[B-Greek] Koine and Homeric

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Apr 10 22:33:34 EDT 2004


At 8:24 PM -0400 4/10/04, <bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca> wrote:
>Waldo wrote;
>
>  > Bert:
>>
>> What is your goal as far as Greek is concerned?
>
>
>My ultimate goal is to be able to read the GNT with 'relative ease'.
>The reason I am doing Homeric greek is to learn Greek using a text with
>which I am not familiar so that I cannot guess at the tranlation like I
>could using the New Testament.
>I plan to read some of the Anabasis as well.
>I chose this order to kind of follow the evolution to the language.
>Bert de Haan.

Bert, I think you are wise to do this--and personally, I would say the same
if your goal were to read primarily classical Attic texts or primarily
Alexandrian Greek texts or primarily Byzantine texts. While I would not
claim that students/readers of NTG texts who limit their reading strictly
to Biblical Greek texts may gain competence at reading them, I think their
competence at Biblical texts can only be enhanced by the careful reading of
texts earlier (and later) than those Biblical Greek texts. I've argued
often enough on earlier occasions on this list  that students who concern
themselves only with a synchronic study of Koine Greek are likely not to
appreciate the extent to which Koine Greek is a language in flux, a
language some of whose users/writers who are conscious of the heritage of
the tradition will employ constructions and usages that have already become
rare if they haven't vanished from the spoken language, while other
users/writers are commonly employing constructions and usages that will
become standard in the centuries thereafter.

But there's an added reward for the reading of Homer beyond gaining a sense
of the history of the language: the reading of Homer is its own reward--a
truism, to be sure, but a truth borne out by centuries of readers who have
found it to be truth.

At any rate, I would not urge you to read Homer exclusively or to avoid
reading the GNT while you're concentrating on Homer: you're not very likely
to confuse Homeric vocabulary or grammar with Koine vocabulary and grammar
inasmuch as they overlap relatively little, considering they were composed
in the same language roughly 800 years apart from each other. But I would
urge you to keep reading Homer long enough to have read through several
books of either the Iliad or the Odyssey (or both) and to feel reasonably
competent to return to them at some future time and read more. Then do some
classical Attic also; if you want to read Xenophon, the Anabasis is
certainly one possibility, but I preferred doing Xenophon's
Memorabiilia--his anecdotes of memories of Socrates. If you read nothing
else in classical Attic, read Plato's Apology of Socrates. If you'd like to
try something intermediate between Homer and classical Attic, try some
Herodotus: it's in Ionic dialect, which is fascinating in its own right,
and the narratives of Herodotus have the same power to grab a reader that
Homer's stories have.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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