[B-Greek] Metalanguage Was: hESTANAI, hISTAMAI and hISTHMI
Stephen Baldwin
stbaldwi at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 8 22:19:51 EDT 2007
Dr. Conrad wrote (concerning Dr. Buth):> I suppose it will always be jarring to some to realize that Randall > is deadly serious about the propriety of using Koine Greek as a > grammatical metalanguage to talk about Koine Greek -- just as English- > speakers use English terminology to talk about English grammatical > usage -- so serious, in fact, that he practices what he preaches.
I am perplexed at the merits of such an approach.
Could someone give an example in the Greek of using koine metalanguage that would confer something that would otherwise be lacking?
Wasn't there a thought expressed in an earlier debate here about developing an "artificial" or neutral metalaguage (a kind of metasperanto I s'pose?).
I'd be interested to read up on this a bit more -- if anyone has any recommendations for further reading on this ("The Idiot's Guide To..." would be about my level).
E.g. What are the goals/limitations of a metalanguage. I studied French for 11 years to pre-university level (many years ago) and we would speak of eg the "passe compose" and the "passe historique" etc. but we could equally have spoken of the perfect and the past historic...
I said in a private post that it seems from my reading, it seems that terms like "aorist" denote primarily a lexical form and can give some semantic/temporal sense to the word; but it becomes clear from even a small amount of study that the aorist pops up in all sorts of contexts and it requires a change in thinking so that as one reads, it becomes intuitive why a particular form is used (whereas currently, often one wonders "why did the writer use that form there"...)
Being out of my depth, and probably having inadvertantly lit several touchpapers, I will repair to the bunker and prepare for the stake...
Steve Baldwin
stbaldwi at hotmail.com
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