[B-Greek] Stanely Porter on Greek grammars

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jan 18 09:07:44 EST 2004


Interesting post, Ken (I only wish you weren't using a font that fouls up
when converted to plain-text as all BG messages are before distribution--I
guess it's curly quotes that's messing it up, but it makes for somewhat
confusing reading, except where a simple apostrophe is intended).

At 10:09 PM -0800 1/17/04, Kenneth Litwak wrote:
>   From time to time, there are discussions here of
>grammars.  I was interested to read an essay recently
>by Stanley Porter (the book, from Baker Academic,
>it’Äôs in is not yet published, so you can’Äôt look it
>up) that essentially, to use the vernacular,
>’Äúdis’Äôd’Äù all the NT Greek grammars I know of,
>except for Moulton’Äôs Prolegomena and Young’Äôs
>intermediate grammar.  Porter gives two basic reasons
>for this.

I take it that this essay is in print rather than on-line? I don't
disbelieve Ken's account, but I'd like to read first-hand what appears by
this account to be a pretty radical bashing of most of us who've spent our
careers teaching and writing about ancient Greek.

>1.  Just about all NT Greek grammars are based on
>language theory from the 19th century, and pretty much
>ignore anything linguists have learned about how
>language works since then.  Here Porter dumps on BDF,
>Robertson (though less so), Dana and Mantey, Wallace,
>Winbery and others.  I’Äôm not sure that all grammars
>should fall under that condemnation, but Porter is
>probably correct to a fair degree.

I tend to view black-and-white judgments--or those that don't allow for
considerable shading of the spectrum between good and evil or truth and
falsehood--as not very helpful or useful, even if they convey an at-least
partially valid judgment. Comparable, in a way, is how British and American
academic philosophers or teachers of philosophy have dismissed or ceased to
teach anything that antedated linguistic analysis as developed in the wake
of Wittgenstein et al., although Whitehead, surely one of the most creative
of 20th-century thinkers, asserted (an exaggeration, at least) that all of
medieval and modern philosophy consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.

What I think is true about Ken's point #1 is that writers and teachers of
Greek grammar have re-presented the traditional categories and explanations
all too uncritically. Certainly one grammar that cannot, in any respect, be
lumped into that category is Funk's _Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of
Hellenistic Greek_. But that's a grammar that doesn't dump all traditional
categories so much as it re-formulates them in the light of Chomskian
linguistic theory. The problem is that Porter's indictment (if reported
accurately) is just too sweeping. Of the above-listed grammars, I can't
imagine dropping BDF and Robertson in particular until something equally
useful is created to replace them. With respect to my own research into
Greek voice, where I may seem to be frighteningly radical in my urging that
we drop the notion of deponency and that we recognize the -QH- verb-forms
as bearing both middle and passive meanings, I've found a good deal of
support in Robertson and not a little in BDF.

There is one huge pragmatic consideration governing the way I tend to view
traditional Greek grammatical lore: people like Robertson could read Greek
fluently in a manner that is rare if it exists at all today.

>2.  He says that NT Greek grammars suffer from
>analyzing NT Greek through comparison with Attic
>Greek.  He says, provocatively, that Koine Greek,
>spoken and written over a wide geographical area
>should not be judged against or compared to for
>understanding to a dialect of Greek spoken by the
>elite of one city five centuries before the New
>Testament period.  Like the first of these critiques,
>this seems overstated to me.  I don’Äôt think you can
>confine classical Greek to 5th cent B.C. Athens.  At
>he same time, I think he has a very good point that
>you should not judge or seek to understand what is
>happening in Ne Testament Greek in light of the
>practice of Homer or Plato or others writing in a very
>different cultural context at a very different time in
>a much more limited area.  Exactly how widely known
>Attic Greek was I will leave to Carl to speak on, but
>I would doubt that before Alexander the Great, it was
>anywhere nearly as widely used as Koine Greek after
>Alexander’Äôs time.

Here too, my reaction is to Ken's representation of what Porter says,
although I have no reason to doubt Ken's veracity--I'd just prefer to
respond to what I've read coming, more or less, "from the horse's mouth."
If Porter is claiming the importance of a synchronic approach to Koine
Greek--as have others including our own eminent B-Greeker Rod Decker,
that's valid enough, as far as it goes; but what disturbs me is the
corollary notion that one can understand Koine Greek without taking the
diachronic perspective on it seriously.

For one thing, Attic Greek is, as Ken rightly notes, NOT just the local
dialect of a single community but rather a Koine forerunner--written and
spoken throughout the Athenian Aegean thalassocracy--of the Koine that
spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of Alexander's
conquests. Understanding Biblical Koine Greek or the Greek of ANY
particular era of cultural importance is facilitated by some awareness (one
that is more than merely superficial) of Greek linguistic history extending
backwards to Homeric usage and forward to the katharevousa and demotic
forms of Greek written and spoken today. EVERY serious student of Biblical
Koine needs to understand that the language of the GNT is a language in
flux, that those who spoke and wrote it used alternative forms and
syntactic structures, some of which were fading away but still in use while
others were becoming standard and/or still developing toward the forms and
syntactic structures of later eras.

I will readily grant that anyone writing a new Koine Greek grammar today
ought to understand all that is distinctive about the Koine as a historical
stage of the Greek language; BUT I would argue that a Koine Greek grammar
produced by anyone today will require not only (a) an understanding of
contemporary linguistic theory (which is hardly a matter of uniformity and
consensus!) but (b) a considerable understanding of the entire historical
development of spoken and written Greek, and (c) a more than passing
familiarity with the great monuments of written Greek of eras before and
after some arbitrary chronological markers such as 300 BC and 200 AD.

>   I’Äôm not seeking here to tell you to go burn your
>volume by Turner on style, which Porter finds
>particularly poor methodologically.  I’Äôm raising
>these points because I’Äôd like to know what others
>think.

Well, that's my immediate reaction, but I'd like to read at first hand what
Porter is saying, and this immediate reaction may well be premature.
-- 

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/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list