[B-Greek] learning greek KATA english
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jun 12 17:11:51 EDT 2007
On Jun 11, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
> Funk BIGHG
> Lesson 5: The Article
>
> #120 For the most part, the article functions in Greek as it does in
> English. A number of the idiomatic uses of the article in Greek can
> be learned by observation, and will occasion no difficulty.
>
> ****
>
> The way I read this statement it seems very misleading.
>
> First, there are numerous and highly significant functional
> differences between the English and Greek article. Second, where the
> Greek article performs a function not characteristic of the English
> article calling that idiomatic seems to imply that English is some
> sort of standard by which Greek should be judged. Funk devotes far
> too many paragraphs and even pages to discussion of the English
> language.
>
> Learning Greek according to English isn't learning Greek.
>
> This falls into the same category with translation exercises which are
> so endlessly popular. Every time someone in a bible student or pastor
> offers a "new rendering" in English of some Greek or Hebrew text I
> wonder what it is they are trying to accomplish. Translation is a
> process of coercing the target language into a form that will do
> justice to the source text. It is all about the lexical resources and
> syntax of the target language. Also, there are a host of translation
> professionals out there doing reasonably good work. It takes a decade
> or more (after College) of continuous professional training to become
> a "certified" translation consultant. Learning to read Greek is a
> completely different goal with a completely different set of
> objectives than being a translation consultant.
I've been pondering this comment for some time and wondering how it
is that I can agree with so much of it while at the same time
wondering whether it is really a meaningful comment upon what Funk
actually wrote in Lesson 5 (and in Lesson 6 immediately following).
§120 in Funk's Lesson 5 actually reads as follows:
"120. The Greek article was originally a demonstrative pronoun (it
was so used in Homer). It was subsequently weakened to the status of
article, then serving merely as a pointer. Cf. the article _der_ in
German, which serves as article, relative and demonstrative pronoun;
in English _that_ is both demonstrative and relative and is related
to the article. In Greek the article is definite. Greek does not,
strictly speaking, have an indefinite article (corresponding to _a_,
_an_ in English).
"For the most part, the article functions in Greek as it does in
English. A number of the idiomatic uses of the article in Greek can
be learned by observation, and will occasion no difficulty."
This strikes me as (a) an accurate and succinct statement of what hO/
hH/hO has been and is in ancient Greek. It does NOT strike me as an
indication that what will follow is an account of the way ancient
Greek works based fundamentally on the way English grammar works.
Moreover, if one considers what actually follows §120 in the
remainder of Lesson 5 there is a pretty clear representation of how
the ancient Greek article and the ancient Greek relative pronoun are
like each other and different, with helpful hints about keeping the
similarities and differences between them in mind. §1240 does give a
"word list" for the Lesson with "the" suggested as an English
representation for hO/hH/hO and "who, which, that" suggested as
English representations for hOS/hH/hO.
Lesson 6 presents an account of "The Article as Structure Signal." I
won't cite the opening paragraphs (§§125-1252). Although there's one
English illustration, these paragraphs are focused upon how the
article functions in a grammatical system generally and in ancient
Greek specifically. In what follows the chief types of usage of the
article in Hellenistic Greek are set forth; there are 19 examples
presented, each drawn directly from the GNT; not one of them is
translated into English.
While I must confess that I have myself in list-correspondence often
enough offered up my Englished version of how I have understood a
Biblical Greek construction, I've done it to illustrate how I think
the Greek construction works rather than to offer the English as some
sort of "solution" to the problem represented by the Greek
construction. I think that I have myself disparaged the process of
what is called above "Learning Greek according to English"; in
particular I have complained about the multiplication of
subcategories of adnominal genitives in Wallace's GGBB --
subcategories that seem named and characterized in terms of English
constructions used to convey them. Perhaps I am blind when I examine
Funk's BIGHG, but I really don't think it is adequately characterized
as "just another instance of learning Greek according to English."
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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