[B-Greek] Re: Koine and Homeric
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Apr 11 10:37:02 EDT 2004
At 10:05 AM -0400 4/11/04, Chet Creider wrote:
>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'm sorry I didn't include Chet--but I knew I was not being all-inclusive
in my reference to linguists on the list.
Yes, I agree that it's perhaps impossible to avoid some confusion between
Homeric and Koine Greek, but I really doubt that there's much. You mention
the use of what later became the article as a simple pronoun in Homeric
Greek--but in fact there are remnants of that in NT Greek, especially in
the resumptive hO DE used directly with a verb, e.g. Mt 2:14 hO DE EGERQEIS
PARELABEN TO PAIDION ...
My own cold plunge exposure method was to do NT Koine in my first year of
undergraduate Greek and move into the Iliad the second year. Not the
simplest of transitions, and I'd really recommend going the opposite
direction, but it was not really quite impossible.
I will confess to a vivid memory of my first year in graduate school: at
the time I was saturating myself in Homer (12 books of Iliad and 12 of
Odyssey in one month) at the same time I was beginning Attic prose
composition: I was writing Greek with Genitives in -OIO, dative plurals in
-OISI and -AISI and -ESSIN. But one embarrassing experience of that was
enough to overcome that sort of confusion.
I very much appreciate Chet's balanced comment on this matter, including
his clear point that one would do well to get a basic competence in
Biblical Greek before venturing back to Homer. But best of all, I think,
would be to BEGIN one's exposure to Greek with Attic.
--
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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