[B-Greek] Re: Koine and Homeric

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Sun Apr 11 10:05:58 EDT 2004


Bert--

Carl wrote:

>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.
>or

Carl, you don't really mean that they overlap relatively little do you?  In 
fact, they overlap hugely.  The specifically Homeric forms such as the 
--OIO and -AO masculine genitives are relatively few.  Other differences 
are often transparent, e.g., the -AWN genitive plural and the many 
instances where contraction has not yet taken place.  The same is true 
lexically, although of course there is a large amount of non-shared 
vocabulary.  Consider how common hHMI is in Homer and how common AFIHMI is 
in NT Koine.

As far as confusion is concerned, and speaking from experience, I can say 
that it probably impossible, at least for many years, to avoid some 
confusion.  The use of the article in Homeric as a demonstrative (and 
occasionally as a relative) is confusing, and I remember once in a graduate 
seminar on Epic Greek translating a subjunctive as though it were an 
optative (expressing a wish).  No one in the class, including the 
instructor, knew anything about Koine Greek, and it was very difficult for 
them to understand where the mistake had come from.  It was very 
embarrassing, and even after explaining what had happened, I doubted that 
the explanation made much sense to most of the other students.  But none of 
this is sufficient reason not to read Homer or other epic Greek.  The 
practice in the participle alone is worth it, and as the syntax is 
generally simpler than Attic (more like much of the Koine), the reading is 
easier to do at an early stage of one's learning.

I agree entirely with Carl that if one wants to read more widely in 
Hellenistic Greek, even Greek as relatively straightforward as Justin 
Martyr and certainly for the Greek of Philo and the later church fathers, 
Attic is necessary.

Next, if I may speak as a "professional linguist" (although not when it 
comes to Greek), the conventional wisdom is that for the purposes of 
language-learning, a strictly synchronic approach is probably best, at 
least until a certain level of mastery has been achieved.  At that point, 
with any language with a literary tradition, it is important to know 
something about the history of the language.  As a Dutch speaker you may be 
interested to look at the following two sentences from Shakespeare:
(1) Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither... (Hamlet)
(2) Sits the wind in that corner?
In Shakespeare's time auxiliary verbs were not differentiated syntactically 
from full verbs the way they are in modern English.  Note also the "double 
negative" in (1).

Finally, I don't think it makes a lot of difference whether you spend your 
extra free time studying Homeric Greek more intensively, start working on 
Attic or go more deeply into Koine Greek.

Chet Creider
Professor of Anthropology
Co-chair of Linguistics Programme
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Ontario 




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