THE LETTERS OF THE GREEK ALPHABET

The first task in learning Greek is to learn the alphabet, which consists of twenty-four letters. Many are similar to English ones, and you may already be familiar with some others (for example, pi π and theta θ from mathematics). Learning the alphabet has three parts.

Learning how to write each of the Greek letters

In Greek, just as in English, different people will have different styles of handwriting. Also, printed Greek often looks a little different from handwritten Greek. That is fine – the aim is not to win prizes for the artistic quality of your lettering.What matters is for the different letters to be clearly distinguished from each other. In practice, you will probably copy the style of your teacher.

Learning which sounds the different Greek letters make

Greek has been spoken for over three thousand years, and in many different dialects. This means that there is no single right way to pronounce Greek.What matters is to make each letter have its own distinctive sound. It is also useful if your pronunciation is similar to that of other biblical scholars (and your teacher and classmates) so you can understand each other.

You may wonder why pronouncing the letters is important at all, since your desire is to read Greek, not speak it.

Students are the ones who matter. Students, and more generally all those wishing to learn, are the only reason for teachers and academic books to exist. For ninety years those wishing to learn to read the New Testament in Greek have been ably served by The Elements of New Testament Greek published by Cambridge University Press. First, in the book of that name by H.P.V. Nunn published in 1914, and then in its 1965 replacement by J.W. Wenham. So successful was John Wenham's book that for much of its forty-year history it has been the standard first-year Greek course not only in the UK but across large parts of the English-speaking world. For generations of students, ‘Wenham’ was synonymous with Greek.

Wenham's success was that he cared about students and did everything possible to make learning ‘the elements’ of New Testament Greek as simple and painless as possible. The most striking example of this was his handling of Greek accents. The scholarly tradition behind the use of accents went back many centuries, though not, as Wenham was keen to point out, back to the time of the New Testament itself. Nevertheless Wenham dispensed with accents. Or at least he dispensed with most of them – keeping only the few cases where they were useful to the student in distinguishing between otherwise identical words. Even today many scholars and teachers find this regrettable, if not even scandalous. I have never met a student, though, who shares that opinion.

In the preceding chapter, we focused on the form of sentences – whether the words are in the right order, whether any parts are missing, whether the right pronoun is used, and so on. But that's only half the story, at best. We also need to think about how sentences convey meaning.

We'll begin by looking at children's early one-word and two-word utterances to see what types of meanings they express and what they tell us about children's early linguistic abilities. We'll then move on to consider a series of more advanced constructions, each of which provides valuable clues about children's emerging abilities to understand and to communicate.

What a word can do

From the day they say their first word, children are amazingly good at finding ways to express themselves and at interpreting what adults say to them. Children's first utterances usually consist of just a single word, but it's often used to express a sentence-like meaning.

A child who points to her father and excitedly says “Dada, Dada!” is doing more than naming the person who just entered the room – she's trying to express the meaning “Here's Daddy.” And a child who looks at her mother's gloves and says “Mama” is not confusing the gloves with her mother – she's trying to say something like “Those are Mommy's gloves.”

Single-word utterances are often called holophrases (literally “whole sentences”).

Most of the time we adults take language for granted – unless of course we have to learn a new one. Then, things change pretty quickly. We can't get the pronunciation right, and we can't hear the difference between sounds. There are too many new words, and we forget ones that we learned just the day before. We can't say what we want to say, and we can't understand anything either, because everyone speaks too fast.

Then, as if that isn't bad enough, we come across a three-year-old child and watch in envy and amazement as she talks away effortlessly in that impossible language. She can't tie a knot, jump rope, draw a decent-looking circle, or eat without making a mess. But while she was still in diapers, she figured out what several thousand words mean, how they are pronounced, and how they can be put together to make sentences. (I know that I've used “she” all the way through this paragraph, as if only girls learn language. Since English doesn't have a word that means “he or she,” I'll simply alternate between the two. I'll use “she” in this chapter, “he” in the next chapter, “she” in the third chapter, and so forth.)

Children's talent for language is strangely limited – they're good at learning language, but not so good at knowing what to say and what not to say.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have words, but no systematic way to combine them. You'd have to communicate in tiny one-word installments – “thirsty,” “water,” “give.” That must be roughly what it's like to be a fifteen-month-old child with something to say.

There's considerable incentive, then, for children to learn how to create sentences, and it doesn't take them long to get started, as we'll see. The development of children's sentence-building skills can be roughly divided into two phases.

The first phase, which begins around the age of eighteen months, sees the appearance of relatively simple two- and three-word patterns. These early sentences are primitive and often incomplete, but they mark the start of something big.

During the second phase, which begins around age two or so, the missing pieces are filled in and there is rapid growth in the ability to produce a wide variety of complex constructions.

Getting started

The basic recipe for sentence building is simple: Combine two words with the right fit (say, an adjective and a noun, or a noun and a verb) in the right order. Repeat the process as many times as necessary, adding one new word or combination of words each time.

Take, for example, the sentence The glass broke. You start with the words the and glass, and combine them to create the phrase the glass.

Children are born into a world full of noises and sounds of all sorts (music, car engines, slamming doors, whistling, coughing, crying, conversation, and so on). Somehow, they have to take the part that is speech, break it down into its smaller parts (words, prefixes, suffixes, etc.), determine what they mean, and figure out how to reassemble them in new ways.

Doing this involves mastering a system of sounds, words, structure and meaning whose intricacy typically defeats even the most gifted adult learners. Yet children get the job done before they learn to tie their shoes. How do they do it?

There's still no real solution to this puzzle, although bits and pieces of the answer are starting to emerge. And as this happens, it's becoming clear that certain widely held ideas about how language learning works are probably dead-ends.

The job of this chapter is to try to sort out the difference between the ideas that make sense and those that don't. We'll start by looking at the popular idea that children learn language by imitating their parents.

Why it's not imitation

Ask the average person how a child learns language and you'll probably be told “by imitating adults.” On the face of it, that makes a lot of sense. The adults in a child's life speak a particular language, and the child ends up speaking that language too.

Imitation of some sort probably is involved in certain aspects of language acquisition. Take words, for example.

A child's first birthday is cause for special celebration in most cultures. It's a sign of survival and growth. By this age, children have their first teeth, they are able to eat solid food, and they're about ready to take their first steps, if they haven't already done so.

Their minds are developing too – they are able to follow the direction of an adult's gaze, they are sensitive to gestures such as pointing, and they tend to pay attention to the same things as the adults with whom they are interacting. Not coincidentally, this is also about the time that they first venture into language.

A child's first word is one of the great milestones in his life – and in the lives of his parents. For most children this happens when they are around twelve months old, give or take a few weeks in either direction. On average, a child has ten words in his vocabulary by age fifteen months and fifty words by age eighteen or nineteen months.

And, yes, it's true that the first words learned by children the world over are usually the names for “mother” and “father.” They get a lot of help with this, though. As we'll see in chapter 6, words like mama, papa, and dada are very easy to pronounce – they consist of very simple sounds arranged into very simple syllables – and they are a natural by-product of children's spontaneous babbling.