[B-Greek] Knowledge of Ancient Greek
L. Harris
ljoharris at ckt.net
Thu Feb 23 17:08:22 EST 2006
Dear Memebers,
To reply in Platonian style.
Linda Harris: By the way did you know there is a "Grammar war" going on?
Ernest Blum: No, I didn't know this "war" was going on, but I'm very much
personally involved in it.
Arthur King: Yes. That's why I was not surprised to find so much material
in beginnning Greek grammar books about English grammar.
Linda Harris: It's interesting that this subject came up, especially after
another post a few weeks ago from Bert de Haan.
Bert de Hann : Many passive verb forms in the GNT are described as
"Theological Passives."Is that because of an effort to pigeon-hole verb
forms into categories or are there noticably more passive verb forms in the
GNT than in other Greek writings?
As far as I know there is no such listing in Greek pasives as a "theological
passive", however in "theology" itself there is, but deals with
"interpretation" and hermeneutics not real true grammar, regardless of what
they call it.
Here is a great article from the NY Times called "Why the Bad Grammar" that
will begin to open your eyes to what's going on.
http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041215-085728-5559r.htm
"
However this article dose not mention another very important player on the
same side in regards to "biblical" translation, by the name of Kenneth L.
Pike who invented "tagmemics", which is basically transformational grammar
applied to Bible translation. A good article on him is at
http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/tags.html
This article states the following:
"Kenneth L. Pike 's evolving linguistic theory, tagmemics, has focused from
its inception upon solving the problems Bible translators face in
understanding and describing languages in primarily oral cultures."
Oh that "sounds" good until you find out what his motivation was:
"Young, Becker, and Pike found the communication strategies derived from
work of psychotherapist, Carl Rogers, most congenial to their evolving
modern rhetoric, specifically his emphasis on reducing an audience's sense
of threat so that they are able to understand and then consider alternatives
to their own belief system. " http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/tags.html
You see they can call it "grammar" all they want to but it's all really just
a form of RHETORIC, which is the "art" of persuasion. In this case
persuading someone the text is saying something it really DOSE NOT SAY, by
the use of TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR, which again is NOT grammar but Rhetoric
and a sneaky system of hermeneutic. However a dog by any other name is still
a dog.
I think that it's important to know the difference between applied real and
true rules of grammar and "transformational" grammar which is based on
theory.
Regards,
Linda Harris
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