[B-Greek] a real Koine dictionary?
Theodore Mann
theomann at sbcglobal.net
Thu Mar 31 16:30:44 EST 2005
Would a lexicon of street-Greek, as suggested below, be of value in
translating the NT? If so, how? Thanks.
Ted Mann
-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of R Yochanan Bitan
Buth
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 3:27 PM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] a real Koine dictionary?
In the discussion on "looking for a book" the following raises some
hidden issues:
Sangrey EGRAPSEN
"In a certain sense, what your pastor is looking for is simply Koine
Greek. Since, 'koine', by definition, is vernacular. In this case,
you
(and we) really already have such creatures. BDAG, Louw & Nida,
Moulton
and Milligan, Brown's, and others, do this for us.
"However, the gotcha, if I'm not reading into your question, is that
even
these books take 1st Century Greek vernacular and, with a number of
words key to theological discussions, give them a theological spin.
For
example, CARIS as used on the street would not have had its rich
theological implications read back into it. People in the KMarticus
parking lot would not have done that. And we do it far too easily.
"Having a lexicon that does ONLY that would be valuable. Though,
again,
a lexicon like Louw & Nida gets very close. Kittel, on the other
hand,
is at the other extreme."
WDE ARXOMAI
All of the above works on the 'KOINH' are skewed "by accident, by
chance", something often forgotten or not factored into the
discussion. The words that are in Louw and Nida do not necessary
represent street Koine, but they represent the vocabulary that
happened to be used in the New Testament. It would be like defining
'standard English' by the words that occur in a particular NT
translation. The four to five thousand words would hardly describe all
of the most common English words, nor would it exclude some quite
specialized words. This can be illustrated quite easily with something
as basic as color in the NT.
In Louw and Nida, under color one finds QEIW'DHS. This means something
like the 'sulphuric, sulphurous yellow'. But it is hardly the word
that a kid would use playing in a street. For that you would need
KSANQO'S 'yellow'. For 'blue' Louw and Nida list UAKI'NQINOS 'hyacinth
blue', but without the more basic KUA'NEOS 'blue'.
It is actually a tricky question to get back to what the basic
language was in daily speech because we need to use written documents
to do this. However, a nice basis would be a mix of vocabulary from
sources like Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, NT, Epictetus, Josephus, et al.
and selected papyri, in order to get the period correct. For example,
would people in the street say PEIROUMAI... for 'I am trying ...' or
would they say 'PEIRAZW', or both, and when? We have word lists and a
wealth of materials to do this. We also have novels that have an
interesting mix of language and the quite humorous dialogues of Lucian
that were not constrained by the meter of the epigrams or the classic
literature.
I would enjoy having a dictionary of 'words widely attested in the
first century'. (It needs to be bi-directional, too, Greek-to-a modern
language; modern language-to-Greek, and/or monolingual in ancient
Greek.) Liddell-Scott is just too comprehensive, Bauer D-A-G, M-M, and
Lampe are too restrictive.
PS: KOINH refers to a dialect of features shared between some of the
earlier dialect divisions. It does not necessarily mean 'colloquial',
'vernacular', or 'common-man language'. Josephus wrote in the KOINH,
as we see from forms like EDWKAMEN 'we gave', instead of the Attic
EDOMEN. But Josephus also used 'highfalutin' vocabulary and forms like
SFISI for simpler KOINH AUTOIS.
ERRWSO
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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