[B-Greek] Caragounis book

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Nov 24 11:36:09 EST 2004


At 2:42 PM +0000 11/24/04, D Jongkind wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>Before everybody gets overexcited, some may find the book a little
>disappointing.
>
>First of all, it has not been edited very well: the author tends to
>repeat himself frequently.
>Some may also find his heavy emphasis on the continuous development of
>koine into modern Greek a little far-pressed. At times one gets the
>impression that the author wants to imply that the only people who can
>understand NT Greek properly are the modern-day Greek speakers; there is
>a heavy dosis of - what might be called - Greek nationalism detectable
>(including the whole edgy debate of what true modern Greek actually is).
>Interestingly, Caragounis does not see the Greek speakers in
>first-century Egypt as true native Greek speakers, they can only be
>found in Greece proper.

IF that's the case, it would seem to be an unfortunate bias, in view of the
fact that there was a Greek population in Egypt that continued to exist,
especially in Alexandria, from antiquity until recent decades, and there
are those who think that one of the greatest modern Greek poets was the
Alexandrian C.P. Cavafy. On the other hand, one of the things that I find
attractive about Caragounis' approach is his focus on the diachronic
perspective on the language and particularly the view that a knowledge of
post-Koine Greek contributes to the understanding of Koine Greek as much as
does a knowledge of Homeric or Attic or dialectal Ionic and Aeolic and
Doric Greek of the earlier era. If there's a bias there, it may be a
corrective to the intensely-restrictive bias of a synchronic perspective,
the worst manifestation of which is the erstwhile conception that NT Greek
is somehow a unique "sacred" language bearing little relationship to the
Greek spoken and written by contemporaries of the composers of the GNT.
Probably when one looks at Caragounis' book, one should also have in hand
or read simultaneously Geoffrey Horrocks, _Greek: A History of the Language
and its Speakers_, Longman, 1997.
-- 

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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