[B-Greek] Linguists in the tower of Babel

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Jun 27 05:41:25 EDT 2005


On Jun 27, 2005, at 12:50 AM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> ...                                                                    
>          This is a difficult problem
> since the authors of the standard books on NT Greek have for the  
> most part
> ignored the framework that Dik is employing in her thesis.  
> Levinsohn is an
> exception but while reading Dik I regularly consulted Levinsohn and  
> found
> that they were not tracking together. Just like Buth and Larsen on  
> this list
> are not tracking together. When you put two linguists in a room you  
> well get
> a half rack (12 bottles) of frameworks. If you put four linguists  
> in a room
> you will have chaos first followed by total silence.

Just about a month ago I had occasion (May 28, "Re: [B-Greek]  
Genitive vs Adjective") to note on this list my observation that  
professional linguists seem to me to work in and write from a sort of  
Tower of Babel, speaking and writing languages or dialects that  
differ from each other on so many basic assumptions and definitions  
and frameworks that non-professional language-students cannot be  
confident of understanding what they say or mean; indeed, Elizabeth's  
observation makes one wonder whether they understand each other.  
We've seen how difficult it is to talk about or understand Greek  
tense and verbal aspect, not just because the matters under  
discussion are difficult but because there is no consensus on  
preferable terminology or basic assumptions. I've found the same to  
be the case in some of the work by professional linguists on voice  
and this has been something of a hindrance to me in formulating an  
intelligible account of what I've discovered about the way voice in  
ancient Greek verbs really works. I suspect that what I have observed  
about professional linguists is more generally true of the social  
sciences: their claim to be "sciences" at all rests upon defining  
"science" in a way that means something altogether than what it means  
in the natural sciencs. Perhaps that's because the social sciences  
are dealing with human phenomena, which somehow do not yield data  
that are so readily quantifiable and subject to verifiable. Whatever  
the truth of this may be, it is particularly disturbing to read again  
and again propositions about how Greek worked at some particular  
point in its history that are put forth as if they were more than  
hypothetical.

Sorry about that, but it's a long-time peeve of mine that  
occasionally has to find expression.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at ioa.com or cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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