[B-Greek] Teaching languages alive in the classroom

Hugh Donohoe Jr. justusjcmylord at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 5 10:58:32 EST 2008


Eric,

The irony is: Modern Greek has its own artificial
issues because of the Atticizing of the Katharvousa.
Of course Modern Greeks work comfortably between the
Demotic and the Katharevousa. I guess learning a
modern language which is sufficiently artificial will
help you avoid artificiality in making Koine alive?
I'm being a little facetious, but the truth is usually
more peculiar than we realize.

ex animo

Hugh Donohoe


Eric wrote:
I intended my previous message to go to the list as
well.

I don't think your rephrasing of the question is
equivalent, since I feel that the range of usages and
styles in a translation such as the NIV is much
narrower than that found in the GNT. I think generally
you have a translation from multiple varieties of
Greek into a single variety of English, but of course
some variations do survive the translation process.

I imagine the man in the street typically can read and
understand a very wide range of varieties, but the
range of what he speaks and thinks in would tend to be
very narrow, depending on which communities of
speakers he interacts with and what he happens to be
reading lately.

For these and other reasons I don't see how one could
reestablish the dynamics of any version of first
century Greek to the point where we could think in it
now in a manner at all approximating the way people
thought in it back then. I think it would tend to be
very artificial. What is found in books represents a
very small portion of how a language is actually used
during a given day. I think it might be better to
learn to think in Modern Greek, which we know we can
do authentically, and then do a lot of reading from
the first century literature and other periods as
well.

Eric Inman




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