Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / June 2006

<snip of my post>

<more snip>

Part of the problem is that the Greeks are indeed lucky in that their
language has a rich basic word stock. This flexibility, much bemoaned
by Greek schoolteachers here when they have to teach a greater range of
vocabulary to get Greeks to achieve what is considered basic fluency in
the language, means that there is a good deal of perfect one-to-one
correspondence between many words in English and Greek.

The flexibility comes from the fact that Greek has a gigantic word
stock to choose from hanging around in the four roots of Modern Greek,
the demotic, colloquial Greek that is spoken in households and largely
borrows from Italian, French, and English to handle everyday words,
educated vocabulary borrowed from "katharevousa," a nineteenth-century
version of Greek which was developed to deal with expanding the folk
language into a language that could handle a wide range of official
uses, Church Greek, or Koine Greek used in the New Testament and its
development, and finally, the Attic Greek of Athens's Golden Age in
antiquity.

Yet every language has roots. Greeks learn as much basic vocabulary as
they do, drawing deeply on these four roots, largely as a patriotic
duty to the Fatherland. There is a well-developed myth here that the
Powers-That-Be (chiefly, of course, the Great Satan) have been
colluding for generations in a gigantic conspiracy to strip the Greeks
of their language and in turn, their identity. I realize how ridiculous
this sounds, but it's a myth. For the American readers of this Board,
do you remember the widespread skepticism that glastnost was met with
in the late eighties on the part of many Americans, who believed that
Russian openness was a prelude to World War 3? It's much the same
thing, and one person is not going to change this.

-----------------------------

Simply the fact that "no one" represents a new, fundamentally basic
concept to them is deeply troubling to the myth. If this item and a few
others is not handled properly on my part, a socio-affective filter can
slam over their understanding of the language. They turn me off: I turn
from being a simple teacher to a representative of the Great Satan. For
those of you familiar with the film _American History X_, do you
remember the scene when the father turns to his son and points out to
him, "Don't listen to what that nigger teacher says. It's all nigger
bullshit!" Quietly, in the privacy of his home, the boy is set on the
pathway of racism.

You can actually see the change happening in their eyes when you do "no
one" with them. Imagine the fundamental instability to Western
mathematicians that a personal introduction to the number zero must
have caused. Suddenly, their understanding of themselves was deeply
troubled, and their conscious and unconscious beliefs in their
supremacy fundamentally challenged.

Now this is all a wonderful introduction to the power of language to
cut across divides, but I generally have one year to take woefully
underprepared students and turn them in to successful examination
candidates. I do not have time to grapple with the mysteries of self
and purpose that a deeper appreciation of any language evokes. Nor do I
have time to flatly point out that English has a word that Greek
doesn't, that this is its meaning, and then move on. UP goes the
drawbridge on their willingness to learn, and I start to grow the horns
of the Great Satan.

So what I'm asking is simple. Some of you out there live in
fundamentally anti-American, anti-British nations like Greece. Some of
you might even get shot at from time to time in the course of
performing your work: I am well aware my situation could be far worse
than it is here. Does it ever affect the basic nature of what you do as
ELTs, and in what way? How do you deal with it?

Oh, trust me, it looks like Greek to me. The problem is that it isn't
exactly the same thing, or used in the same way. There are actually two
words in Modern Greek for the concept of "no one," one from demotic
Greek (the form listed) and one from katharevousa Greek, the Latinate
spelling of which is "kaneis." "Kanena" really means "none." The form
ending in "s" is a person-equivalent to that. "No one" is not a simple
person-equivalent to "none."

Therein lies the rub, along with other assorted noun declension issues.
This is how it works:

No one was there. = Kanenas eitan ekei.

Not one ("one" being a pronoun here) was there. =  Kanena eitan ekei.

I didn't seen anyone. = Den eida kanenas.

I saw no one. = Den eida kanenas.

Not even one (ibid) was there. = Kanena den eitan ekei. (Double
negatives are quite common in Greek.)

Mix that in with the fact that the "s" in normal conversational speech
is routinely disappears, and teaching "no one" as a concept becomes a
CF of glorious proportions.

I, of course, say this as a Greek-American, one of those kids who just
had one nationality to put up on the board in Social Studies class.
I've also spent six years living here and spend far too much of my time
speaking Greek.

Anyway, I really appreciate all your comments in this thread. It did
bring things into perspective.