[B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?
CWestf5155 at aol.com
CWestf5155 at aol.com
Sat Aug 27 13:53:11 EDT 2005
Michael and Ben,
I'm intimately acquainted with both works, and Porter recommends that his
intermediate students also own Wallace, Robertson and BDF as well as a few
other "classics". Although I haven't actually asked Dan, I'm sure he recommends
that his serious students own Idioms. My advice is to buy both.
Some of the differences between Wallace and Porter are format. Porter is
easy to read through and follow, and is more comparable to Young's intermediate
Greek in format. Wallace is more encyclopedic in format and more useful as
a reference tool--he's easier to read when you have specific questions you
want answered.
But much of what Ben observes below is a difference in theory. Dan Wallace
is acquainted with linguistics, and fits what he knows or accepts into his
traditional theoretical framework--in part accounting for a proliferation of
categories and over-definition.
Stan Porter has an intimate knowlege of Greek (though he does not subscribe
to the importance of fluency in speech), a thorough understanding of
linguistics in general, and a commitment to systemic functional linguistics (or
English linguistics/Hallidayan). His grammatical works reformat the grammar in a
way that reflects the explosion of our understanding of language (due to the
ability to record speech and analyze written and oral language with advanced
technology).
Whether Ben is reflecting Dan's view or his own about discourse analysis,
it's going in the wrong direction. Greek students should be introduced to
understanding words and phrases in the context of the discourse from the
first--words and grammar have meaning in context. Sure beginning and intermediate
explanations can be described as "token". Everyone's got to start somewhere.
You can move from "token" to more sophisticated reading and theory when
you're ready. In Biblical studies, discourse analysis can seem confusing, partly
because you have people out there who are claiming to do it who really
haven't throughly read the linguistic literature and/or don't have a consistent
theoretical commitment.
Cindy Westfall
McMaster Divinity College
In a message dated 8/27/2005 12:54:11 AM Mountain Standard Time,
ben-mandy_pehrson at sil.org writes:
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 Pehr
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