[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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