Casual
Casual Time for My First Declension If you received a poor education, there are a couple of things you can do: You can gripe about it for years afterward; or you can set out to rectify the...
...Remember: All of this is intended for "the average boy or girl," which prompts the question, Just how capable were they in 1902...
...Jay Nordlinger...
...Now the letters get a little funky, so that when I reach Omega, I'm dizzy...
...I had the misfortune to go to school just as the New Left was solidifying its grip on American education-primary, secondary, and collegiate...
...Not the Greek, the English ones, like "nominative," "genitive," "dative," "accusative," and "vocative," to say nothing of "proparoxytone feminine nouns...
...These volumes fairly shimmer with high learning, and they don't make you wait for doctoral studies in Italian to show you a Petrarch sonnet...
...This was fine for knowing that Crispus Attucks won the Revolutionary War single-handed and that Ida Tarbell saved the country from Standard Oil...
...Gracing the frontispiece is a serene picture of the Acropolis...
...If Dr...
...This inadequacy I feel with great force when in the company of my polymath grandmother, the once-and-forever valedictorian...
...But I copy them out, much as Laura Ingalls and her schoolmates might have done on their slates...
...But if you'd like to know about Joe McCarthy and that slithery Roy Cohn, just ask...
...And it was terrific for knowing all about Japanese internment and McCarthyism, the two central facts of the 20th century...
...I admit that I'm hazy on the subjects that preoccupied Gibbon, Jefferson, and a billion less famous others...
...May not these treasures be brought within the reach of the average boy or girl...
...Of the gaps in my education, the one that bothers me most acutely is that concerning antiquity...
...I don't celebrate for long, though, because I can't understand the words...
...or you can set out to rectify the situation...
...Not long ago, I was perusing her bookshelves when I lit on a small, worn volume titled The Elements of Greek...
...Ball begins his preface with the lament that "Greek is not studied as much as it ought to be" and asks, "Are not the treasures of Greek literature richly worth the finding...
...That's about all of the preface I understand, however, because it quickly moves to a discussion of declension, oxytones, penults, mute verbs, liquid verbs, aorist systems, and the Anabasis...
...So, I've suspended my latest foray into self-education (and "suspended" is to be polite...
...I look again at the picture of the Acropolis...
...The first letter is just like our A, so I'm cruising...
...I'm not yet ready for Euripides in the original (which falsely implies that I'm ready for Euripides in modern English translation), but it's a start...
...The book was published in 1902 and authored by one Francis Kingsley Ball, Ph.D., "instructor in Greek and German in the Phillips Exeter Academy...
...To her, not knowing Greek and Latin is akin to not knowing how to tie your shoes...
...I've barely learned to gurgle in this tongue, and already I'm being asked to recognize Greek sentences meaning "There was a rout of the Persian guards" and "Cowardly was the flight of the garrison...
...Ball's little primer were placed before typical college students of today, they would either laugh or rebel...
...Have you ever looked at a McGuffey Reader...
...But it was lousy for most everything else, which is why, in adulthood, I occasionally try to make up for it...
...I like to haunt used bookstores now and then, to see whether I can acquaint myself with some of the knowledge that grimy farm children were granted as a matter of course a hundred years ago...
...Attic Greek is the province of the brainy and strange, not of the multitudes, who seem content with their gruel...
...Because these lessons are stupefyingly difficult, requiring enormous discipline, will, and perseverance...
...After a briefing on vowels (short, long, and-get this-"doubtful") and a dance with diphthongs (involving "smooth breathing" and "rough breathing"), it's time for my First Declension, which I celebrate as a kind of rite...
...I figured I should give it a whirl, because, you know . . . better late than never...
...Next I flip to the introduction, which opens with the reassuringly cornball sentence, "Hellas, the sunny home of the Greeks . . . ," and ends with the truism that "the study of language is the study of life, and the study of life is the learning of truth...
...Thus ennobled, I proceed to Lesson One: the alphabet...
...The second letter is B-no sweat...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 37
