"Bashing" D&M

Dale M. Wheeler dalemw at teleport.com
Mon Dec 13 21:01:07 EST 1999


I've been accused of "bashing" D&M...golly, I thought that I had bent over 
backwards NOT to go into great detail as to the multitudes of errors in the 
book (which are well known to every Greek Prof I know; which is why I don't 
know any Greek Profs who use it as their textbook for Greek Syntax, though 
probably all of the Profs I know had it as a textbook when they were 
students...I certainly did), so as not to bash them (NB Gary Dykes' 
comments)...ah well, no good deed goes unpunished...

But a couple of points came up that I think do need to be addressed, so 
that misperceptions are not left dangling in the air.

Clay Bartholomew wrote:

 >I find it highly ironic that we bash  Dana & Mantey for being out of
 >date since it is an old work and then turn around and recommend Wallace
 >which is in linguistic terms pre-Saussure.  Dana & Mantey is out of
 >date. So is Isaac Newton. So what. Wallace was published in the '90s and
 >in a lot of ways it (the book) is using a language model which is at
 >least as old or older than Dana & Mantey.
 >

Boy, I sure pushed your hot-button... (-:

The problem as I see it, is if Newton was wrong, then he was wrong and 
there's nothing inappropriate about pointing it out.  But of course that's 
not the real issue you are discussing here.  I've always tried to be 
careful to point out that Greek "grammars" are NOT (entirely) written from 
the standpoint of how original language speakers understood or used their 
language, they are clearly written from the perspective of the target 
language, thus the 30+ uses of the genitive.  My personal sense is that 
Greek grammars and syntax books are getting better and better in terms of 
trying to both understand Greek as Greek and Greek as not-English (ie., how 
the two languages communicate the same thing but in different ways).  This 
is why understanding how Greek uses/doesn't use the article is important; 
namely because its quite different than English in many places.  And unless 
English speakers know where those places are they will inevitably think in 
English, not Greek terms.

Thus, regardless of what linguistic theory you adhere to, when finally 
trying to describe a specific language, you MUST look at the language and 
see what kinds of patterns and forms the speakers of that language chose to 
express their ideas.  In this sense I'd say that you SHOULD care about the 
Granville Sharp construction, and the aspectual choices of verbs tenses, 
and all the other patternistic things that speakers do when they 
communicate in their native tongue.  Otherwise your just describing what 
you feel about communication based on your own native language sense.  So 
whether you approach a language from the standpoint of "Whole Language" or 
"Deep Structure" or whatever, you still must ultimately look at how this 
particular language communicates this particular idea...and that pretty 
much is what syntax books do; without getting into all of the philosophical 
and linguistic background data as to why...they are pragmatic in that sense.

On the sentence level I do share your frustration, since very little real 
research has been done on the clause and sentence level 
construction.  We've done alot on the individual elements, down to the 
morphemes, but the broader strokes of how speakers use their language is 
still lacking.  This is one of the reasons that I use the textbook that I 
use; it forces students to read stories right from the beginning, which 
makes them at least develop intuitively a contextual sense of understanding 
language on the clause, sentence, paragraph, and story level...something 
that can NEVER happen by translating isolated nonsense phrase back and 
forth from Greek to English.  As I've said before, those types of 
exercises, I suspect, are one of the main reasons that generations of Greek 
students have come to think of Greek as a wooden, word for word, almost 
mathematically formulaic language, rather than a living entity like their 
native English.

Finally, until you or someone else rises to the challenge and writes a 
linguistically based Greek grammar or syntax, we are stuck with what we've 
got...and for my money, Wallace is still heads and shoulders above everyone 
else in terms of accuracy, being up-to-date with current grammatical 
discussions, breadth of examples, wrestling with difficult passages, 
etc.  Its not perfect (I've sent him pages and pages of stuff that I 
disagree with) and its a bit much for students to swallow (if their prof 
demands they digest the whole thing in one semester), but I think its the 
best thing available right now...my opinion, of course.


Justin T. Alfred wrote:

 >The point has been made by some (e.g., Dale Wheeler) that D&M have not
 >clearly presented, or even incorrectly presented certain aspects of Greek
 >syntax (e.g., Granville Sharp, aorist, etc.).  However, on that point, can
 >one say that the Granville Sharp is never applicable?  Or would it be better
 >to say that the application of that rule has some merit, but there are other
 >instances where it needs to be modified?  I believe the latter is the more
 >accurate and correct position to be taken.

The problem is NOT with the Granville Sharp rule, which is certainly 
applicable when correctly identified, but the fact that D&M leave the 
impression that it applies to any sort of nouns by not indicating that it 
only applies to Singular, Non-Proper, and Personal Nouns.  Historically I 
suppose D&M can be forgiven their lack of precision on this issue, since 
virtually no other grammar until Wallace seems to have actually read G-S's 
treatise carefully and realized that he was imposing these restrictions 
himself, since he didn't explicitly state them in his "definition" statement.

 >With reference to the aorist, while it is true that a great many pastors 
have
 >in many instances not fully understood the use of the aorist, it is just
 >plain wrong, in my humble opinion, to blame D&M for that.  Indeed, if one
 >would carefully read D&M with regards to the aorist, one would find that 
they
 >clearly present the aorist's aspect as signifying "nothing as to
 >completeness, but simply presents the action as attained" (p.193).

I suppose then that we should blame their Greek teachers... (-:
The problem is not the overall discussion in D&M, but their concluding 
statement, which most evidently latched on to (p 194)  "It presents the 
action or even as a 'point,' and hence is called 'punctiliar.'"  Now you 
and I may understand what that means, but history has shown that a lot of 
students (and perhaps their teachers) certainly didn't, and they turned it 
into "once for all, point action."

XAIREIN...





***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages        Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street                               Portland, OR  97220
Voice: 503-251-6416    FAX:503-254-1268     E-Mail: dalemw at teleport.com
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