Tuesday, November 21, 2006

On the Basis of the Breads

As I've been trying to learn Greek, one of the things I've been doing is trying to regularly read a passage from the New Testament. To this point I've been doing this just to get comfortable pronouncing the Greek, since I hadn't had either the grammar or the vocabulary to quite make out what I've been reading. But slowly, the lights are starting to come on. According to the text book I'm using, I ought to know about 70 percent of the words now.

Last night as I was reading I came across the phrase "epi tois artois". Since epi is a word that's been giving me trouble, I slowed down to figure out what that was saying. So I parsed it out, "epi followed by a dative is...'on the basis of'". And then I looked, "on the basis of the breads"??? I try not to pay attention to what passage I'm reading, but here I looked it up.

"for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened"
-Mark 6:52

Strange book, the Bible.

2 comments:

David said...

Word order in a Greek sentence is like putting a book in a blender, and then hitting the puree button. I admire you for your diligence Andy, I try to keep up with my Greek, but not to the level of reading it every day. Keep up the good work.

toujoursdan said...

I commend you on your efforts. When I was in college I took a semester of Greek and struggled.

Now I am taking French and am to the point where I understand 75% of a newspaper and 90% of the closed captions on TV.