[B-Greek] How did the Greeks Read Greek?

N.E.Barry Hofstetter nebarry at verizon.net
Mon Aug 23 11:36:59 EDT 2004


> 
> From: Clayton Javurek <javurek at asu.edu>
> Date: 2004/08/23 Mon AM 10:51:17 EDT
> To: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
> CC: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [B-Greek] How did the Greeks Read Greek?
> 
> 
> 
> Clayton Javurek
> E-Mail:javurek at asu.edu
> 
> Dear b-greek listers:
> 
> Currently I am reading through the book of Hebrews in the NT with the
> help of the Greek-English Interlinear. The Greek word order in the book
> of Hebrews is very difficult. How did the Greeks in the first century AD
> read Greek? By this
> I mean to ask "Did the Greeks look at each sentence like a scattered
> puzzle
> and they first had to identify the parts and then fit them together" or
> "Did
> the Greeks, somehow in moving from left to right, were still able to use
> Greek word order
> somehow to read Greek"? I just find that the Greek word order in the
> book
> of Hebrews appears so crazy that it would seem so difficult even for a
> Greek native speaker to read the book of Hebrews!
> 
> Thanks for any insight you can offer.

Clayton:

The difference is that they knew Greek as a language, and that their language was not dependent on word order in the same sense as English.  Could they tell at the beginning of sentence what the the full meaning of the the sentence was?  No more than in English, if we stop speaking or writing in the middle of the sentence.  However, the way they conceptualized the syntax was through not by through macro word order, but by listening for the inflections of the various words.  Of course, certain micro-word placements, such as nouns normally following prepositions, or the attributive/predicate placement of a modifier, did have significance.

If you are at the inter-linear level of Greek, and have not studied it as a language, I can understand your confusion.  Word order is in English such an important part of communicating meaning that it is difficult for us at first to get how inflected languages work...


N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Faculty-guy, CUTS
Philadelphia, PA
nebarry at verizon.net
barrycuts at juno.com
nebarry at verizon.net




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