Jonathan Robie wrote:Incidentally, Andi Wu has demonstrated phrase-by-phrase interlinears based on parallel aligned treebanks that are actually quite accurate and seem much more useful. In his software, you can move up and down the tree hierarchy, seeing the equivalent in the other language.
It's only slightly relevant here, but let me say that ESL students that I have had who have learnt English primarily by memorising phrases for extended periods (a few years), without significant interaction with others (no conversational practice) and who are bored or confused by the details of grammar end up with language which is very fluent but lacks accuracy and has many basic grammatical mistakes.
Distinctions between registers (presumably due to the lack of interaction) are almost non-existent and mixed high and low register element in the same sentence are common. The phrase by phrase equivalents usually come from textbooks designed for that style of learning, from the words of songs, and from bi-lingual subtitles in films.
Those learners are able to sort out registers without too much difficulty, but have a lot of trouble getting to be grammatically accurate.
My educated guess is that the authour of the book of Revelations learnt much of his Greek (throughout the formative stages of his acquisition) through phrase by phrase equivalence memorisation. The way that that is put together into a useable language is quite individual according to each speaker.
Even less relevant here, just based on the number of syntactic parallels that I have been finding (I'm sure others must have found them too over the centuries) just between the Lysias and Xenophon (while reading with Wes) and the New Testament, I would guess that the writer(s) of Luke, Acts and Hebrews were drawing on a knowledge of classical literature (specifically its syntactic structures) when they composed their works. Most of the New Testament parallels for syntactic structures are from those (NT) works. Presumably, those authours had classical training of one sort or another, which included oratory, dialogue construction and historical narrative.
A quite different way of learning and mastering Greek than learning phrase equivalents.