[B-Greek] Greek Semi-Colon? [WAS: testing my new tool]
Jeffrey T. Requadt
jeffreyrequadt_list at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 30 18:50:42 EST 2007
As far as I know, a “raised period” (what is the actual term for that punctuation?) could be “roughly” equivalent to an English colon OR semicolon, depending on the clauses and phrases which it is separating. I do not have the book to which you refer, although I do have Mounce’s BBG, and he does indeed say that it is equivalent to the semi-colon, and does not refer to the colon. I did not use Mounce to begin learning Greek. I used Kaufmann, which I don’t have anymore, and I also used Eugene Van Ness Goetchius’ The Language of the New Testament, and I know that Goetchius says that it could be both. I have made it a colon in my tool simply because it would be obviously impossible to know when it should be an English colon or semi-colon; and also because I’m not trying to say how it should be interpreted in English, simply that there is a punctuation mark there in the Greek text (edited, obviously) that is not a period or question mark. I think my experience, which is very limited even within the realm of the New Testament and a reading in the church fathers every now and then, is that the raised period more often serves the purpose that an English colon does: namely, to precede a list, quotation, or explanation. Actually I’m a little surprised that Mounce does not refer to its use as such. Am I off my rocker here? I guess this is a pretty trivial question, but I think it could bear on the meaning of the text at some miniscule level. I'm sure someone knows the answer to all this.
Jeff Requadt
________________________________________
From: Anita Clerke [mailto:clerke at humanperformance.cc]
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2007 6:12 AM
To: Jeffrey T. Requadt
Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] testing my new tool
I'm running Mac OS 10.4.11, on a PowerPC G5, using Mail 2.1.2.
Your program seems to be flawless except:
Where the Greek text has a period above the line, this is converted to a colon in B-Greek. I gather from page 15 of Greek for the Rest of Us (2003) by WD Mounce that a period above the line should be a semicolon in English. However perhaps the convention for B-Greek is different.
2) The Greek text line beginning with |1 Διἀ has a comma followed by a 1 Βρἀδιον. In the B-Greek translation, the numeral 1 is ignored. The other numbers, namely 2 and 3 are present though.
Well done.
Jonathan Clerke
clerke at humanperformance.cc
On 30/12/2007, at 3:57 AM, Jeffrey T. Requadt wrote:
I'm trying to test my new conversion tool. I'm sending the first part of 1 Clement in both Unicode and B-Greek, without having typed a single letter of it. Any feedback would be appreciated.
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