[B-Greek] Chrys C. Caragounis' Book on the Development of Greek
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Dec 21 12:38:52 EST 2007
On Friday, December 21, 2007, at 12:22PM, "Hugh Donohoe Jr." <justusjcmylord at yahoo.com> wrote:
>I'm new to this forum, so there is a likelyhood I'll
>bring up a topic that is hackneyed. I was curious
>though, to know if anyone found the main premise of
>Caragounis' work to be cogent? And if so, has it
>impacted your study of New Testament Greek?
Caragounis' book is interesting and valuable in many ways, but it should probably be read
with some caution. What's clearly demonstrated is its major proposition, that NT Greek needs
to be understood diachronically -- i.e. from a perspective of its prior and later history, and not
just synchronically, as some linguists and pedagogues like to present it (as being essentially
uniform in the morphology and syntactic usage and lexicography used by major writers of
the NT era. There are some matters here and there in the book that are at least open to
question, including the assertion that Greek was already being pronounced in the classical
era much as it is by Greek-speakers today. I think there's much interesting and valuable
material about the history of the language and the place o; NT Greek within that history.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)
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