7.4 Aesop's Animals — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a story-shaped text about animals, opening on the line Πριν από πολλά χρόνια υπήρχαν λιοντάρια στην Ελλάδα. . Read a present, a past that is still going on and a past that is over, in three consecutive lines, without having been taught any of the three: κυνηγάει , άγγιζε , έπιασε . Read the three ways Greek compares one thing with another: τόσο … όσο , πιο … από , and μοιάζει με . Name eleven animals in Greek with their articles, and say what gender each one is from its ending. Say what a fable does to a language, and find one sentence in this text where English kept Aesop's picture and Greek did not. Prerequisites : 7.3 — the text with a refrain. Read 7.3 Reading first; this one is longer and has a story in it. A fable is the shortest form of literature there is. Two animals meet, one of them is greedy or vain or slow, something happens, and the last sentence tells you that the story was never about animals at all. Aesop — if there was an Aesop; the Greeks themselves were not sure — is the reason this form exists in every European language, and the reason an English speaker who has never opened a book of fables still knows that a fox is cunning, a tortoise is slow and patient, and a wolf may be wearing somebody else's coat. Why no fable is printed here, and what is printed instead. The plan for this volume asked for a simple modern retelling of a fable, with a note saying that the retelling was ours. We are not writing one, and the reason matters more than the text would have. Writing a retelling means writing Greek, and this course does not write Greek: every Greek sentence in all fifty-five lessons of this phase is quoted from a public corpus of real sentences, precisely so that nothing you read here is a foreigner's guess at what a Greek might say. A "simplified retelling" is the one place where a course can start inventing a language without anybody noticing, and a learner has no way of telling an invented sentence from a real one. The public-domain text of Aesop is no help either: it is in Ancient Greek, which is a different language from the one you are learning and is not simple. So this text does the honest thing available. It gives you the animals themselves, in real modern sentences, and then the comparisons that modern Greek still makes with them — which is what actually survived of the fables in everyday speech. Sixteen lines, all quoted from the public corpus and printed unaltered. The first eleven put the animals in front of you and let a small story happen among three of them; the last five are the comparisons. The order is this course's work; the sentences are not. Before you read The opening line is both a fact and a formula. Line one says that many years ago there were lions in Greece, and that is true — lions lived in the southern Balkans into classical antiquity, which is why the Greeks who told these stories had actually seen one. It is also, word for word, the shape every fable and every fairy tale opens with. The verb is the past of the one you learned in lesson 3.14 for saying that something exists, and you can recognise it under its past ending because the stem has not moved. Reading a past tense you have never been taught, off a stem you have, is the skill this whole volume is training. Three shapes of the verb in three lines, and this is the heart of the next phase. Lines seven to nine are about a cat and a mouse, and they contain three different verb forms. The first is the present: the cat is doing it now. The second is a past that means the cat was in the middle of doing it, with no end in sight — the paw is still on the mouse. The third is a past that means it happened and finished: the mouse was caught. English uses a helping verb for the second of these and cannot easily mark the third at all. Greek does the whole job by changing the stem and the ending of a single word, and it makes that distinction in every past sentence anybody speaks. This is called aspect, it is the axis the entire second phase of this course turns on, and the three lines here are your first sight of it. Do not try to learn it now. Notice only that there are three forms and that they are telling you three different things about time. A fable is a comparison, and Greek makes comparisons in three frames. The last five lines stop telling a story and start comparing. Line twelve says that a man looks like a fox, using a verb of resembling with a preposition after it. Line fourteen puts two little words around an adjective to say that one thing is as slow as another. Lines fifteen and sixteen use a different pair to say that one thing is more something than another — a word in front of the adjective and a word after it. None of these three has been taught; comparison is a second-phase topic. All three are readable, because each is a frame of two small words with a word you know in the middle. Once you can see the frame you can read any comparison in Greek, which is a large return for three lines of a reading text. One line where English kept Aesop and Greek did not. Line thirteen is translated as the English phrase about a wolf in sheep's clothing, which is an Aesop fable in four words. Look at the Greek and you will find no wolf in it and no sheep either: it uses a single word of its own for the same kind of person. This is worth more than a curiosity. Fables travel, but the pictures that fix themselves in a language are not the same pictures in every language, and a learner who translates the English idiom into Greek word by word will produce a sentence that no Greek has ever said. When a dictionary gives you an idiom for an idiom, it is telling you that the two languages agree about the meaning and disagree about the picture. Read the whole text once. Then read lines seven to nine again slowly, and see whether you can feel the difference between the second and the third. Glossary Word (with article) Meaning Notes το λιοντάρι el lion Part of speech / cl