Greek primer, colloquial and constructive

by John Stuart Blackie

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PREFACE

One cannot have moved much in the world without hearing complaints, both from parents and young persons, about the amount of time and brain spent in the learning of languages, and the little profit derived from this outlay. These complaints, no doubt, arise partly from the want of judgment on the part of the parents, and the want of capacity and inclination on the part of their young hopefuls: parents often acting thoughtlessly on the vulgar notion that far birds have fair feathers, and preferring what is foreign to what is native, and what lies at a great distance in time or space to what is near; and young persons being forced to submit themselves to a grammatical indoctrination in which they feel no interest, and from which they derive no benefit. But it is no less true that these complaints are due in no small measure to false methods of linguistic training generally, or to some cherished prejudices in favour of certain languages on the part of the teachers; and it becomes therefore, at the present day, a matter of great practical importance to inquire how far our traditional methods of teaching languages are in conformity with the method of Nature in her great art of thought-utterance, and how far they may justly be called on to submit themselves to a revision and a reconstitution. We say at the present day emphatically, because it is quite evident that education, following in the train of democratic reform, is one of the watchwords of the hour, to which every good citizen must lend an obedient ear; and not only so, but circumstances have so changed since our schooling received its traditional form, that the wants which were satisfied by our school curriculum and school practice in the days of Milton and Locke now demand an altogether different treatment. In particular, the so-called learned languages, two hundred years ago the only medium of culture to an accomplished English gentleman, have now become the luxury of the leisurely, or the arsenal of the professional few, while other languages, such as German, not named in those days, are now sought after as the keys to the most valuable storehouses of all sorts of knowledge. Add to this that Great Britain, which was then a secondary naval power, and following the French and the Spaniards slowly in the great world-transforming process of colonisation, is now mistress of a world-wide empire from the Ganges to Vancouver Isle, through which stretch she exercises a dominant influence, combining the political virtue of ancient Rome with the commercial activity of Carthage. In these circumstances it becomes the special duty of every British man to acquire a familiar knowledge of the languages of the various races with which he may be brought into political or commercial relations; and, as languages after all are not valuable in themselves, but only as tools by which effective work in certain fields falls to be performed, we ought to see to it, both that we get the proper tools for doing the work, and that we learn to use them in such fashion as to work pleasantly and profitably; and in this view it may be truly said that, while the wrong language in the wrong place is of no use at all, even the right language in the right place, when imperfectly learned, is a tool with which the best workman can do only bad work, and perhaps cut his own fingers in the process.

As language is a function which belongs as much to every normal human creature as seeing or hearing, there can be no difficulty in finding out the method of Nature in its acquisition. We have to answer only two questions: first, What are the factors of the process by which the human babe, from being capable merely of inarticulate cries, like any of the lower animals, is developed into an easy and graceful manipulator of articulate speech? and again, How far, and in what respects, does this model require to be modified in order to enable the expert handlers of the mother tongue to use any second or third language with like expertness? That this cannot be a very difficult matter demands no far-sought induction to prove, as the fact lies before us; for from the Greeks in the South-East to the Highlanders in the North-West we find bilingual and trilingual peoples largely scattered over Europe. It is in fact as easy to learn two or three languages as to learn one, if only the learner be habitually submitted to the natural influences, and guided by the steps of a natural process.

What then, in the first place, are the steps of the process which analysis presents as elevating the inarticulate babe to the significant-speaking boy or girl? There is (1) the direct connection of certain objects with certain sounds and gestures; (2) these objects are such as stand in the nearest relation to the learner, and are presented to him in an atmosphere of the most natural and most pleasant surroundings; (3) the imitative faculty, by which he appropriates the proper sounds, is encouraged and cherished by frequent repetition, till the original impression becomes permanently stamped into his soul, and, so to speak, jumps up spontaneously with the object. Let us, in the next place, ask how far this child’s linguistic ladder is affected by the performer being an adult. Manifestly the difference lies only in one point, and that altogether in favour of the adult, viz. the application of a regulated system to the accidental sequences by which the child learns its mother tongue, easily indeed and pleasantly, but slowly; for he learns not architecturally as a mason builds a house, but by the way, as one picks up a pebble on the shore or a daisy from the meadow; whereas the adult, with his firm will and his reasonable purpose, wishing to learn a language can submit himself to a reasonable and a calculated treatment; and in so doing experience has shown that in favourable circumstances, and under wise training, he can learn a foreign language more perfectly in six months than a child can do in as many years. Why then, you ask, is this not always done? Why does it seem such a difficult business to acquire a familiar knowledge of any foreign language, and why is so much brain and so much time spent so frequently on their acquisition with such scanty results? The answer can be only one: because your teacher has ignored the method of Nature, and given you a bad substitute for it in his own devices; instead of speaking to you and making you respond, in direct connection of the old object with the new sound, and thus forming a living bond between the thinking soul, the perceptive sense, and the significant utterance, he sends you to a book, there to cram yourself with dead rules and lifeless formulas about the language, in the middle of which he ought to have planted you at the start. The evil results of this neglect of the living model of Nature are only too manifest. Books are useful, but they are only secondary; in all matters of observation and practical exercise they may form an apt accompaniment or a supplement, but they never can supplant the vital function of which they are only the dead record. No one learns dancing, or fencing, or golf, or lawn-tennis from a book. The evils caused by this unnatural delegation of the work of a living teacher to the formulas of a dead book are three: (1) The direct connection between the reasonable soul and the new articulate sign of the object is lost; the learner does not shake hands, so to speak, with the object, but he cumbers himself with the phraseology of his mother tongue, and instead of saying at once δός μοι ἄρτον, give me bread, he must first ask what is the Greek for bread. In this way the new term remains a stranger to his thought, and he uses it uncomfortably, as when a man puts on a pair of shoes which have only an occasional acquaintance with his feet. (2) Then again, when, after being sufficiently tortured with mere grammatical forms, he acquires a certain vocabulary from the elementary reading books, the objects for which this vocabulary supplies the new names are seldom the objects with which he is familiarly surrounded and in which he has a living interest, but they relate to something Julius Cæsar did in Gaul or Cicero said in Rome some 2000 years ago, a region of strange sounds, in which the linguistic neophyte of this nineteenth century has no particular inclination to move, and to which his memory cannot ally itself with any feeling of kinship; and he easily forgets the word, because he does not care for the thing. But (3) even when he does care for the thing, the mere reading of a lesson every day does not in the least ensure that frequent repetition of a new vocable in connection with an object, on which the familiar knowledge of a language depends; whereas, if the teacher had commenced by making his schoolroom an echo-chamber of daily repeated sounds in connection with interesting and familiar objects directly in the view of the learner or near to his daily life, familiarity with a new language, be it Greek or be it German, would come as naturally and as pleasantly to a clever lad of seventeen as the use of the mother tongue to a dainty girl or a rattling boy of seven.

These things being so, and the method of Nature being so plain in the matter, we now ask what are the causes that have led so many of our teachers, even the most accomplished of their class, to neglect so infallible a guide, and to follow methods of linguistic inculcation equally unpleasant in the process and unprofitable in the result? These causes, fortunately, are as patent as the consequences to which they have led. The first cause is ignorance. In not a few of our educational institutions it is to be feared there are teachers—an over-worked and under-paid class—who are employed to teach languages of which they have only a very superficial knowledge and no firm hold. With persons of this class the whole process of linguistic training amounts to this, Read your book, Get your lesson, and I will hear you. Of a living appeal from the tongue of the teacher and a living response from the tongue of the learner these gentlemen have no conception. They must do the most they can, confine themselves within page and chapter of a printed book, where they require no knowledge beyond the marked limits of the lesson, and where the scantiness of their linguistic furniture and the feebleness of their linguistic vitality cannot be exposed. Let them pass. But what of the men of high accomplishment, exact scholarship, and fine taste: why should they scorn the practice which is the foundation of the rules, and the conversation which made great speeches and great poems before rules or schools were heard of? Simply because they have forgotten the lesson taught in a well-known dialogue of Plato,[1] that the printed papers which we call books, useful for record, are rather prejudicial than profitable to the culture of memory; they have become the slaves of their tools, and defrauded the ear and the tongue of their natural rights in the field of significant speech by a wholesale transference of their functions to the eyes. The scholar, in their conception, is a reading animal, and without books he is nowhere. Why then, they will argue, when our object is to read and to understand books, should we trouble ourselves with conversation? We do not learn Latin in order to talk with Cæsar and Cicero, but to read their books; and in like manner we do not study German to drink beer and smoke pipes and sing songs with rollicking students in a kneipe, but to ponder with many-sided thought over the poems of Goethe or the speculations of Hegel. So be it. Let books and not living converse be the final end of the study of languages; so they certainly are with the dead languages; but even with regard to them it is quite certain that the familiarity and frequent repetition which are the special virtues of the conversational method both render the mastery of books, as in the case of the mother tongue, more complete, and the hold of the printed signature at once more firm in the grasp and more easy in the approach. But some one will say, Does not speaking in a language imply thinking in it, and is not thinking in a foreign tongue one of the most difficult and rare attainments even with the most accomplished linguists? Not at all. The difficulty lies merely in starting from the wrong end and following the false direction thus given till it culminates in the persistency of a bad habit and the imagination of an impossibility. It is as easy to look the Sun in the face and say שׁמּשּׁ, Shemish, as to say Sun, and there is no more difficulty in saying λαβὼν τὸ σκάλευθρον κίνει τὸ πῦρ, than in saying, take the poker and stir the fire. In both cases the direct connection of thought, thing, and word is equally obvious, equally easy, and equally natural; only at the start the habit of thinking exclusively in the mother tongue must be broken.

There is one other objection to the conversational method in the teaching of languages, viz. that it makes a man a parrot. Well, a parrot is an imitative animal, and so is a man, and so far must not be ashamed to own his kinship with the plumy prattler. But he is a parrot and something more; and this something more every sensible teacher will take into account. For myself, I have no preference for random talk: my contention is for regulated talk; the talk first and the regulation afterwards, in the order of gradation so succinctly stated by Lord Bacon—speaking makes a ready man, reading makes a full man, writing makes an accurate man;—all the three. But have your nails first before you pare them; this is the common sense of the matter.

In conclusion, I have a word or two to say with regard to the occasion and the plan of this little book. In the first place, whatever may be said of Hebrew or Latin, Greek is a living language, and must be treated as such even by those who persist in the notion that, while the method of living vocal appeal applies in its full extent to modern languages, it is certainly out of place in the treatment of the two ancient languages which justly claim the first place in the linguistic culture of our highest schools. The delusion that Greek is a dead language, springing as it does mainly out of our “insular ignorance,” as Professor Seeley calls it, and partly, I fear, our national insolence, will be dispelled in a moment by a glance at any current Greek newspaper; as for instance the following paragraph, the first that met my eye, from the 2d November number of the Athenian “Ἀκρόπολις,” giving a short notice of the application of Koch’s remedy for consumption.

ΝΕΑ ΚΑΙ ΠΕΡΙΕΡΓΑ.

Ἡ φθίσις ἐν Ρωσσίᾳ.