[B-Greek] Caragounis' book
R Yochanan Bitan Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Sat Nov 27 07:49:15 EST 2004
Wilkins HRWTHSEN
>Now I would be indebted to you if you could give me a specific example or
two indicating that a knowledge of modern Greek is as useful for the NT as
Attic (I might then better understand your viewpoint), but in any case I
respect your opinion and don't want to bother you with such an exercise (I'm
sure you have better and more pressing things to do).>
As a specific example, my last email listed Mk 10:51, whose naturalness is
closer to modern Greek than ancient. (This does not mean that it might not
echo something like KI ER'EH 'that I would see', as well.) Examples like
these are others have already been pointed out by Jannaris and Robertson and
are a continual comment in a book like Horrocks 1997.
I have noticed and met some modern Greek speakers who seemed to have an
easier time retaining a fuller vocabulary and reading ancient literature 'on
the fly' than those who only controlled the ancient. Having said that, those
people also confess that they had to learn and study and read ancient Greek
in massive doses in order to reach that level. So there appears to be a
potential fluency issue that could be matched/neutralized if we learned our
ancient Greek fluently. Unfortunately, most do not learn the Attic or Koine
to '(reading) fluency'.
BTW, I tend to see Attic and Koine as one big language. I rather doubt that
Josephus or Luke treated Plato as a different language, while I think that
they would very much call modern greek ETERAN GLWSSAN. And you are right
that subtracting (=masking) pieces of a language, like going from standard
English to Tok Pisin, is easy. But building new pieces of a language in
going the other direction is much slower and difficult.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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