[B-Greek] Caragounis' book

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net
Sat Nov 27 15:39:22 EST 2004


On Saturday, November 27, 2004, at 04:49 AM, R Yochanan Bitan Buth wrote:

> 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.

Regrettably I did not see your email on Mk 10:51. I assume that you are 
referring to the construction TI SOI THELEIS POIHSW, where we would 
ordinarily expect an infinitive for POIHSW, and barring that hINA with 
POIHSW. This is an excellent example because it illustrates issues with 
hINA. It sent me on a search to dig up my old modern Greek primer, which 
fortunately I was able to find. From what I can determine, this use of 
POIHSW has no ordinary counterpart either in modern or Attic Greek, 
because modern would use NA with the perfective subjunctive form of the 
verb. In the context, it is clear that the blind beggar has no 
difficulty understanding because he responds with hINA ANABLEYW, 
probably indicating that he takes Jesus' POIHSW to be an abbreviation of 
hINA POIHSW. For a modern Greek reader, the orthography and morphology 
in themselves would cause serious challenges, while the orthography and 
morphology would be transparent to the Atticist. Also, I suspect the 
Atticist would have an easier time figuring out that POIHSW is 
subjunctive, and inferring the implication of hINA, while the modern 
Greek reader might be stymied due to the need for such markers as NA and 
QA to clarify the mood or tense of verbs as a result of changes to 
morphology.
	As an aside, hINA ANABLEYW is a good example of what I was talking 
about regarding purpose overlapping other ideas. We could look at the 
construction and say, somewhat subjectively, that it is an object clause 
roughly equivalent to an infinitive. Then we could argue that this hINA 
construction eventually crystalized into NA + verb as the infinitive in 
modern Greek. But it can be argued that purpose is inherent (consistent 
with the Attic hINA construction) because the purpose of the blind man's 
request is necessarily to gain his sight. The same could be argued for 
all object clauses of request. The Attic reader can see this because he 
is used to thinking of hINA and the verb separately, with the 
combination producing a final clause, whereas the modern Greek reader is 
used to thinking of NA + verb as the formal infinitive, just as we do 
with "to" and the verb in English. And I would assume that modern Greek 
includes the idea of an infinitive of purpose, just as in English, 
thereby ignoring the nuances of the construction. Of course I invite 
corrections if I am misunderstanding the modern Greek constructions.
	One other point: Randall notes that the blind man's reply could 
represent the Hebrew KI ER'EH. The question is what POIHSW represents, 
if Mark and the other synoptics are simply translating a Hebrew or 
Aramaic conversation. It might be possible for vav ("and," but far more 
flexible than that) to have preceded POIHSW and have been omitted by 
Mark (as well as in the parallel passages), but I would guess that Jesus 
simply used the "imperfect" tense of the verb by itself in a kind of 
shorthand which would not be atypical for Hebrew/Aramaic. So as good as 
this example is, a verse in which there is no discourse raising the 
possibility of translation Greek might be better.

> 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'.

Here RB explains away the phenomenon of these modern Greek speakers 
himself. I do agree with him that speaking fluency in any stage of Greek 
would be beneficial. The problem I always encountered was time 
constraints. It was always a challenge to recruit and retain students 
even for a limited curriculum because of the old "What can you do with 
it?" problem. Greek dorms/living environments would be a tremendous 
help, but again it is difficult (if not impossible) to get 
administrative support for such things, and also a hard sell to the 
parents of students.

> 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.
>
Not too difficult, thankfully, or I for one might never have learned 
classical. But it certainly can be difficult, and modern Greek speakers 
I have encountered who are unacquainted with classical do seem to view 
ancient Greek as ETERAN GLWSSAN (or GLWTTAN) because of the daunting 
differences.

Don Wilkins



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