Mork's Log 2017

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MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2114
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Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Oct 04, 2017 7:26 pm

The delay of several weeks writing in this log stems from the changes made in my procedures for studying Ancient Greek. French and Spanish proceed as before, though more time spent on Ancient Greek means less time reading other languages.

First off, IMHO Ancient Greek can not be learned by extensive reading. If it is the case that to learn a new word the reader must see it seven times*, then there are simply not enough texts to read. Add the fact that many words have multiple meanings, sometimes even conflicting meanings, then then number of times the reader must see them increases well beyond seven. Other tried and true methods do still help: using parallel texts to pick up meanings, learning accidence by heart, studying word families and using word lists to solidify understanding of meanings.

* I wonder how valid that assertion is.

My text is De Syria Dea, or, On the Syrian Goddess, attributed to Lucian. Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis edited the text along the same lines that Geoffrey Steadman edits his texts. Beside or beneath the texts are full running vocabularies and frequent grammatical explanations. A certain percentage of the vocabulary is deemed too frequent in appearance and is presented in bulk at the beginning of the work for readers to memorize.

LWT is what I use to read the text and look up and collect meanings. The vocabulary in Hayes and Nimis's text greatly facilitates this lookup. After reading a bit of the texts, I list words whose meanings I don't know, with their meanings. I also note which probably belong to a word family that An Aid to Greek at Sight lists. If it is there, I print out the entries in the word family and study them. Then I use word lists to learn the vocabulary items that I do not know. Another task has been to look up the meanings of frequently used words with several meanings and print those out. Another task is to solidify in my mind the conjugations of frequently used verbs, especially the present, future and aorist tenses, both active and middle.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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MorkTheFiddle
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Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Oct 13, 2017 7:09 pm

E. Donnelly, member of textkit, has done a splendid job locating old Loeb classics at Google.Books and archive.org as well as out-of-copyright books about the classics at the same locations. These include learning texts with exercises and, especially important, keys to the exercises: Classics texts from EDonnelly. Taking a cue from members here who make profitable use of courses, the other day I downloaded a dozen or so texts with keys for Ancient Greek. I have made a brief start by looking over the books and beginning a few exercises. This can be good review of not only the nuts and bolts of accidence but also of the vocabulary. In addition, the old masters such as Sidgwick had such an easy familiarity with the language that their translations of examples overcome the often awkward meanings Liddell-Scott give. Sidgwick wrote several of the books, and Thomas Arnold of Rugby wrote several more. In addition there are five or six more authors.

Another book that I happened upon at a local used book store is Attica: Intermediate Classical Greek by Cynthia L. Claxton. This 369-page book
has been designed to fill a gap in the texts available for students transitioning from the first-year Greek to the second year of study.
(pg vi of the Preface). The author provides in Part 1 guided readings for selections from Xenophon's Hellenica, Antiphon's Against the Stepmother for Poisoning and Euripides Electra (one history, one speech, one play). Part 2 consists of a grammar review and Part 3 contains several exercises. The guided readings of Part 1 include vocabulary help, grammatical and syntactical help and guidance and suggested translations. At the end of every little section of readings there is a reading with little help and no translation to try the student's mettle.

I have worked my way through a few of the readings from Hellenica, and I can't say enough in praise of Claxton's work. It is illuminating and empowering. The only disturbing thing is that I had to discover it by chance on a bookshelf in a used bookstore. The publishing particulars are Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2014. At the time of printing, Claxton worked at the University of California at Irvine.

In other developments on the Ancient Greek front, I continue with De Syria Dea as edited by Nimis and Hayes. I'm on page 60 (out of 87 text pages). And I've worked up another present tense/aorist tense comparison of strong aorists. The unexpected appearance of some of the aorists still throws me off, and I would like to get this behind me.

In French, in a desultory fashion I am still reading Montaigne's Essais, Tolstoi's Guerre et la Paix, and, new, James Ellroy's biographical essays, Destination Morgue.

In Spanish, La Novela de Genji and Los Hermanos Karamazov.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

aravinda
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby aravinda » Sat Oct 14, 2017 2:09 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:E. Donnelly, member of textkit, has done a splendid job...

Wonderful, and thank you for letting us know.
MorkTheFiddle wrote:In addition, the old masters such as Sidgwick had such an easy familiarity with the language that ...

I have only dabbled with Ancient Greek but this has been my impression too with regard to old resources in other languages.
MorkTheFiddle wrote:In French, in a desultory fashion I am still reading Montaigne's Essais, Tolstoi's Guerre et la Paix...

May I know which translation of La guerre et la paix? I have read the whole work (except the epilogue which I have only skimmed through) three times and parts of it many times (in different English translations) and hoping to read it in the original one day. In the meantime, I would like to read it French.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Posts: 2114
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Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:31 pm

aravinda wrote:May I know which translation of La guerre et la paix? I have read the whole work (except the epilogue which I have only skimmed through) three times and parts of it many times (in different English translations) and hoping to read it in the original one day. In the meantime, I would like to read it French.
Boris de Schlœzer is the translator. The version I am reading was published by Folio Classique in two volumes in 2016 (though the original date of publication was 1960). I'm only on page 94 of the first volume, but so far the translation reads well. I read the English translation years ago, too long ago to remember anything except how much I liked it. :)
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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Carmody
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby Carmody » Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:35 pm

aravinda
three times and parts of it many times
Geeesh...I thought I was the only one in the world to do things like this....nice to know I am not alone.
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MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2114
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:41 pm

Here is another classics source to go with the EDonnelly's page that I noted in an earlier post. Euripides Electra edited by Charles Keene. Working through the first 111 lines of the play, I find Keene's work helpful. His notes are at the bottom of the page. He includes textual variants, too, which are useless to me, but he separates them from the commentary.

To add another great long Russian novel translated into French, there is an audiobook by Audible of Les Frères Karamazov, more than 33 hours long. Vincent Violette narrates with a good voice, though I've listened to only a bit of it. Note: I have it on my iPod, but I can't locate it on Audible's site.

There is also a written Spanish translation Los Hermanos Karamázov by José Laín Entralgo. So far I've read only 50 or so pages (out of a total of 1131), but I like what I've seen so far. I've read a couple of English translations, if that matters, though I don't remember who did them. The usual suspects, I suppose.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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reineke
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby reineke » Tue Oct 17, 2017 1:10 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:The delay of several weeks writing in this log stems from the changes made in my procedures for studying Ancient Greek. French and Spanish proceed as before, though more time spent on Ancient Greek means less time reading other languages.

First off, IMHO Ancient Greek can not be learned by extensive reading. If it is the case that to learn a new word the reader must see it seven times*, then there are simply not enough texts to read. Add the fact that many words have multiple meanings, sometimes even conflicting meanings, then then number of times the reader must see them increases well beyond seven. Other tried and true methods do still help: using parallel texts to pick up meanings, learning accidence by heart, studying word families and using word lists to solidify understanding of meanings.

* I wonder how valid that assertion is.

My text is De Syria Dea, or, On the Syrian Goddess, attributed to Lucian. Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis edited the text along the same lines that Geoffrey Steadman edits his texts. Beside or beneath the texts are full running vocabularies and frequent grammatical explanations. A certain percentage of the vocabulary is deemed too frequent in appearance and is presented in bulk at the beginning of the work for readers to memorize.

LWT is what I use to read the text and look up and collect meanings. The vocabulary in Hayes and Nimis's text greatly facilitates this lookup. After reading a bit of the texts, I list words whose meanings I don't know, with their meanings. I also note which probably belong to a word family that An Aid to Greek at Sight lists. If it is there, I print out the entries in the word family and study them. Then I use word lists to learn the vocabulary items that I do not know. Another task has been to look up the meanings of frequently used words with several meanings and print those out. Another task is to solidify in my mind the conjugations of frequently used verbs, especially the present, future and aorist tenses, both active and middle.


How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?

"If we define ancient Greece as up to the fourth century AD, and we exclude Christian works and technical works (so just literature, as opposed to writing), it's 16 million words. If a novel is around 100,000 words, that corresponds to 160 books; so yes, someone could potentially read it. If we cut it down to strictly Ancient times (down to the fourth century BC), it's 5 million words."

https://www.quora.com/How-much-writing- ... ially-read

*between 5 and 20 encounters. In some cases less than 5.
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MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2114
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Oct 17, 2017 7:38 pm

reineke wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:
How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?

"If we define ancient Greece as up to the fourth century AD, and we exclude Christian works and technical works (so just literature, as opposed to writing), it's 16 million words. If a novel is around 100,000 words, that corresponds to 160 books; so yes, someone could potentially read it. If we cut it down to strictly Ancient times (down to the fourth century BC), it's 5 million words."

https://www.quora.com/How-much-writing- ... ially-read

*between 5 and 20 encounters. In some cases less than 5.

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past contains about 1,2000,000 words, and according to this source, Words in the Harry Potter Series, there are 1,084,170 words in the Harry Potter Series (7 novels). So reading extant Ancient Greek literature is like reading 16 novels the length of Remembrance of Things Past or 16 series of novels as long as the Harry Potter Series. So clearly, yes, someone could read it all, in far less than a lifetime.

As for the number of authors, a glance at Hodoi Elektronikai, even though the writers' names are given in French, can give you an idea of how small the number of writers who are involved (and some of those writers are Christian writers or technical writers).

Ancient Greek is a language like any other. The native English-speaking learner of Ancient Greek, I think, faces the same kind of hurdles that face the native English-speaking learner of Russian, though with fewer native materials to work with. Based on what I hear, anyway, because I have never studied Russian.

Thanks to Reineke for the number of encounters for remembering the meaning of a word.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

DaveBee
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby DaveBee » Wed Oct 25, 2017 9:07 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:I still await the second saison of Eureka dubbed into French to come in the mail. Cavesa called this an excellent segue into understanding spoken French, and she is right.
I'm still working on Kaamelott, with thanks to Eleni and Cavesa.
I watched the first episode of Epitafios, Argentine series about a serial killer. I have the first season on DVD picked up for less than $10. Tip of the hat to Iguanamon for suggesting this.
Still working on the old animated series Justine Je T'aime. Thanks to Reineke for the link.
Also still watching Hélène et les garçons. I'm up to episode 34. A light romantic comedy with some moments not so light.
I've just started watching "les filles d'à côte" (one episode!) which was made by the same production company as Helene & co, AB Productions.

I mostly understood what everyone was saying, and there's lots of episodes and pretty people, so I'm officially sold!. :-)
Last edited by DaveBee on Wed Oct 25, 2017 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2114
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork's Log 2017

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Oct 25, 2017 6:20 pm

DaveBee wrote:I've just started watching "les filles à côte" (one episode!) which was made by the same production company as Helene & co, AB Productions.

I mostly understood what everyone was saying, and there's lots of episodes and pretty people, so I'm officially sold!. :-)

Your criteria match my criteria. ;) Thanks for the recommendation. I'll take a look at it this evening.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson


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