[B-Greek] grammar-translation
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Tue Aug 4 13:06:23 EDT 2009
On Aug 4, 2009, at 8:30 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> It is ,alas -- my reaction, shared, I suspect by very few --, the
> wave of the future in Biblical Greek pedagogy -- less so in
> Classical Greek pedagogy. There is no pretense of such fool notions
> as "thinking in Greek." Rather, it is: Parse, decode, and use the
> glosses to convert to woodenly-literal English, somewhat like an
> attempt to describe the taste of a cucumber or broccoli that one has
> only sniffed. Granted, this is a gross exaggeration, but there is, I
> think, more than a little truth in it.
Carl,
I agree, it is "the wave of the future in Biblical Greek pedagogy"
On Aug 4, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Will Dilbeck wrote:
> "Pragmatically, how can I go from translation to reading/thinking
> in Greek?"
Will,
The only evidence I can see that I have "internalized" greek is errors
in my english syntax. I tend to drop the verb "to be" and my use of
the articles has suffered. I also use some really strange word order
and drop out constituents which are not "optional" in english. But I
make lots of other errors which don't lend themselves to this
explanation. I don't even dream of thinking in Greek, it isn't going
to happen. My aptitude for SLA is marginal to poor. I didn't do well
in modern languages when i was in school.
Aptitude is one issue that Buth seems to have completely ignored. This
is a common fault found in "gifted people". They just cannot
understand what the majority of the populace is up against. Must of us
are not gifted people and learning Greek, Latin or Hebrew requires a
ridiculous level of time investment. Those who choose to avoid the
whole problelm and just use english tools for exegesis have a strong
pragmatic argument in thier favor. Why bother investing thousands of
hours to become a mediocre reader of Koine?
.
Here is a text David Black uses to illustrate the imperative
.
John 14:1 Μὴ ταρασσέσθω ὑμῶν ἡ καρδία·
πιστεύετε εἰς τὸν θεὸν καὶ εἰς ἐμὲ
πιστεύετε.
.
JOHN 14:1 MH TARASSESQW hUMWN hH KARDIA· PISTEUETE EIS TON QEON KAI
EIS EME PISTEUETE.
.
Black used intonation and/or paraphrase in english to illustrate how
an exegetical decision about the ambiguous form PISTEUETE would play
out in four possible combinations of indicative vs. imperative
readings of PISTEUETE. It would be an interesting exercise to come up
with an alternative teaching method that could illustrate this point
without using translation alternatives.
.
Elizabeth Kline
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