[B-Greek] phonological flow & syntactical structure

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Wed Apr 27 14:01:05 EDT 2005


On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:19:38 -0700, "Eric Biggs"
<ericb at gracechurchreno.org> said:
> I have been meditating on Noam Chomsky's "generative grammar", especially
> in view of his explaination of the phonological flow of language and its
> conection to syntactical structure.  This has lead me embrace phonology
> more.

I'm not sure what you mean by "phonological flow". Is this your term or
Chomsky's?
 
> I've also been lead to believe that the pronunciation of Koine should be
> taught with Modern Greek ponunciation, but would that not drive one away
> from understanding the "deep syntactical structure" (to use Chomsky's
> lingo) and hence produce a little more error in Exegesis?

I can't see how.

> I am wondering what is taught in the pronunciation of Greek before the
> Koine era?

I would recommend W Sydney Allen's book Vox Graeca for a comprehensive
reconstruction of pronunciation of the Attic dialect in the 5th and 4th
centuries BC.

> Do we need to go back to Sanskrit to better understand the
> phonological flow of Koine, marking changes throughout the development of
> the language?

Firstly, Greek is not descended from Sanskrit.

Secondly, knowledge of the development of the language over time has
nothing to do with how generative grammar works. A child learning
English doesn't need to know anything about how Chaucer spoke, for
example.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding part of what you're saying because I
don't know what you mean by "phonological flow". Could you explain?

James
-- 
  James Tauber               http://jtauber.com/
  journeyman of some    http://jtauber.com/blog/




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