[B-Greek] Primers for Attic Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Apr 29 07:27:19 EDT 2004
At 11:15 AM +0100 4/29/04, Jody Barnard wrote:
>Hi Carl,
>
>I'm particularly interested in your comment that "it's
>worth the student whose primary interest in the Greek
>language will be the New Testament or patristic
>authors should get a solid foundation in classical
>Attic."
>
>Why do you say this?
To prove that I am perfectly capable of writing ungrammatical
sentences--even if what I meant was understood well enough! I've argued
this proposition many times on this list; some have agreed with me, many
have disagreed (you expected maybe a consensus?).
The proposition is more clearly demonstrable with respect to patristic
authors who wrote after the inception of the "Atticist" movement at the end
of the first, beginning of the second century of our era: school-educated
writers were urged to write the Greek of Plato and Demosthenes rather than
the demotic koine that is dominant in most of the GNT. But one will have
some difficulty reading even Philo or Josephus, whose work is coeval with
the emergence of the GNT documents, without a foundation in Attic. But even
if one never reads any Greek outside of the NT corpus, I personally believe
one who has at least a year of Attic Greek will be better able to
understand some of the less frequent items surviving from earlier phases of
the language such as use of the optative; but I think even that the
transition from the simple narrative style of John's gospel to the somewhat
more intricate sorts of subordination in Luke and Hebrews will be easier
for one who has learned to read some Plato or Lysias or Xenophon. I don't
mean to be flippant, but this is a proposition analogous in a way to Moses'
question and God's response in Ex 3:11-12: Q: "What business is it of mine
to undertake this big task?" R: "You won't know until you see what comes of
doing it successfully." At any rate, I don't know of anyone who has found
wasted a serious expense of effort at learning Attic Greek with a primary
concern for reading the GNT.
My broader proposition, however, is that the reader of NT Koine needs to
have more than a synchronic perspective on the Greek language being used in
the GNT, needs to grasp that the NT Ko;ine is a languge in flux, retaining
forms and usages that are older than those in most frequent current
practice and exhibiting some forms and usages that are currently rare but
that become standard in the Greek of a later era.
--
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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