[B-Greek] structuralism & Robert W. Funk 2nd Ed.
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 10 06:30:35 EDT 2007
On Jun 10, 2007, at 1:44 AM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
> There are a few other biblical/classical grammars written using the
> structuralist framework. One is Waldo S. Sweet, Latin a Structural
> Approach 1957, published the same year as Chomsky's Syntatic
> Structures, E.V.N. Goetchius Language of the NT, 1965. Funk's 2nd Ed.
> was published in 1973. Waltke-O'Connor Biblical Hebrew Syntax was
> still dabbling in structuralism in the 1990s.
>
> From what I have read so far I can see that R.W. Funk is preferable
> to some of the other first year grammars but one can only wish that
> the framework was something more current than C.C. Fries The
> Structure of English 1952.
I realize that the point of this comment has a different focus from
the comment I'm going to offer on it, but perhaps what I want to say
will be worth saying anyway.
Elizabeth, it seems to me that you have long since reached the point
that most Greek teachers who have taught for several years and used
different textbook eventually reach: the realization that the only
adequate textbook that meets one's own desiderata is one that one
writes for oneself. I certainly often considered doing that myself,
but I think it's evidently a good thing that I never did (the
nearest thing to it being a "Supplement" to the JACT "Reading Greek"
textbook, which supplement I now see to be flawed in many ways. In
fact, I think that FAR too many Greek teachers have succumbed to that
impulse to "write their own" textbook. I had a high school geometry
teacher who didn't say this but apparently felt that a translation of
Euclid would suffice to teach plane geometry. He repeatedly said,
"There are new books and there are good books; the new books are not
good, and the good books are not new."
Obviously that dictum is more entertaining than useful. But it does
seem remarkable to me that new textbooks of Biblical Greek don't
really "hit the spot" with teachers and students generally. I've
taught Biblical Greek out of Machen and out of Mounce. I despise
Machen and I don't like Mounce; my experience with AKMA's textbook
was not satisfactory. All this may be my fault; I'm inclined to think
that learning Biblical Greek depends more upon the student than upon
either the teacher or the textbook. But the fact is that Machen, as
wretched a textbook as it is, survives into a new generation because
people like its layout and method (it's like Crosby & Scheaffer, the
old high-school text for Attic that teaches one to read Xenophon's
Anabasis just as old-fashioned high-school Latin texts teach one to
read Caesar's Gallic Wars). A.T. Robertson's big grammar has been
faulted for many, many reasons, but it remains in publication and
use, just as does BDF, for the simple reasons that enough students
(and teachers) of Biblical Greek still find them useful -- and
because something clearly superior to it has not been created. What
has modern linguistic theory produced in the way of Biblical Greek
textbooks? There's Ward Powers' textbook which has its commendable
features, but it's not one that I would use. Of course there's
Porter's "Idioms of the NT," an intermediate grammar; does it "hit
the spot"? Not to my satisfaction. So where and when is the "great
white light" going to dawn on Biblical Greek pedagogy? I honestly
can't see anything on the horizon, and I think we're going to have to
make do for some time to come with those tools that we have found
most useful up to the present.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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