[B-Greek] Colloquialization of Greek

cmeadows3 at verizon.net cmeadows3 at verizon.net
Sat Dec 1 17:24:17 EST 2007


Hello all,

Sorry if this is a duplicate - I think my first attempt to post this failed due to my excessive time spent thinking while I wrote!

I am seeking some perspective here…

When I first started studying Greek I was impressed with what I saw as the tremendous flexibility in communicating verbal action.  This is a viewpoint shared by many Greek grammarians of the past 100 years or so.  This would seem to make the language very “commentator friendly” in that there should be comparatively little ambiguity in translation.

However that more I look at my own native language (English) the less plausible this seems to be.  In analyzing my own natural speech I find that many verb forms are chosen for colloquial or idiomatic reasons.  Application of rigid rules for translation would likely yield strange results – at least for common spoken language.

Modern Greek has also made for an interesting comparison.  The modern language seems to flow more like conversational English than ancient Greek.  

This has left me with several questions which may not have clear answers.

1.	Does the “colloquialization” of Greek from NT to modern times represent a blending of spoken and written languages, owing perhaps to an increase in literacy?  Perhaps there WAS in times past a formal written language which had more rigid rules and which would be more germane to a “precise” verbal system with many different choices and sometimes only subtle differences between them?  It seems to me that, from talking to native Greek speakers, some of the formal distinctions of tense and aspect as given by 19th and 20th century NT grammars are quite artificial and perhaps even “unGreek”.

2.	Do we err in treating NT Greek like a code system and not like a modern spoken language?  I admit that the more I look at my own speech the less I am inclined to believe that a NT Greek “syntax” can even be constructed with any precision.

3.	Given that Greek may have been a second language to most of the NT authors (amongst whom there were certainly varying degrees of mastery) would it not be even more difficult to construct any normative “syntax” for NT Greek?

All opinions welcome!

Thanks.

Charles Meadows
Marshall University
USA



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