[B-Greek] On Fluency, Aspirations and Choices
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Oct 8 15:12:44 EDT 2008
On Oct 4, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Michael Aubrey wrote:
> The vast majority of students in the US who learn Koine in
> seminaries and universities don't learn the language. What they
> learn is a method for translating in their heads every word and
> phrase that they see. There is no internal comprehension of the
> words. The relationship in students head between ARTOS (ἄρτος)
> and the loaf sitting in the kitchen doesn't exist in any student's
> mind. There is only a relationship between the lexemes
> "ARTOS" (ἄρτος) and "Bread." That's not reading - or if it is,
> its barely reading. Its more like learning a code than anything else.
>
> I've done modern language methods for other langauges - and after
> three months, my Russian was better than my Greek had been after a
> year!
This was only four days ago -- I write on Oct. 8 -- but it still seems
to me to cut to the core of how the different stances on pronunciation
and its bearing on successful pedagogy or acquisition of a meaningful
command of Greek. It's not far removed in spirit from what I wrote in
a post to the list on Feb. 28, 2006:
"One problem I noted previously about the metalinguistic grammars is
that, to the extent that they are written in the alien language of the
student, they are oriented excessively toward conversion of Greek
idiomatic structures and usage into alien idiomatic structures and
usage: one learns from grammars how to translate at least as much and
often far more than how to understand the original Greek construction
and usage. They foster the understanding of reading Greek as DECODING
an alien cryptogram. I am convinced that successful language
instruction, however conducted, ought to lead to THINKING, so far as
possible, in the alien language. And I do suspect that goal would be
fostered by using the language being learned -- ancient Greek -- as
the language for grammatical accounting -- or at least, underscore the
distinction between UNDERSTANDING Greek and TRANSLATING it into one's
native language."
There's been a lot of lengthy give-and-take in this latest of our
recurrent go-rounds on getting the pronunciation scheme right when
learning Greek and how it bears upon the degree of success in
learning. In general I have found the recurrent discussions of
pronunciation of Biblical Greek predictable, boring, and not really
likely to sway opinions of readers away from the pronunciation they've
learned or the way they think the matter of pronunciation bears upon
their ability to read Biblical Greek (or other historical phases of
the language).
It is as the old saying expresses it: "You pays your money and you
takes your choice."
What B-Greekers share is some degree of investment in acquiring skills
in the Biblical Greek language in order to read Greek Biblical texts.
What differentiates B-Greekers with regard to this investment is just
how much they are willing to invest in acquiring those skills and just
what constitutes, in the perspective of each aspirant, "reading" Greek
Biblical texts.
I have no idea of the percentages of those aspiring to "read" Greek
Biblical texts falling into the different categories, but I think
there are at least three such categories:
(1) "minimalists" who will be content to glean what they can from
interlinears (including "reverse interlinears"), parsed Greek texts, a
brief introductory course in Biblical Greek or self-study of a
textbook such as Mounce or Machen, perhaps an intermediate reference
grammar and an inexpensive dictionary that is little more than a
glossary; they tend to be essentially "decoders" who work toward
solution of the Greek text as a cryptogram to be solved and rendered
in an acceptable "translation"; at worst, they hold some mystical
notion of some single meaning attaching to each Greek word and a
notion that the meaningful thought is the aggregate sum of the
meanings of the words expressing it; the Greek Bible is the outer
boundary of their focal concern, and even the LXX is of concern only
insofar as it illuminates the GNT; the highest aspiration of the
"minimalist" seems to be to re-read the books of the GNT again and
again, perhaps to achieve one's own perfected translation of the
whole; these are the people to whom "analytical" GNT's and Biblical
software packages pander, offering them a tempting illusory experience
of "reading and understanding" the real Greek Biblical text.
(2) "maximalists" who aspire to intimate familiarity with the Biblical
Greek as it was spoken and written in its own era, grasping what is
written as the thought finds expression in the flow of the text,
voicing the sounds of the language as they were spoken and heard in
the Hellenistic-Roman era in the eastern Mediterranean area, reading
not only Biblical Greek texts but other contemporary Greek texts as
well as earlier and later Greek texts; they will make use of the best
lexical and grammatical reference works available and aspire to make
sense of the Biblical Greek texts as compositions intended to be read
aloud before an audience attending to a SPOKEN language, a language
that its writers and its hearers use not only in their ecclesiastical
communities but in their everyday life in the secular world;
(3) "wannabes" -- probably the great majority of B-Greekers -- who
have begun the study of Biblical Greek in hopes of reading and
understanding the GNT as it was intended by its original authors and
as it was understood by its original listeners (not silent readers,
but listeners to a text that was heard). With respect to Greek
pronunciation, the "wannabes" are not quite sure what they want in
terms of authenticity. Some want to use the pronunciation of modern
Greek because they know that when the GNT is read aloud in the
Orthodox churches, it is "understood" (more or less) by the
congregations of modern-Greek-speakers -- it doesn't matter that
several vowels and diphthongs are pronounced in the same way; others
want to voice the Greek text in such a manner that the sounds of all
the consonants, vowels, and diphthongs are clearly distinct from each
other -- that's the virtue they think they see in the Erasmian
pronunciation, regardless whether the actual language was ever sounded
that way in the linguistic history of Greek. This involves a certain
commitment to the artificial conventions of a traditional orthography
belonging rather to classical Attic rather than to Hellenistic-Roman
Koine (distinct sounds of E and AI, of OI and I, of U and OU, etc.,
etc.). Our helpful editors of the GNT have neatly printed out our
Greek text in the orthography of classical Attic, whereas those who
look closely at Hellenistic-Roman papyri and the earliest codices of
the GNT must face a text in which spelling reflects actual
contemporary pronunciation as much or more than traditional Attic
orthographic conventions. "Wannabes" are confused about pronunciation,
and I think that's why this thread on pronunciation has never yet come
to any conclusive consensus. I think we just simply don't have any
agreement about whether the Biblical Greek text is essentially a
literary text or the deposit of a language that was spoken and
intended to be heard aloud.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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