[B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
James Ernest
jdernest at alum.bu.edu
Sat Dec 19 23:20:42 EST 2009
On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Robinson is not the first to ignore the accent
> rules when speaking Greek.
Yes, I know. I'm not picking on Robinson, a very learned man who has
accomplished much. So let's forget Robinson here and speak in general:
I don't know why anyone would want to learn pronunciation by listening
to recordings made by someone for whom pronunciation isn't very
important. No one who thinks of Greek as a real language--i.e., more
than a writing system--could produce recordings like most of the few
that I have heard. In American theological education in the 20th
century Greek was just a writing system, not a language; or it was a
language, but like FORTRAN is a language, not like French is a
language. Isn't a language something performed by the lingua? Maybe
Greek is a digitage (writing performed by the fingers) or a cerebrage
(analysis performed by the brain)? I think the future lies in treating
it as a language. Maybe it doesn't matter how you pronounce GOTO in
FORTRAN, but in French if think that the different little marks found
over the letter e don't matter, you shouldn't make recordings.
> since the Greek accents as they are
> taught are (a) one of the Top Ten Reasons
> why Greek is so hard and (b) not really how
> ancient Greek was ever spoken, anyway,
> I can’t complain about abandoning them.
Hmm. I'll risk exposing my opinion with regard to (a): I'll grant that
it's hard to learn any language well, and harder to learn Greek than
to learn a modern European language. But the Greek rules of accent?
Any gibbon could learn them--not perfectly, perhaps, because certainly
there are complications, but well enough to get them mostly right most
of the time. People just don't put any effort into it. The
oft-repeated assertion that they are too difficult to learn always
puzzles me, especially when voiced by people who I know to be
intelligent and industrious. I attribute it partly to the decision to
treat Greek just as a writing system but also partly to a sort of
cultural-intellectual malaise in the Greek-learning community. In
college when I was taking my first year of Greek I was also taking
chemistry and calculus. The latter two courses were much harder than
Greek, and yet I never heard the sort of whining and moaning from the
pre-med chemistry and calculus students that I heard from some Greek
students. The profs wouldn't have tolerated it, much less encouraged
it; they certainly wouldn't have joined in it themselves.
As to (b): I'm not sure why you suggest that the accents never
mattered (or were not connected with stress?) in ancient Greek
pronunciation. Cf. the discussion in Caragounis, Development of Greek,
385-389.
Cheerio
James Ernest
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