"An ancient Greek aficionado," or ambiguous English noun modifiers

My friend Greg Wertime gave me a good chuckle when he described me as, "an ancient Greek aficionado," in a recent article on his blog (f.y.i.: that one article takes a serious chunk of time to read).

When he works on writing about interpreting the New Testament, he occasionally asks me about the language of ancient Greek texts (including the NT) and issues in translating those texts into present-day English. I agree with him that it often isn't necessary to look at the Greek text when studying New Testament passages, and that the Greek by itself often doesn't solve a difficulty. He also examines wider contexts, and most standard English translations work perfectly well for that, preferably a few of them next to each other. Still, I have fun reading NT passages in Greek.

I have forbidden Greg from calling me an "expert" or "scholar" because I haven't earned the right kind of title in front of my name or letters after it. Therefore, he chooses amusing labels such as, "an ancient Greek aficionado."

Am I
(1) an ancient, Greek person who is an aficionado?
(2) an aficionado of Ancient Greek language and literature?
(3) an ancient person who is an aficionado of Greek language and literature?

Greg's keyboarding made it even funnier because he capitalized "Greek" but not "ancient."
This is an example of how the competing patterns in English can give smiles.

English allows adjectives ("ancient") and nouns/names ("Greek") before the head noun ("aficionado") of a noun phrase, to describe the head noun. One of the technical terms for the way Greg used the name "Greek" in that phrase is noun modifier.

English also allows compound nouns, Adj + N or N + N, which become distinct words, such as "White House" (each part of a compound proper name must be capitalized) or "gas tank." We spell some as two words: trap door, egg white, Ancient Greek. A few compounds have been allowed to lose the space: schoolhouse, chairperson, windmill.

Therefore,
in (1) both "ancient" and Greek" modify the head noun "aficionado" equally,
in (2) "ancient" modifies the head noun "Greek aficionado,"
and in (3) "Ancient Greek" is a compound noun that modifies the head noun "aficionado."

Spelling rules in some languages (Dutch and German, among several others) prevent this kind of ambiguity by requiring compound nouns to be written with no spaces inside, but that gives another type of fun: Oosterscheldtstormvloedkering (a very impressive engineering site to visit if the Dutch authorities still show the barriers in the southern estuaries to tourists).

In truth, though, meaning number (1) is not possible, because the word "aficionado" by itself needs a topic area to be mentioned.

Bury the bad old system of teaching Greek

A vast and greatly varied amount of interesting material was written in Greek in ancient times, and enough of it has been preserved that we still have lots to enjoy now.

There is even more pleasure and food for discussion to be gotten by reading texts "in the original" than by reading them in modern translation.

As you might expect, there is no escape from some work at the beginning of the task of learning to read the writings of long-dead Greek speakers, no matter what your present-day, native language is (even modern Greek!).

However, teaching methods and textbooks now exist that cater to different learning styl-- Oops, I mean to say that the twenty-three-century-old, brute-force system of teaching Greek by making students memorize hundreds of paradigms (most of which are exceptions to the handful of main ones), a system which most students have experienced as a bad thing, can now be replaced by mere hard work with rewards that come much earlier in the process.

The present generations of teachers can make the bad system disappear forever if they band together to ensure that the bad-system textbooks, many still being reprinted with deceitfully-friendly-seeming layouts and graphics and introduction comments, become marketed as intermediate textbooks or reference texts rather than primers.

I will name names and titles soon.

Welcome

Welcome to this "gym!" You'll see messages here about learning and teaching the languages I know well enough to tutor or teach. You'll also see messages here about the use of rhetoric (the effort to influence people's feelings and thoughts).

I'm employed in non-religious jobs, active in my church, and interested in the use of rhetoric in both types of environments.

I have learned to push religious matters mostly on my own kind. I have learned to try to practice discernment in applying encouragement, confrontation, affirmation and exhortation.

You are welcome to push back through comments. I am accountable for what I put here. If the way that I treat you stinks, please tell me so.

Emotionally charged comments are welcome, especially if they show some reasoning. Not all people who get branded as "loose cannons" are loose cannons.

Whether or not you are one of my own religious kind (Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestants who are Americans), I want this blog to be useful for you on these topics.

Qualifiers with no shame: I'll mostly avoid discussing rhetoric in business management in order to keep myself employable. For rhetoric in churches I'll be silent on some issues, circumspect on others and outspoken on yet others.