[B-Greek] Why Monotonic Greek. Was: Free Polytonic Uncial GreekUnicode Font?

Curtis Hinson curtis at curtishinson.com
Thu Aug 10 12:51:19 EDT 2006


Greetings George,

It appears you may have missed my points.  I will try to clarify since I 
may have been unclear about it.

1.  The breathing marks changes which meaning that eta has, and the 
reading of most major translations suggest that it has been read by them 
differently than most critical editions.
2.  The original reason diacritical markings were created was to help 
foreigners learning Greek know how to pronounce the language.
3.  Since then the breathing marks are not original to the text and the 
language, either way it's an editorial decision.
4.  So then it might be better to let the reader make contextual 
decisions rather than pre-judging the issue for them.

That is my reasoning, explained one way, on why diacriticals are an 
unnecessary addition to the language.  Greece agrees with me.

Now, I brought up IPA as a way of explaining how polytonic came to be in 
the first place, to draw an analogy.  Diacriticals were indeed about the 
sounds; it is a side-effect of them that they also effect the way  we 
understand texts.  So, just like writing English in phonetic notation 
all the time would be considered dumb and a burden for English were 
anyone to suggest it, so having to use diacriticals was discarded by 
Greeks as dumb and burdensome.  And a side-effect of following the 
Greeks in not printing diacriticals in critical editions, and not 
forcing students to write Greek using them all the time, is that we 
remove a layer of potential editorializing from our texts, as well as 
simplify our pedagogy.

I am sorry if this is a complex or convoluted point.  Allow me to draw 
another comparison.  In Hebrew, the language is vowel-less.  So a reader 
has to understand what vowels to fill into the word, using context, 
tradition, or whatever.  In their day the Massoretes added vowel 
markings to the text, thereby fixing a traditional reading of the word.  
Usually they're probably right, but from time to time, they may well be 
wrong, and the wrong vowel marking changes the word we see and therefore 
the meaning of the whole verse. 

There are therefore many who prefer to read the unpointed Hebrew in 
order that the reader is left in the living process of discovering what 
the word should be without any pre-judgement.  I'm saying likewise, we 
ought to allow students and readers of the GNT to be involved in that 
process by not spoon-feeding them someone else's editorial judgement.  
After all, if you want editorial judgement, go read a translation.

Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com

P.S.  It's also interesting to me that the diacriticals were invented 
two or three centuries after prosody started to die in Greek.  Maybe 
they were intended at first to help speakers understand the prosody of 
ancient Greek plays wherein it was an important feature.  It seems like 
the decision many centuries later to start using the diacriticals on the 
NT text was probably an ignorant one in any case, since the Koine didn't 
need it.  I suppose the internationalization of Greek, so to speak, 
might have had something to do with the death of prosody.  I am 
suspicious of the motives of using polytonic in printing the NT, since 
it's so easy to use the markings to pursue a theological agenda.


George F Somsel wrote the following on 8/10/2006 10:24 AM:
> I'm astounded by your logic.  In Greek an eta is still an eta 
> regardless of whether it has a rough breathing, a smooth breathing or 
> none whatsoever.  How does that compare to IPA?  In IPA it is the 
> sound which is represented, not necessarily the spelling.
>  
> __________
>
>
> */Curtis Hinson <curtis at curtishinson.com>/* wrote:
>
>     Hello again,
>
>     I wanted to note a couple of things quickly before I have to leave
>     in a
>     moment. First, the reason I brought up modern English was to point
>     out
>     what the effect would be on us if we spelled English in a way that
>     was
>     more considerate (in theory anyway) of foreigners. Although in
>     practice
>     if we really did spell in IPA notation, it would probably cripple new
>     speakers rather than helping them obtain a normal ability
>     eventually by
>     learning the normal alphabet. In that light it's understandable why
>     Greeks rejected polytonic.
>
>
>
>
> george
> gfsomsel
> _________
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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