Download Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of by Donald Fairbairn PDF

By Donald Fairbairn

Why do scholars at the present time locate Greek and Latin so tricky and challenging to benefit? might be the first barrier fighting us from studying one other language effectively is that we frequently subconsciously think that English is the normal for a way languages needs to exhibit rules, and for that reason we unwittingly attempt to healthy the recent language into the constitution of English.

This e-book seeks to wreck scholars out of "English mode" once attainable, on the very starting of research. instead of consistently concerning Greek and Latin to English, the publication begins with a big-picture dialogue of what any language needs to do with a view to facilitate verbal exchange. It then explains how Indo-European languages usually accomplish the initiatives of verbal exchange, and the way Greek and Latin specifically do so.

Understanding Language comprises significant sections at the noun and verb platforms of the classical languages. In either situations, the e-book offers first with functionality (what nouns and verbs needs to do) after which explains how the varieties of Greek and Latin in attaining the wanted services. for this reason, the ebook is helping to make the difficult initiatives of memorizing kinds and studying syntax more uncomplicated and extra relaxing. scholars achieve a vast realizing of how the classical languages paintings earlier than they start the details.

This e-book offers scholars the various conceptual merits of learning heavily comparable languages, no matter if they're learning just one of them. scholars shouldn't have to be learning either Latin and Greek (or even to understand the Greek alphabet) so that it will make the most of this e-book. academics may possibly decide to have scholars learn the full e-book at the start in their learn or to learn sections at quite a few issues within the first year.

About the Author:
Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. he's the writer of existence within the Trinity: An creation to Theology with assistance from the Church Fathers, Grace and Christology within the Early Church, and japanese Orthodoxy via Western Eyes.

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Extra info for Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

Example text

Now, we can understand that latter sentence, and in fact, you may have heard a native French or Spanish speaker say something like this in English. Nevertheless, that latter sentence should sound quite odd to your ears, because it is not the best way to convey that idea in English. ” Some languages (like ours) insist that the first is correct; other languages work in such a way that the second is correct. ” Other languages, however, have different ways of expressing that relation. ” If so, that probably sounded very strange to you, and the strangeness comes from the fact that Hebrew conveys that relation between words in a different way from English.

When we ask this question, we should immediately recognize that, unlike many other ancient languages, Greek and Latin are not dead in the sense of having vanished from civilization and being accessible only to archaeologists and professional linguists. Both Greek and Latin have been with us continuously since their emergence, and it is worth giving a brief history of the two languages. , and of course it existed as a spoken language prior to that time. To oversimplify somewhat, the three dialects of ancient Greek that are most interesting to contemporary students are Ionic, Attic, and koine.

Some languages (like ours) insist that the first is correct; other languages work in such a way that the second is correct. ” Other languages, however, have different ways of expressing that relation. ” If so, that probably sounded very strange to you, and the strangeness comes from the fact that Hebrew conveys that relation between words in a different way from English. ” In some cases, relating words to one another in a way that is not correct in a certain language means that you will sound funny but still be understood correctly—when you say “a cup with coffee” for example.

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