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Well, here I am, fresh from my crash course in Classical Greek. One of my main motivations for taking the course was that I wanted to be able to read patristic writers. So now I am trying. It is doable, but only with some assistance.
I have started with Theodoret of Cyrus (also commonly spelled "Cyrrhus"). This is in large part because the Catholic University Press has recently published two volumes containing Theodoret's The Questions on the Octateuch (Amazon: vol. 1, vol. 2). There is a critical edition of the Greek text on the left-hand page and an English translation on the right-hand page. The English of these volumes was translated by the late Robert C. Hill. It is a very good literary but meaning-oriented translation, which means that I have to look carefully to determine the correspondences between the English form and the Greek, when I refer to the English.
Occasionally I can follow the Greek without the English, but it is sufficiently stylistically complex that I often have to look at the English. The good news is that I can follow the grammar of the Greek, something I don't think I could have done before my latest courses. However, I can see that it will be a while before I can readily follow it without at least occasional reference to a translation. This is about where I am with Syriac and Coptic, as well. In both cases, the key is to read, read, read!
Aside from linguistic issues, it is interesting to see what questions were being dealt with by the early Church Fathers. Theodoret was born in Antioch (Syria) about A.D. 393. He was a native speaker of Syriac, but he likely grew up fully bilingual in Greek. That was the sort of city Antioch was. He only wrote in Greek. These volumes on the Octateuch are not heavy-duty in their theology. Rather, they address questions that were asked by average Christians at the time. The questions are on a level similar those addressed in modern study Bibles, although some of them are a bit different from what modern readers might think to ask. Here are the first few:
- Why did the author [Moses] not first set down the true doctrine of God before relating the creation of the universe?
- Why did he not mention the creation of the angels?
- Did the angels come into being before heaven and earth, or were they made along with them?
- Yet, some commentators claim that the angels preëxisted heaven and earth, for "if there were no angels," they ask, "how was the God of the universe praised in song?"
The next question is along the lines of what we would call "the Bible and modern science":
- If the earth was in existence, how did it come to be, since the historian says, "The earth was in existence"?
"The historian" is a reference to Moses. Theodoret displayed all the tact and diplomacy I am inclined to show when faced with questions of a similar sort:
This is a silly, foolish question. He who said, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth," did not say that the earth was eternal, but that it received its existence after, or along with, heaven. Furthermore, the historian did not simply say, "The earth was in existence," but connected it with what follows: "The earth was invisible and formless." That is, though made by the God of the universe, it was invisible, because still covered by the water, and formless, because not yet arrayed with growth or sprouting meadows, groves and crops.
The question and answer arise from the wording of the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Old Testament, which was (and still is) the one universally used by the Greek-speaking Church. The people who were asking the question were pulling a phrase out of context, and Theodoret said they had to read it in the context of the rest of the sentence. It seems such a simple point, but people have continued to employ similarly silly approaches to Bible reading up to this very day. So the lessons of Theodoret continue to be quite useful to us.
Here I am, three weeks after finishing the intensive Greek course. Now I have had a three-week reading course. We mostly read Attic Greek, such as Plato and adapted Herodotus (who wrote in the Ionic dialect).
Toward the end we read some un-adapted Herodotus. His syntax is sometimes a bit tricky to follow. Reading his Ionic dialect is of particular interest to students of New Testament Greek because, as I have learned this summer, NT Greek (and Koine in general) was largely derived from Ionic, though with some Attic influence.
Well, now I have some translation work (Portuguese, Spanish, English) to occupy my time before the new school year starts. Arabic will be my new language this coming year. I have been reading the textbook. This language will definitely challenge my schedule, particularly considering that I will be taking three other courses as well!
I have just passed the halfway point in my intensive summer introduction to Classical Greek. We go through the whole thick textbook (Greek: An Intensive Introduction, by Hardy Hansen and Gerald M. Quinn) in six weeks! The book is 588 pages plus a long appendix that serves as a reference grammar. Each class day is equivalent to a week in a normal semester.
Even though I have a good knowledge of New Testament Greek, by the fourth day of class we were getting into new territory for me: the optative mood. I knew what it was in general terms, but in the NT its use is limited to little more than a few frozen expressions. I am also being required to produce a large variety of forms: the active, middle and passive voices in the indicative, middle, passive and infinitive moods, in the present, imperfect, future, aorist, perfect and pluperfect "tenses," plus participles in many combinations of the above. We have also been through all three declensions of nouns.
Today we had our second test, after three weeks of class. It is the midterm exam in this short course, equivalent to the final for the first semester of the regular course. I had to do a lot of review to make sure I was reasonably ready for this test. What I and some other students are finding is that we have a lot of verb suffixes floating around in our heads, but it can be difficult to associate them with the right labels, especially in isolation, as they appear on some sections of the test. I think I did well on the test, but tomorrow will tell. Our instructor, a very capable graduate teaching assistant, has the fun of grading all the tests before class tomorrow. Reminds me of my days as a TA for introductory grammatical analysis back in the fall of 1983, and for introductory Spanish in 1990-91.
Anyway, now that we have reached the halfway point, we still have contract verbs, -mi verbs, imperatives, deponents and other pieces of fun to cover before the end of course. After this, I will be taking a three-hour course of readings in Classical Greek. Once I am done with all this, I should be able to read the Greek patristic writers who so strongly influenced Syriac writers for several centuries. With only a knowledge of NT Greek, this would have been extremely difficult indeed, since the Church Fathers modeled their style on the sophisticated variety of Classical Greek, not the rather simplified variety found in most of the NT.
I prefer this fast introduction to a language to the slow, very dull speed of normal semesters. If we were trying to learn to speak it, of course, we would have to go more slowly. But since our goal is just to read it, we don't have to spend time learning to deploy grammar and vocabulary in coherent speech, or learning to understand it when spoken by fluent speakers.
Long, long time ago... I can still remember when...
I learned my first non-Roman writing systems! It started when I was in third grade. That school year was split between Minot, North Dakota and Wichita Falls, Texas. Normally we moved during the summer, but that year we moved during the school year.
I don't remember for sure which school this started at, but I think it was in Wichita Falls. My elementary school library had one book with the Greek alphabet and another with the Russian alphabet. It also had a book with a number of Chinese characters. In all these books, the characters were printed in a very large size, perfect for young readers. I checked these all out repeatedly, and again and again I traced all the letters and characters on reams of notebook paper. I did this because I thought it was fun, but after a while, by the time I started fourth grade, I found that I could actually read the Greek and Russian alphabets! And I could reproduce some (two or three dozen?) of Chinese characters. It was just all that copying that drilled it in, even without any conscious effort on my part to memorize the symbols.
To be sure, I didn't yet know about Greek accents and breathing marks, and I had no idea what the "hard" and "soft" signs in the Russian alphabet meant, but at least I could read the letters that represented phonemes.
My standard procedure now--and the one I recommend to anyone learning a new alphabet--is to copy the whole thing 20 or 30 times in a row. Then start trying to write words and names, anything you like, spelling out the English sounds as best you can in the new alphabet. You will gain a basic control of the characters in a couple of hours this way, at least if it is one of the simpler alphabets like Greek, Russian or Hebrew. Much longer and more difficult alphabets, such as Thai or Devanagari, will take longer, but the basic method is still good. Enjoy!
German is a Germanic language. So is English. So, why do English speakers find it so blasted hard to learn German? Two reasons: vocabulary and grammar. Yes, German also has a few sounds that English doesn't have, but these are as nothing compared to the wildly different vocabulary and the mildly different grammar patterns that are just different enough to cause constant conflict with our own.
Who is to blame for this unfortunate estrangement of siblings? A certain Englishman and a certain Frenchman. The Englishman was the last king before William, known as Edward the Confessor. Edward's conception of religion led him to believe that he would be more blessed by God if he remained chaste throughout his life. Maybe he felt personally blessed, but his failure to father an heir proved a curse to England. Upon his death, a vicious war of succession broke out. It was won by William, Duke of Normandy, who had a real, though weak, claim to the throne. As William was French, he brought in a great many Frenchmen to help him rule his new kingdom. Over the course of the next few centuries, the hardy Anglo-Saxon language came under the strong influence of the newly prestigious Norman dialect of French, the language of the nobility. This affected English phonology, morphology and, most especially, its lexicon.
The phonological changes in English were not severe enough to cause a great deal of difficulty with relation to German. The main effect was that certain sounds that had previously been allophones (variants conditioned by the sounds around them) became distinct phonemes. Thus, f and v used to be variants of a single phoneme (a sound considered "the same" by native speakers of a language). The f sound was used at the beginning or end of a word, or within a word before a voiceless consonant. The v sound was used inside a word between vowels or before a voiced consonant. The same conditions applied to s and z, voiced th as in "the" and voiceless th as in "thin." In French, though f and v, s and z were distinctive phonemes, that is, these sounds could distinguish one word from another. This came to be the case in English as well. This is why, in Old English, in the word heofon the letter "f" was pronounced like the "v" of the modern English equivalent, heaven.
Changes in morphology, that is, word structure, were much more noticeable and did create serious difficulties for English speakers learning German. Noun plurals, in particular, became simplified. The consonant s, with phonologically conditioned variant pronunciations, became the almost universal marker of plurality. It had served as the plural in some cases in some declensions in Old English, but the fact that this was apparently the most common plural ending in Norman French no doubt helped make it the standard in English. Also, the highly simplified French case system helped English lose all morphological noun cases except the genitive (the possessive "apostrophe s" of Modern English). German, on the other hand, has retained its complex case system up to the present day. This creates considerable difficulties for English speakers learning German.
The largest barrier to the easy learning of German by English speakers is, in my estimation, the vocabulary. The core vocabulary of the two languages (i.e., about the 200 most frequent words) is largely cognate (i.e., derived from the same Proto-Germanic root and recognizably similar). Thus help/helfen (verb), go/gehen, eat/essen, man/Mann, etc. But once you get out of this core vocabulary, there are huge differences. This is due to the absorption of large quantities of French vocabulary (ultimately from Latin) by English, as well as a considerable volume of Greek, in contrast to the decision of German speakers to coin new words by joining existing German roots rather than borrowing Latin and Greek terms willy-nilly as English has long done. Thus, for example, in linguistic writing, where English says sentence construction (two Latin words), German says Satzbau (one word with two German roots). In the realm of religion, English uses baptism (from Greek), while German has Taufe. English history (Greek), German Geschichte. English society (Latin), German Gesellschaft. And so on and so forth. The result is that English speakers learning French, Spanish or Italian will immediately recognize thousands of cognates, while in German they will only find a few hundred, and most of the technical terms needed for a particular field of learning will be completely different. So English-speaking graduate students face a daunting amount of vocabulary learning to make even modest progress in German, whereas once they have learned a couple hundred words of non-cognate core vocabulary in a Romance language, their path is clear because of the overwhelming mass of cognates in technical vocabulary.
In a separate post, I will deal with syntactic conflicts between English and German that cannot be blamed on William.
As I mentioned in my first post, I learned the Greek alphabet by the time I was nine years old (by dint of repetition, not a deliberate attempt to memorize it). However, it was some years before I started studying the language in earnest. The moment finally arrived when I was a senior in high school. By this time my family had moved to Del City, Oklahoma. A big turn in my spiritual life led me to have an intense desire to study New Testament Greek.
Beginnings
I found a textbook at a local Christian bookstore (Ray Summers, Essentials of New Testament, 1950). It was a reasonably good introduction to the language (although better texts have come out since). The one thing to which I vigorously objected even then, and to which I even more vigorously object now, was a statement in the introduction. I no longer have the book, so the following quote is only approximate, but the meaning is unaltered: "It was logical that God should have used Greek as the medium for the New Testament, for it is the most expressive language known to man." For a person with an appreciation for the range of human languages, this last clause is heresy! Even at the age of 17 or 18, when I got this book, I was appalled by the smugness and ignorance displayed by this statement. There simply is no such thing as "the most expressive language known to man." The most expressive language known to any person is usually his or her first language, whether Sipakapense, Chinese, Xhosa or Spanish... or Greek! Greek was used for the composition of the New Testament because it was the language of scholarship and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean region. The Greeks had been colonizing that area for centuries, and the conquests of Alexander of Macedon ("the Great") spread Greek even farther and cemented its status as a language of government administration. People spoke many languages throughout this large geographical area, but Greek was a language they all had in common. It was likely the native tongue of Paul of Tarsus and the gospel writers who came after him. These men were well prepared to compose the documents that came to form the New Testament in the language in which they could most readily gain wide circulation.
Having gotten past that myth (which I hope is not still circulating in seminaries!), let me tell a bit about how I slowly got to know Greek. I started plodding through Summers' book on my own. I got fairly far along, but I remember that understanding the nature of Greek participles was beyond me at the time. Whether it was a poor exlpanation in the book or simply my own inadequate comprehension of the explanation, I cannot remember. From time to time as an undergraduate I returned to Greek. Bits and pieces kept sinking in, but much still eluded me.
Some time after I started my linguistic studies at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the fall of 1981, maybe even a year after that, I briefly joined a Greek reading group composed of three or four students. I still had trouble making much sense of connected text. Some verb forms stumped me and the syntax (by which I mean word order) was often incomprehensible. But overall, this exposure did more good than harm.
A Breakthrough: Hepatitis
In 1989, while I was living in Guatemala, I got hepatitis. To make good use of the time as my body slowly recovered, I undertook the study of Russian. It turns out that Russian has a system of participles that is very similar to that of Greek. Somehow, as I studied the books from Moscow, participles finally clicked! Basically, they are verbs turned into adjectives which, like all adjectives in many languages, can also function as nouns. Hurray! I was finally over one of the most daunting hurtles in my acquisition of Greek.
Eventually I found myself in Florida, starting in 1990. A few years after I got a job as a Spanish editor at a Christian publishing company (Editorial Vida), I finally decided that my hankering to be able to read the New Testament (and the Septuagint) in Greek was not going to be satisfied until I actually started applying myself to the task. No thunderbolts of knowledge from heaven were going to suddenly put it in my brain! So I went back to reading the NT on my own, with help from a lexicon and maybe even some help from that crippler of language learners: an analytical concordance. (I know, it's embarrassing to admit it, but even at that late date I may have sometimes given in to the temptation to go back to the linguistic equivalent of bottle-feeding.)
Consolidation: My First Class in a Seminary
Finally, after my company was acquired by another one that offered educational benefits to its employees, I was able to enroll in a local seminary (Knox Theological Seminary, Fort Lauderdale) and take a second semester Greek course (Spring 1997). This was just what I needed at the time. About the time I began the course, I finished my first reading of the entire New Testament in Greek. While there was still plenty that I didn't know, I had at least become somewhat familiar with how the Greek writers expressed themselves. Greek II helped me nail down various of the verb and noun forms that had been hovering on the periphery of my knowledge. Somewhere over the course of the next few years, I finished reading through the NT again, this time with much more appreciation of the style of the language and the idiosyncrasies of the various authors. I still had to look up some words, and Hebrews and 2 Peter continued to be exceedingly difficult syntactically, but I had definitely gotten past the "decipherment" phase to the phase of reasonably fluent reading.
Pedal to the Metal: Greek with Frank
After my second reading of the NT, I very occasionally read a chapter in Greek, but my attention to it was very sporadic. Finally, in the fall of 2006, I began my studies at the Catholic University of America. One of the requirements for all students in the Semitics department is to take two semesters of Advanced Biblical Greek. This I did during the 2006-07 school year. I thought I would die that first semester! I have boundless admiration for my professor, Dr. Francis T. Gignac (JEEN-ee-ack), who likes to be called just "Frank" by his students. He is a Jesuit about my father's age. He is very friendly, very erudite and very demanding of his students.
In the fall semester, our reading consisted of all the genuine Pauline epistles. This meant two chapters every class day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). We all had to be prepared to translate the entire text of the two chapters. About two weeks into the course, Frank informed us that we would be expected to be able to produce from memory every principal part of every verb. Yikes! That meant up to six forms of each of hundreds of verbs. Also, on the exams he would put a passage from one of the books we had read up to that point and we had to be able to translate it with no reference to a dictionary. This meant some serious vocabulary memorization. I knew most of the words that occured 50 times or more in the NT, but there were plenty that were less frequent than that, so I had to start making cards for all the ones I either didn't know or wasn't quite sure of. Thus my commutes by bus and train to and from the university were largely taken up with studying the seemingly endless lists of words and verb forms. This, combined with my other courses, demanding in themselves, made me feel like I was drowning.
I learned from a student who had introductory Greek with Frank that his first semester is known as "boot camp": he takes the beginners through the entire introductory textbook (which he wrote) in about six weeks! They have to learn all the principal parts of all their verbs. This is the amount of grammar and vocabulary commonly covered in a full two semesters of seminary courses. My friend told me that the beginning students felt like they were drowning too. But, he said, it was extremely satisfying after this very intense period of study, to be able to open the Gospel of John in Greek and find he could read it with ease.
Well, by the time I finished that first semester of advanced Greek, my "okay" knowledge had been whipped into shape and could perhaps even be called "good." But there was more to come! In the second semester (which I was in just a year ago!) we read parts of the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), that is, the Greek translation of the Old Testament done a couple of centuries before Christ. In that course, we had to keep an eye on the Hebrew text as well, to see how the Greek differed from the Hebrew. We also found that the quality of translation varied wildly, from good renderings in some books to horrible renderings in others, ones so bad as to be virtually incomprehensible, unless you already knew what the Hebrew said. Once again, there were many principal parts and many new vocabulary words to learn, as well as various grammatical peculiarities of LXX Greek that set it apart from both Classical and New Testament Greek. On our tests, we had a passage to translate from Greek to English, but also one to translate from Hebrew to Greek! My Hebrew is only middling, and composing coherent text in Greek was a big challenge, but I survived. I am grateful to Frank for pushing us to learn as much as we did; my Greek would never have reached its current reasonably good level without him, I'm sure. But whew! What a lot of work!
Why Do Semitists Learn Greek?
Since Greek is an Indo-European language, like English and Spanish, rather than a Semitic language, like Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic, you may wonder why Semitists have to study it. Here is the answer.
If you aim to become a scholar of Old Testament Hebrew, you will have to be able to use the Septuagint as you study matters of textual criticism. The Septuagint is the earliest translation of the Hebrew text and sometimes witnesses to a version different from the current Masoretic text.
If, as I am, you are a student of the Semitic languages of the early centuries of the Christian Church (Syriac, Arabic and Coptic [though this last is not quite Semitic, as I explain here]), you will find abundant Greek loanwords, often key theological terms. Also, many Greek theological writings were translated into these languages and exercised a profound influence on how writers of these languages formulated their own theological expressions. Particularly in Coptic, you would be hamstrung without a knowledge of Greek.
What Textbook of New Testament Greek Do I Recommend?
There are a great many possibilities out there, and I am not familiar with them all. Of the ones I am familiar with, though, the one I recommend is the one I used at Knox: David Alan Black's Learn to Read New Testament Greek. Dr. Black shows an awareness of linguistics, and he happily debunks some of the ridiculous myths about Greek that have circulated for generations in seminaries. My favorite is his refutation of the utterly baseless notion that the "aorist" is a kind of magical "once-and-for-all" tense. In the first place, it is not a tense (absolute time reference), but an aspect (indication of the speaker's point of view). In the course of his explanation on page 50, Black says, "Hence, the 'once-for-all' nature of the aorist, so often celebrated in sermon and commentary, is little more than nonsense if one is arguing that it is the aorist tense per se that proves the nature of the action behind it." Amen!
Frank Gignac's book, An Introductory New Testament Greek Course, is a bit more heavy duty. He includes information on the historical development of the language and even on its Indo-European ancestry. If you have a knack for languages and an interest in the history of Greek, you could start out with this book. Otherwise, start out with something like Black and use Gignac for review and expansion of your knowledge.
Today you can find various books written in Syriac or teaching Syriac or translated from Syriac, in which the author claims that this is "Aramaic, the language of Jesus." Well, it is true that Syriac is one of the many dialects of Aramaic, and it is true that Jesus spoke Aramaic. However... (sorry to burst any bubbles) Jesus did not speak Syriac. Jesus spoke a rather different dialect of Aramaic. The speakers of his dialect could probably understand Syriac, and vice versa, but there may have been some difficulties in communication. So when you see a book that advertises Syriac as the language of Jesus, take this claim with a grain of salt. Even so, by reading works in Syriac, especially ones written before the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), you will be reading a language whose thought categories are much closer to those of Jesus than those of Byzantine Greek which later became dominant in theological discussion (particularly during the Christological controversies of the 5th century, which is why I give the Council of Chalcedon as a dividing point). The Syriac writings of St. Ephrem of Nisibis are the epitome of Syriac literature, but they also take the most study to fully understand.
Although I have cursorily mentioned Greek influence above, I should be more specific. The Syriac-speaking area was by no means untouched by Greek. Syriac was the dialect of Aramaic spoken in the city of Urhay, and by the time Ephrem was born in the nearby city of Nisibis in 303 CE, Edessa had been under Greek influence for some six centuries, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great. Ephrem himself was quite knowledgeable of at least one school of Greek philosophy, and the Syriac language had quite a few Greek loanwords (quite a few Persian ones, as well, but that's another story). Even so, Ephrem had a talent for expressing himself in a rather traditional Aramaic-sounding way, so his writings are a rich source of insight into Aramaic thought categories in the 4th century of the Christian era.
What is Syriac? Not a few people may have this question, so I will answer it immediately. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. This latter language has gained some fame as the language of Jesus, most recently in the movie "The Passion." Aramaic was a major language in the Near East for many centuries. It had many dialects over the period in which it flourished, and there were many variants from place to place where it was spoken. There were no TV's or radios to promote a "standardized" broadcast version, so different spoken dialects abounded (although standard written forms were more or less successfully maintained among the educated elite at various time periods). Syriac was the major language of Christian church in Syria and over a vast territory stretching east of it, even to India and China. Aramaic has the largest amount of surviving literature of any ancient Semitic language, and Syriac represents the largest chunk of it.
Getting My Toes Wet
Okay, I seem to have started off with a digression. The point of this entry is to talk about my own experience of learning Syriac. But because the name may be unfamiliar, or perhaps just marginally familiar, I wanted to start with a brief explanation of what it is. Now for my own story. Once again, serendipity enters the picture. On November 2, 2005, I was walking around Huehuetenango, Guatemala, where I had lived for 3 1/2 years, until moving to the nearby rural town of Sipacapa. On one of my regular trips to town for groceries and supplies, I went into one of the many small evangelical bookstores in town to see what was new. To my astonishment, I found a Syriac Bible on display! Who could have imagined such a thing? I was probably the only person in western Guatemala who would have even recognized what language it was. Why would a bookstore that catered to Spanish speakers have such a volume? When I asked, I was told that it had been sent out by the Bible Society of Guatemala in August, the "Month of the Bible" in that country. It had been heavily discounted. I suspect that the Bible Society had been holding this book in its warehouse in the capital for years and didn't know what to do with it. So they took advantage of the Month of the Bible to chop to price to a third of the original and send it to the provinces. Well, as destiny, luck or divine intervention would have it, this book wound up in a place where I would see it. Although I wasn't exactly awash in money, this was such a novelty and such a good deal that I couldn't resist it.
Presently, I got to looking on the internet to see what books I could find on Syriac and where I might be able to study it seriously. I soon found some of the major modern works on the language, both a teaching grammar as well as reference grammars, and a good dictionary. I put three books on my Christmas list, and thus, on Christmas day, 2005, I began to seriously study this mysterious and fascinating language. Some of the patterns and words were familiar due to their similarity to Hebrew, which I had dabbled in off and on since I was 17. But a number of features were new, since Syriac is not a member of the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages to which Hebrew belongs.
In two months of intensive study, I worked my way through Wheeler M. Thackston's Introduction to Syriac, the best introductory textbook available, in case you're interested. I was aided by Theodor Noldeke's Compendious Syriac Grammar and Jessie Payne Smith's A Compendious Syriac Dictionary. About the middle of this process, I acquired Takamitsu Muraoka's very helpful Classical Syriac, a shorter reference grammar, but much more recent and up-to-date than Noldeke's 1898 volume (in its 1904 English translation).
Jumping Off the High Dive
Before and during this period of study, I got to looking on the internet to see where I might be able to get a Ph.D. in Syriac. As it turns out, there is one place in the United States that has such a program: The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. Certain family needs that had arisen made returning to the U.S. highly desirable at that time, even though I was quite happy in Guatemala. So I started looking into graduate programs. I checked out Spanish, linguistics and Syriac. Ultimately, Syriac won out. So in the summer of 2006, we moved from beautiful rural Guatemala to the crowded, extremely expensive Washington metropolitan area. Silver Spring is a nice place, don't get me wrong, but my goodness, how much cheaper and more pleasant the atmosphere would be if the unversity were located a few hundred miles west! But what the heck, here we are. Our family has adjusted nicely and I am once again going after that Ph.D., though in a field I had not contemplated until recently. It's a lot of fun but also a lot of work.
After I had moved to the area and Dr. Sidney Griffith, CUA's senior professor of Syriac had returned from a trip, I met with him and he gave me a page of Syriac to translate. He needed to see if I had learned enough Syriac on my own to go straight into the readings course, or if I would need to start out in the introductory class. I worked my way through the difficult text (the beginning of Narsai's Homily on the Three Fathers), translating it and parsing the verbs. Father Sidney (this is what we call him, since he is also a priest) considered my work satisfactory, so I enrolled in Syriac readings.
Ay, ay, ay! Syriac grammar isn't excessively hard, but learning to read Syriac texts--that is a challenge! I found that while my linguistic knowledge was good, my ability to figure out what in the world the writer was saying was almost non-existent! To follow Narsai, one had to be intimately familiar with the details of the Christological controversies of the 5th century, and one had to quickly develop a feel for the subtle wordplay loved by Syriac writers. They love symbols and metaphors, and they wrote for an audience that did not have to have everything spelled out for it. However, those of use who are 15 centuries and light-years of culture removed from that audience do have to have a great deal explained. That first semester I was already drowning in a very heavy Advanced Greek class and I was being challenged by a totally new language, Coptic. A little four-line stanza of Narsai sometimes took two hours to translate, and even then I was sure that I had made many errors (and this was confirmed in class). I struggled mightily, managed to learn some bits and pieces of the relevant history and symbolism, and finally, by the middle of the semester, I felt that I was really catching on. But then it was time to switch to a new writer--Ephrem!
Now I'm in my fourth semester at CUA. Understanding texts is less difficult than it was, to be sure, but I feel like I'm only about 10% of the way up the steep slope of the learning curve. I have learned a lot about Syriac symbolism, but I still have a long way to go. Many people who start in this field already have knowledge of patristics and theology, but not me. Oh well, we each bring our strengths and our weaknesses. I am enjoying my studies, but I find that it is very different studying an ancient language that we do not even try to talk in, than studying a modern language like Spanish, in which the first thing we learn is to carry on conversations. In Syriac my studies went from elementary to advanced in a single bound!
Greetings, readers of this brand new blog. I have decided to try my hand at this mode of self-expression. I don't know how it will evolve, but for now it is enough to just get started.
I have loved languages ever since I was 7 or 8 years old. That is nearly 40 years now! When I was in elementary school, I would spend hours tracing the Greek and Russian alphabets, and some Chinese characters, from books in my school's library. I traced them over and over. It was fascinating! By the time I was 9, I found I could read both of the alphabets. I would copy phrases in such exotic languages as Twi from the back on children's books on the countries where they were spoken. In junior high I copied lists of Latin and Greek roots used in English. I graduated, by 8th or 9th grade, to copying lengthy explanations of writing systems, such as several pages on the Thai alphabet from a Thai dictionary. I copied probably a hundred Navajo verb paradigms. I cared little about sports, so while other boys were spending their time on things like that, I was busy accumulating myriad details on languages.
(To be accurate, I was not a total geek and bookworm as a kid. I played plenty of informal games with my friends in our various neighborhoods--chicken, football, basketball. I was also an avid member of the marching band throughout high school. And I was in Boy Scouts from 5th-9th grades. But I did spend a lot more time than most kids on intellectual activities.)
Various serendipitous events have provided unexpected good turns in my life. The first such even was the one that led me to my interest in languages. One day when I was in second grade (I can't remember if it was before or after my eighth birthday), my dad came home from work with a little challenge for my brother and me. [Note to all you hypercorrectors: "me," not "I," is the correct pronoun here, since the phrase "my brother and me" is the object of a preposition, not the subject of a sentence.] He had written a short message using a cipher. He gave us the message and the key to the cipher. We worked through the message, which I have never forgotten: "I have four pennies for both of you." The idea of writing something in a secret way absolutely enthralled me! The idea of writing things in a secret way soon led me to foreign languages. After all, if I wrote something in another language, no one else (that I knew) could understand it! Both cryptography and languages fascinated me for years, and I wrote some ciphers and even rather voluminous codes. I also devised increasingly sophisticated artificial languages, though my interest in doing this waned before I reached anything too advanced; real languages had started to occupy my attention. Finally, about my freshman year in high school, my interest in cryptography pretty well fizzled. My interest in languages had grown greatly, and I was more interested in communicating than in disguising communication.
This is probably quite enough of an introduction to the development of my interest in languages. I will close with the note that during all my years growing up, I only met one other person my age with an interest in languages: David B. We met in eighth grade and kept in touch through college, but eventually lost touch. Languages: fascinating, wonderful, but sadly underappreciated in the U.S. of A. But popular or not, they are my thing!
