[B-Greek] Metalanguage Was: hESTANAI, hISTAMAI and hISTHMI

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Thu Aug 9 05:11:41 EDT 2007


On 8/9/07, Stephen Baldwin <stbaldwi at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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?).

The primary advantage is that it allows students and teachers to 'stay
in the language' whenever they have to stop communication and focus on
one of the nuts or bolts of the communication mechanism.

This is actually quite important, but would not be felt in an English
classroom since no one really ever 'enters the language', 'cepting
English. The language is continually being pulled into an English
world. On the other hand, as soon as one wants to feel what something
is like from within Greek, they will need to do their communication
and thinking in Greek (painfully slow and blank when one would start
this process), and they will run into a major need for metalanguage
vocabulary.

>  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...

You would be able to do the same as your French/English were you to
internalize the Greek metalanguage.

A metalanguage, a language about language, provides a framework, a
scaffolding, that language users refer to when there is time for
reflection, like in a writing process. Speech is normally too fast to
do any metalanguage processing. But to stop, and then to jump out of
the language itself, impairs the communication within that language.

In multilingual situations it usually helps to tie one's thoughts or
words to a piece of a particular language that is in the conversation.
It is psychologically problematic to flip in and out of a language at
random. There are often good reasons for a particular language switch
in a multilingual situation, but once the switch is made, a
conversation will often stay in that language for some time, assuming
that people are comfortable in it. One would not do well with Greek
progress if one reverted to and stayed in English everytime there was
any kind of language question.

> ... 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 ...

This may be a classic case of poor metalanguage, though the Greeks are
partially to blame. It sounds like a result of the traditional
appelation 'present' to the aorist's antithesis. Which then influences
what someone thinks about the aorist itself, since it is the opposite
of  'present'.  This is why I use PARATATIKH 'extending' for what the
ancients called ENESTWS 'standing-in, present'.

It somehow turned out this summer that we used Pinnochio (sp?) as an
illustration of PSEUDESQAI 'to be lying, fibbing' versus PSEUSASQAI
(ἀδύνατον ψεύσασθαι τὸν θεόν ADUNATON PSEUSASQAI TON QEON), so that a
teacher or student could grab their nose and imaginatively pull it out
to arm's length when asking questions about whether a particular verb
form was PARATATIKH. The ancients, of course, referred to one of their
pasts as PARATATIKOS (past time) 'extending, open-ended'. We referred
to AORISTOS OPSIS as "EXEI TELOS" and PARATATIKH OPSIS as "OUK EXEI
TELOS". Kind of simple, when it gets right down to it, especially with
METOXAI participles and non-indicatives.  (and of course, this
simplicity leaves aside aorist indicatives that 'enter a state',
crossing a boundary, as it were; or omnitemporal past examples; with
such semantically complex and pragmatically marginal situations, one
can quibble whether the TELOS is in view or exactly on the edge of the
view.) jWhat is clear is that the AORISTOS OPSIS = OU PARATATIKH 'not
open-ended, not extending'.

ERRWSO
Randall
-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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