The Polis Method
In September 2008, a new Greek method is going to be published by Les éditions du Cerf: Polis: parler le grec ancien comme une langue vivante (Polis: speaking ancient Greek as a living language. This book is intended for all those who wish to acquire the ability to read ancient Greek texts without a dictionary. This course is an introduction to Greek through the dialect which has given the most important literary works: Koine Greek. From Plutarch to New Testament authors, from Polybius to the Septuagint translators, from Plotinus to the author of the treatise On the Sublime, many writers have composed their texts in the common dialect (koinè dialektos) from which Western culture has sprung. As this language spans over eight hundred years, we had to choose a reference point : the Greek dialect from the first century AD. This dialect has the advantage of being intermediate between early (3rd c. BC – 2nd c. BC) and late Koine (3rd c.-5th c. AD). In addition, it allows us to read the most interesting Greek books of Antiquity.
This course draws most of its inspiration from techniques usually applied nowadays for teaching modern languages. The course starts with the alphabet : no former knowledge in Greek is expected from the student. This method offers a series of Greek texts ordered according to a natural progression. To compose these texts we drew our material from different data bases : Apollonius Dyscolus’ (grammatical vocabulary), Plutarch’s (usual daily words) and New Testament concordances (common vocabulary). These three corpuses allow us to base the language of our texts on a very large collection of texts from the first century AD.
Whenever these concordances did not provide the word we were looking for, the vocabulary of the Septuagint has been helpful.
In some exceptional cases, (such as τηλέφωνος), we dared creating a neologism to refer to objects that were inexistent at the beginning of Christian era. It thus became possible to produce texts that show the full strength of a living language. All along the way we drew from the various concordances at our disposal frequent idioms and ways of speaking specific to first century Greek. This allowed us to produce some texts which could be considered as centos of the New Testament. In addition to the texts that were directly composed for the sake of this method, we included in this first volume of Polis three passages from the New Testament that had to be lightly reworded in order to be understandable for the beginner.
The Method
Each lesson includes at least two or three study texts illustrated with many drawings that help the student to grasp their meaning. The method provides a rich variety of exercises (blanks to fill in, phrases to put together, questions to find, answers to give..) in order to avoid any routine for the reader. Eleven characters, most of them students, will show up in the texts that have been composed. They follow us all along the Polis method. The strong personality of each character creates a context for the reader, a framework for interpretation and helps to understand the different texts.
The pronunciation that has been chosen is a conservative one, that of the cultural elite from the beginning of Koine Greek, save for the consonants θ, φ and χ. For the sake of commodity, these consonants are pronounced [f], [θ] and [ħ] instead of the historical [ph], [th] and [kh] sounds.
Our decision might at first seem arbitrary. Why should we adopt the phonological system of the beginning of Koine Greek while the language that we are learning belongs to the first century AD ? The decisive factor in our decision was the pedagogical one. In first century Greek, pronunciation has become far removed from spelling. Many diphthongs have coalesced with vowels (οι is pronounced as υ, αι as ε and ει as ι). Among many other changes, this phonetic evolution adds a new difficulty to a language that does not have the reputation of being easy to learn. As the unity of Koine Greek is based on its literary spelling, it seems advisable to adopt a pronunciation as close as possible to the written texts. This is why we distinguish circumflex from acute accent whenever we read the Greek texts.
How to Study
Three different steps must be followed : hearing, reading out loud, reading silently. The student is encouraged to listen to the recordings of each lesson. Our advice is to listen first three or four times to the recordings without reading the texts, even if you do not fully understand their meaning. It will then become possible to listen several times to the text having the printed version under your eyes. In the end, you might read the text without recordings, out loud first, and then silently.
As for any living language, regularity is the key to success. Find every day a fixed time to study Greek (half an hour). You will not manage to reach the goal by making a big effort one day and forgetting to study the following ones. Self-discipline is what matters. Experience shows that the student who is faithful to his or her thirty minutes a day of study will manage, within two years, to read directly an average narrative text from the New Testament or the Septuagint. He will understand most of the passage without feeling the need of translating. That will be the best reward of his or her effort.