[B-Greek] Metalanguage Was: hESTANAI, hISTAMAI and hISTHMI
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Aug 9 08:04:37 EDT 2007
Randall has already essayed one answer to these questions. I'd like
to state (or re-state, since I've discussed these matters to some
extent previously, some might say 'ad nauseam') a couple things about
them from my own perspective:
(1) What anyone learning a language needs most to achieve -- as soon
as possible -- is the ability to THINK in the language that one is
learning. This does not come readily and does not come immediately,
although it will come more quickly to the extent that one immerses
him/herself in discourse conducted in the language one is learning.
An English speaker doesn't think, "I went to the store yesterday" if
learning French but "Je suis allé hier au magasin." Some of us think
that the core process of traditional Greek pedagogy in English-
speaking institutions is misdirected because it focuses upon
producing an English version of Greek words, phrases, and sentences
in English words, phrases, and sentences that are patterned in terms
of standard English grammatical structures. I think that most Koine
Greek textbooks and classroom instruction employ that process, and
even intermediate or advanced grammars promote it. My recurrent
complaint about Wallace's GGBB is not so much directed against it as
against its practice of describing Biblical Greek in terms of how to
translate Biblical Greek into English rather than understanding how
Biblical Greek works.
(2) Grammarians in Greek-, Latin-,Sanskrit- and other-speaking
cultures have developed traditional grammatical terminologies and
accounts of how Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. function, and the
"grammars" that they have developed over the centuries and bequeathed
to us as a heritage still constitute much of what is being taught in
our schools; those grammars are far from useless, but they are
problematic in many ways, the more so insofar as they are square-
pegged into the round holes of target languages into which they do
not fit very well. Academic linguistics has endeavored to develop a
metalanguage to describe how Greek and other languages work and how
Greek shares structures and strategies of communication with other
languages and how Greek differs from several other languages in this
regard. I think that academic linguistics has suffered greatly from
the inescapable "bootstrap" process of creating a metalanguage for
describing linguistic process. The academic Linguists have done much
to enable us to understand how ancient Greek functions, but their
work is not readily "accessible" to some of us owing to (a)
terminological and even conceptual differences between "schools" of
academic Linguists and even between some members of the same
"school", and (b) the variations in presuppositions and methodologies
governing the work of academic Linguists in the different schools.
These are difficulties confronting any "layman" who seeks to learn
and make use of the work of social scientists generally. I've learned
much about Greek from some academic Linguists I've read, but I've
also found myself at sea in much of the reading and I have been too
often tempted to throw up my hands and wonder whether the effort is
worth while. I guess what it comes down to is that much of what the
academic Linguists are producing is exploratory and hypothetical --
far from useless, but far from being as helpful as one might hope.
On Aug 8, 2007, at 10:19 PM, Stephen Baldwin 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?).
>
> 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
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list