Burying the bad old system, part 2: What Are the Problems?

Repeated note: Because the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems still represent writing other than English in different ways, I cannot include the marking system for modern editions of ancient Greek writing. I can give you the regular lowercase and uppercase Greek letters, but not the breathing marks, pitch marks or subscripted letter iota.

I have seen two problems with the bad old system
of teaching Greek.

One is economic and political: how educational institutions
assign instructors for courses in beginning ancient Greek.

Classical literature, philosophy, archaeology,
the theology and history of Judaism and Christianity,
and Jewish or Christian Biblical text scholarship
are of course fields that demand detailed,
nuanced study and analysis. An effective scholar in any
of these fields may or may not be an effective teacher
of foreign languages, especially for a language as challenging
as Greek.

Unfortunately, because of the economic, bureaucratic
and internal-politics limitations of educational institutions,
inexperienced instructors and experienced scholars
who are not effective language instructors can be found
teaching introductory Greek courses.

The other problem with the bad old system
is purely linguistic:
there is no escaping the fact that the Greek language,
both ancient and modern, performs complex changes
to its word forms (a little more complex
in ancient texts) in order to express the relationships
between the words in an utterance very clearly.

Other languages do this too: Latin,
classical Sanskrit, Old Norse, Old English,
modern German, and most modern Slavic languages.

Nevertheless, Greek courses are more famous
than courses in those others
for causing headaches, discouragement and worse things
when the teaching method is bad. Even ancient complaints
in writing by native speakers of Latin who suffered
while learning Greek from the very taskmasters
who defined "old school"
have been passed down to us.

English does this the most to verbs and personal pronouns
(We gave him it yesterday. You give us them every week.),
and a little bit to nouns (day, days, day's, days'),
but not to adjectives (big cow, big bull, big cow's, big bull's,
big cows, big bulls, big cows', big bulls').
However, Greek does this much, much, much more:
to every verb, pronoun, noun and adjective, every time.

Here are some examples in the prose style
of either the "Golden Age" Attic or Hellenistic Koine dialects:

η ημερα η μεγαλη
the great day

της ημερας της μεγαλης
of the great day

ταις ημεραις ταις μεγαλαις
for the great days

ο ποταμος ο μεγας
the great river

του ποταμου του μεγαλου
of the great river

τοις ποταμοις τοις μεγαλοις
for the great rivers

το δωμα το μεγα
the great home

το δωμα της μεγαλης
the home of the great one (great lady)

το δωμα του μεγαλου
the home of the great one (great gentleman)

A table or chart of the variations of forms
of a vocabulary word is called a "paradigm."

Most paradigm tables for the ancient forms of Greek nouns
have eight or ten positions.
For δωμα, the Attic and Hellenistic paradigm is

singular:
nominative case δωμα home, subject of verb
genitive case δωματος of/from home, of/from a home
dative case δωματι in/at/for home, in/at/for a home
accusative case δωμα home, direct object or limit of motion
plural:
nom. δωματα homes, subject of verb
gen. δωματων of/from homes, of/from some homes
dat. δωμασι in/at/for homes, in/at/for some homes
acc. δωματα homes, direct object or limit of motion

The paradigm charts for most adjectives and several pronouns
have 24 to 30 different positions because the representations
for cases and numbers must be multiplied by the representations
for the three gender distinctions. For μεγας, "great," the Attic
and Hellenistic paradigm is

singular: masculine, feminine, neuter
nom. μεγας, μεγαλη, μεγα
gen. μεγαλου, μεγαλης, μεγαλου
dat. μεγαλωι, μεγαληι, μεγαλωι
acc. μεγαν, μεγαλην, μεγα
plural:
nom. μεγαλοι, μεγαλαι, μεγαλα
gen. μεγαλων, μεγαλων, μεγαλων
dat. μεγαλοις, μεγαλαις, μεγαλοις
acc. μεγαλους, μεγαλας, μεγαλα

In words that have paradigms similar to μεγα,
the letter ι (iota) at the end of the dative singular forms
is often printed under the previous long vowel letter
("subscripted") in modern editions of ancient texts.
This is because Greek speakers seem to have gradually dropped
this particular use of iota from their speech
during the 600 years between
the reign of the Greek-loving Macedonian
king/emperor/general Alexander the Great
and the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine I.
There is clear evidence from stone inscriptions
from before Alexander's time that the dative singular iota
was indeed pronounced with no confusion
with the nominative plural ending for native speakers.

For δωμα, the iota at the end the dative singular, δωματι,
has always been pronounced because δωμα belongs
to a different paradigm pattern from μεγας.

Paradigm charts for Ancient Greek nouns, pronouns
and adjectives are painful for beginning students who are
native speakers of English because the paradigms
for those types of words in English cannot be made
into similarly-shaped charts (except perhaps the personal pronouns).

For verb forms, the paradigm charts also have many positions;
however, most English-speaking students find the verb paradigms
easier to learn. Nonetheless, there are also easier ways
to present Greek verb forms,
as proved by W. D. Mounce.

The 24-century-old system for Greek
maximizes the number of such charts
to be memorized and frequently reviewed.
This is painful and unnecessary,
which is why I call it the "bad old system."

These charts cannot be avoided, but their number
can be greatly reduced by teaching rules
that group the words and the forms
into the fewest charts necessary.
Better systems for teaching Greek,
such as the system by W.D. Mounce,
keep the charts to a minimum this way.