[B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 20 18:56:45 EST 2009
Hi, James,
<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.>
I'm not suggesting that pronunciation is not important. I'm
suggesting that the issue of Koine pronunciation is so
complicated that I cannot accept any approach other
than radical tolerance. I don't know why Robinson and
Dobson choose to ignore all rules of stress; I'd like
them to speak for themselves. I will just say this.
Jonathan Pennington, who was somewhat of a
pioneer in this, stresses QEOS in Jn 1:1 on the first syllable
He does this, I think, to put emphasis on the word
in the context of the passage which he reads.
Now I know it is important to accent this word
correctly, because THEon means "running,"
while theON means "of the Gods." Both of these
words are very common in Homer. So I would
not myself advocate doing this. But what causes
Pennington to do it in this one instance, is
precisely THAT he is treating Greek as a
living language, at least by making a start
in speaking it for people like me to hear.
If it is okay to do this once, it is okay with
me, not ideal but okay, to do it all the time.
I can guarentee you that if as you say
<I think the future lies in treating
it as a language..>
If that is, we actually start using
Koine, it will change, radically,
just like Hebrew was changed
when it was used by European
Jews. If one of those changes
means radically changing the
accent rules, and others
mean that Koine will be
HEAVILY influenced by
English, just like it was
influenced by Aramaic and
Latin, why in the KOSMOS
is that a bad thing?
<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.>
One out of two is not too bad
for FWSFOROS.
Mark L
FWSFOROS MARKOS
--- On Sat, 12/19/09, James Ernest <jdernest at alum.bu.edu> wrote:
From: James Ernest <jdernest at alum.bu.edu>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
To: "B-Greek" <B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009, 9:20 PM
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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