[B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?
Ben & Mandy Pehrson
ben-mandy_pehrson at sil.org
Sat Aug 27 02:53:40 EDT 2005
Michael,
There is no comparison. Wallace is very useful and user friendly in many
ways that Porter is not. Porter also seems a bit scant in places. Wallace
is rightly considered an intermediate level grammar, but his approach and
interaction with recent research means that his grammar sometimes contains
insights not covered in the older advanced grammars.
Here is what Wallace describes as the distinctives of his grammar, most of
which I really appreciate: (1) exegetically significant examples, (2)
consideration of semantics and "semantic situation," (3) clear,
user-friendly definitions, (4) plenty of examples, (5) grammatical
statistics and noting which constructions are "rare," (6) charts, tables,
and graphs, (7) multitude of syntactical categories, taking into
consideration both the unaffected meaning and the affected meaning in a
given context, (8) no discussion of discourse analysis (because its methods
are still developing and it is too important to receive merely a token
treatment, (9) structural priority over semantic considerations (IMHO very
important!), (10) minimal material on lexico-syntactic categories (IOW it
doesn't duplicate the extensive treatment of things like prepositions,
pronouns and conjunctions that you have in your BDAG lexicon, (11)
user-friendly layout (examples given in Greek and English; 3 levels of
discussion: summaries, normal type, and smaller type including substantial
footnotes; scripture index)
Some people critique Wallace for his 7th distinctive above, saying he is a
"splitter" of semantic categories. But overall, I think this is very
helpful for the student to learn to analyze the sense of the category under
question in relation to the multitude of specific contexts it may occur in.
If you stick with it, you will want to get the advanced grammars by
Blass-Debrunner-Funk as well as Robertson.
By all means, give this grammar a look and compare it to anything else. I
think you'll find it amazingly helpful.
With any reference type book like this that is not organized alphabetically,
label the chapters on the fore-edge of the book so you will always be able
to quickly turn to the relevant section when you're doing your research.
Hope that's helpful,
Benjamin Pehrson
Aitape West Translation Project
SIL PNG
Wycliffe Bible Translators
-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Michael Ledford
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 9:15 PM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?
Hello, this is my first post! Can anyone tell me the difference between
Wallaces' Grammar Beyond the Basics and Porter's Idioms? I'm a second year
Greek student. Should I eventually own both or what? Thanks for the help.
Michael
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