Relevance of Modern Greek?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Dec 14 16:05:14 EST 2002
At 9:56 PM -0500 12/13/02, <bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca> wrote:
>Mr. Conrad
>I am reading your paper: New Observations on Voice in the Ancient Greek
>Verb. I can't say that I understand everything of it but I understand
>enough of it to keep me interested and I am certainly learning a lot from
>it. I have a question that relates to this; I read somewhere that modern
>Greek is closer to Koine than ancient Greek is. If that is the case,
>would you be able to use modern Greek in your study on voice in koine?
>This brings me to another question; Am I going about studying Greek
>backwards seeing that I know neither ancient nor modern Greek.
>Bert de Haan
I have myself only an inadequate textbook grasp of Modern Greek, but I've
made a couple comments about Koine on the basis of what I do know of Modern
Greek which I consider relevant to the discussion of Koine voice: one is
that the verb EIMI which in Homeric Greek was middle has begun by the Koine
to become middle in the imperfect (HMHN, etc.) and that in Modern Greek
it's completely middle (EIMAI, etc.); another is that although the -QH-
forms have spread beyond the aorist into the perfect, it is evident that
the Modern Greek "passive" comprises verbs and meanings that were both
passive and middle in ancient Greek; that's one of the facts that has made
me more confident that the -QH- forms are not distinctly passive but more
precisely later-developing forms supplanting the older aorist and future
middle forms while retaining the ambivalence that those forms originally
had (they could be either passive or middle).
We've had the discussion several times on B-Greek on the question whether
students of Koine should learn Modern Greek or Classical (or even Homeric)
Greek. I've argued that it is not so much imperative (I wouldn't urge it on
any and everyone) but is, I think, helpful for one's understanding of
Biblical Koine--and in addition, there's a lot of good literature worth
reading in the other phases of Greek. Most simply put, I think that a
student of Biblical Greek (1) needs to appreciate that the Biblical Koine
is a language in flux, that its speakers and writers use, to a considerable
extent, competing forms of the morphoparadigms and competing grammatical
constructions and idioms, some of which were once more common in the
earlier language, some of them destined to become more common in the later
language (and this is one reason why I am somewhat dubious of efforts to
synthesize all instances of a particular verb or noun in a strait-jacketed
form or usage); (2) will probably understand Biblical Greek better for
having read some non-Biblical Greek, at least secular Koine literature, but
even earlier and later stuff.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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