentially more Greek.

The lists of “vocabulary to be learnt” are a little misleading in this regard: they don’t at all prepare you for the Thesaurus readings. They teach you most of the words that show up in the folk tales. I think that’s a shame, to decide that students have to struggle through texts they’re wildly under-prepared for, and then fail to even incorporate the rewards of those struggles into the rest of the text.

I think, if I were really committed to writing a reader to go with this textbook, what I’d need to do is to give up altogether on the idea of history per se and go back to the epistolary idea. You would want to write pretty much one letter for every single chapter of this book. I don’t know whether the fictional baby Greek letters I’ve written are sufficiently charming for students to enjoy reading one every day or not. It would require a lot of creativity, to figure out a new letter to write that fits well with every single day’s vocabulary. Also, the vocabulary is distributed with great unevenness across the days, but it’s not uncommon to encounter a day with twenty or even thirty new words, counting the vocabulary in the Thesaurus. And should one include the vocabulary in the Thesaurus, to begin with? If you don’t, what’s the point of the section to begin with?

Maybe it would be a good creative writing exercise for me to try and make the epistolary reader happen as a companion volume to AGA. But that removes the prime advantage of the historical reader, i.e., it was supposed to make it easy for teachers to find things to talk about in Greek, in the classroom, every day. If I go back to epistolary reader, it’s no longer the case that one could count on having the option of a safe, easy, informative discussion topic for every single class. And I liked the idea of learning Ancient Greek through History, darn it. It meets a real need, I think: students do tend to be woefully ignorant of the ancient world in which Greek speakers lived and wrote and traveled.

So I don’t know that I really will throw out the idea of an LGPSI historical companion reader after all. For all that I think Saffire’s little stories are so charming and re-readable, I think the vocabulary in the early chapters of this book is simply too difficult to adapt that way.

Simply turning up to the UNCA library on Tuesday to wander through the shelves for a couple of hours seems to have filled me with new life, academically speaking. I found two books that had been misshelved by a row or more (and only checked out one of them). I serendipitously encountered a book on my TBR list, George Steiner’s After Babel, and brought it home with me. I was reminded of the kind of research I want to be able to read (competently, critically), and the kind of research I want to be able to do.

And, not least, I checked out a book which may change the direction of my Ancient Greek introductory graded reader project: Paula Saffire and Catherine Freis’s Ancient Greek Alive. I checked it out for the novelty of the Greek reading material it contained; extremely simple folk tales are part of a healthy diet for language slackers like me. The next day, having read through the nine introductory scripts and the first ten lessons, it struck me: this is the easily the sanest vocabulary progression I’ve ever encountered in a textbook. Very restrained when it comes to nouns: e.g., one learns only μήτηρ & παῖς together in their first story, and the other family nouns you’d expect (πατήρ, ἀδελφός/ή, υἱός, θυγατήρ) are saved for other chapters. Same deal with parts of the body: you get ὀφθαλμός & χείρ quite early, δάκτυλος soon after, but there’s never a frantic attempt to cram in, say, οὖς, κεφαλή, πούς, πρόσωπον, as well. To me, this seems to be the most sensible decision, given how slowly vocabulary is really acquired, and how many other words you need to learn.

Verbs, for example. You need a lot of good verbs to tell any kind of a series of interesting stories, and many of the best verbs for writing beginner stories are irregular. By the end of Script #9, Saffire & Freis have gotten us off to quite a good start: ἀκούω, γιγνώσκω, ἀναγιγνώσκω, γράφω, δακρύω, ἐθέλω, ἐσθίω, ἔχω, κάμνω, λαμβάνω, λέγω, μανθάνω, μεθύω, πίνω, χαίρω, ἐρωτάω, ὁράω, γαμέω, καλέω, νοσέω, ποιέω, φιλέω, βούλομαι, ἔρχομαι, φοβέομαι, δείκνυμι, δίδωμι, εἰμί, εἶμι, κεῖμαι, ἀνίσταμαι, and οἶδα. That is a terrific set of verbs to be working with during the first few weeks of class. Do students know all of them equally well? No, they do not. But they have seen them before and will see them again, because that is a fantastic list from which to plan classroom activities or write extra reading material. I don’t know that you can be properly impressed by the vocabulary review list on p.25 until you’ve spent time with other Ancient Greek curricula. It’s just so–elegant. And sensible. I am a very firm believer in not sheltering students from common irregular verbs until they’ve been at the language for a semester or (worse) almost two: they simply don’t get enough practice time with -μι verbs if you don’t touch them until the year is almost over. No, give them a couple of -μι verbs right from the start, and lots of opportunities to use them.

And the authors haven’t been overly precious about avoiding any kind of verb form for which the students haven’t been given a complete paradigm & grammatical explanation. The 1st & 2nd person plural forms are, I note, exempt from student production for a while. Although this is painful, I can recognize that they are simply not as important for students in either classroom conversation or in storytelling, and sacrifices (temporarily) have to be made. But the teacher’s scripts contain not only all six personal endings and the imperatives a TPR partisan would expect, but also the 1st person plural present active subjunctive. There are also a handful of aorists scattered throughout these introductory scripts, mostly in the imperative & infinitive to contrast aspect, but a handful to indicate past tense (“ἔμαθον τὸ ποίημα”, e.g.). Again, I think all this is healthy for a student. They can (and will) learn to produce and analyze these forms later. But at the very beginning, to be exposed to them in a meaningful context is what they need.

It also hurts a little to have such a tiny set of prepositions (I see ἐπί, ἐκ, & δία listed, and I am fairly certain I remember a glossed ἐν from a later script), but I can recognize this also as a sensible temporary sacrifice. Getting comfortable with personal endings for verbs & case endings for nouns/pronouns should reasonably come first, and internalizing those deserves time. Thankfully, Saffire & Freis have also chosen the path of wisdom in allowing some of their two dozen starting nouns to come from the third declension. Again, students will internalize this if given sufficient space to do so, and it’s better to start them as you mean to go on.

I suspect one of the reasons this book isn’t more popular is the authors' approach to the content of the AG readings: “Being a purist I was unwilling to water down or otherwise distort Greek material. I admired the Greek texts for their beauty and vigor, and did not want to tamper in the least….I went to the children’s library…picking out any stories I thought were funny, intriguing, or both. These I translated into Ancient Greek” (p.xv). Thus AGA’s Ancient Greek readings are mainly “original” Ancient Greek content, which has little or nothing to do with the Ancient Greek world. I more or less share Saffire’s disinclination to simplify authentic texts drastically enough for a first-semester student to be able to read them, which is why I am working on writing my own. Not because I identify as a purist (I don’t); I just think that the texts become less intrinsically interesting after passing through that layer of translation and de-authentication. Once you’re reading an adaptation rather than the real thing, and the satisfaction of touching someone else’s words across the millennia is gone, the adaptation in question needs to be tremendously compelling on its own terms for me to feel any kind of intrinsic motivation to read it.

But AGA also contains a handful of authentic short poetic excerpts to be memorized (Sappho, Archilochus, Mimnermus, Homer, and a couple of Anacreontea), along with a Θησαυρός section at the back of the book, containing brief prose excerpts from the New Testament, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, epitaphs and related snippets (some from Greek tragedians, most from Lattimore’s 1962 Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs), Diogenes, and other famous sayings. This kind of encounter with authentic texts is, I think, far more compelling than an adapted version. I also think that memorizing sentences (in this case, authentic sentences with interesting content) is much more valuable from an SLA perspective than is memorizing vocabulary lists. I think a teacher could do much worse than to ask students to memorize some of the Θησαυρός selections–or perhaps to make artistic posters illustrating them with nice calligraphy. From what I’ve seen of the folk tales so far (through about chapter 10), they are also engaging enough that I would feel I was being reasonable if I asked students to create little illustrated picture books of the stories. This sounds like a small thing. But compare a random Nasrudin story with a random reading from another Greek textbook: do you honestly think that these stories land the same way? The folk tales (again, thus far) have sufficient charm that I would not find my time wasted if I were to read them in any language. The same simply cannot be said of other Greek textbooks.

Of course, there isn’t anything like enough enough Ancient Greek material for students to read in this book. I don’t have an estimate yet, but to put a wild round number on it…maybe ten thousand words total from these readings? Fifteen? I am not certain that it is as high a figure as twenty. And this, mind you, is for a book that’s meant to cover two semesters of Attic Greek. For all the joy of rereading and memorizing–which again, is vastly more plausible for Ancient Greek Alive than for any other AG textbook I’ve laid eyes on–that is still not the kind of input that any student trying to learn to read Greek fast needs. To try and get from zero to large quantities of authentic texts (even the “easy” ones) in a year is an ambitious goal. I don’t think this book alone is likely to get you there.

Nevertheless, the texts in the book are worthwhile (okay, maybe I’ll admit to ambivalence about the skit ὁ ἰατρὸς ἔρχεται), and the sequencing of vocabulary and grammar is almost shockingly sensible. And any teacher who picks up this book is going to have already accepted the major sticking points that I suspect many teachers will encounter with my Ancient Greek reader: namely, that the content doesn’t have enough to do with Ancient Greek, and that they’re just not sold on (or not sufficiently comfortable with) the idea of speaking Ancient Greek in the classroom. “Here’s tens of thousands of words of extra reading for your students to do, relying largely on the vocabulary & grammar that they’ve already learned; they could be doing this instead of (or in addition to) tedious translation exercises or memorizing vocabulary lists & verb paradigms” sounds like a pretty soft sell for the teacher who’s already decided on Ancient Greek Alive as a textbook.

No, the textbook isn’t free–and I suppose that is not quite my original vision. But it is eminently re-usable; you could get by with classroom copies, if you were on a tight budget. It isn’t Koine–which I still tend to think is the most sensible place to start with AG language instruction, since that’s the dialect most of the intermediate-friendly texts are written in. I don’t love the layout, visually, and I am not sure I’m sold on the whole idea of starting with uncontracted verb forms (though I am intrigued). I also prefer macrons in first-semester texts, although I think a competent teacher could get away with genuinely teaching vowel quantities through their pronunciation; that’s probably preferable to cluttering up the text with more diacritics, even if it makes me (not at all a competent speaker) nervous. Thus far I am not blown away by the historical context English readings–they’re okay, but I could name other textbooks whose historical sections I prefer.

But despite these quibbles and questions, I still think I’d do better to scrap my existing vocabulary list and take up with this one. That’ll be a little bit of a project, to organize the AGA vocabulary by chapter and then to start rewriting οἱ λιθικοὶ αἰῶνες. The end result, however, seems likely to be one which is more widely adopted by others, and which and fits more smoothly into the way I actually plan on teaching: in a classroom, face to face with human beings.