[B-Greek] sheep, ronunciation of Biblical Greek

Leonard Isaksson leonardo1orchardcity at mac.com
Sat Jul 18 10:21:13 EDT 2009


Where does this reference in this poem about scuttling claws come from?

Eliot, eh?

Are you saying that the afternoon, the e'en, "sleeps so peacefully", 
while black marks on a scrren, from a binary language device  present 
scholars views to us all, Biblical Greek study without much effort, and 
meanwhile, in the slumbers, we lie blissful, but ignorant?

Leonard Isaksson

On Jul 18, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:

>
> On Jul 17, 2009, at 8:11 PM, Oun Kwon wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Mark
>> Lightman<lightmanmark at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> <clipped>
>>>
>>> I agree and frankly I don't understand why so many
>>> list members whom I respect so much can't seem
>>> to apply this tolerance to Erasmianism.  A pronunciation,
>>> any pronunciation, is neither right nor wrong, but simply
>>> there, like your life.
>>>
>>>
>>> Mark L
>>>
>>
>> Yeah,
>>
>> whether it is artificial/unnatural or not, I believe it will survive
>> as an easy-to-get-on Erasminian dialect for some population. ;-)
>
> There is no danger that the pronunciation attributed to Erasmus will
> obsolesce. After all, a sheep knows one big thing: how to defend
> Erasmus (i.e. the so-called Erasmian pronunciation). And with all due
> respect, Biblical Greek pedagogy is a big sheep, a PROBATON that may
> occasionally take one step forward, but generally at the pace of a
> glacier before the onset of global warming.
>
> I grimace when I see the recurrent discussion of Biblical Greek
> pronunciation endlessly regenerated like the mythical hydra. The same
> opinions have been restated repeatedly  and attacked by others with
> the same fervor. The only constant seems to be the agreement that we
> need to voice the words of the texts we are studying if we are to
> discern in them more meaning than we might find in a printed page of
> sequences of numerical digits. I don't think that a discussion of
> Biblical Greek pronunciation has been squelched, however obnoxious it
> may have become; fiercely-contending opinions have been expressed, but
> the boundaries of civility seem at least minimally to have been
> observed.
>
> Eddie Mishoe has noted that discussions of the pronunciation of
> Biblical Greek on the TC List have been as serious as those on B-Greek
> have been frivolous. One might be tempted to think that if this topic
> is discussed so frequently and so fervently on B-Greek, then there
> must be real changes imminent in how the pronunciation of Biblical
> Greek is taught in schools and seminaries. But it is patently false
> that any real changes are imminent in how the pronunciation of
> Biblical Greek is taught in schools and seminaries. It would be
> difficult to exaggerate the profound conservatism of Biblical Greek
> pedagogy. So far as I can see, the only real ferment in the
> theoretical study of Biblical Greek in the last half century or more
> has been in the matter of verbal aspect -- and, to be honest, despite
> the best efforts of Porter and Fanning and McKay and Olsen and
> Campbell and even Zondervan's publication of a primer on Biblical
> Greek Verbal Aspect, I don't believe that Aspect Theory has had any
> real -- significant -- impact on the way most readers of Biblical
> Greek texts interpret those texts. Classical Greek pedagogy, on the
> other hand,  has been significantly impacted by the efforts of Allen
> and others to reconstruct the actual sounds of ancient Greek in the
> era of the literature of focus.
>
> I personally think that by far the most significant transformation in
> Biblical Greek pedagogy in recent decades has been the virtual
> abandonment of the objective learning to read Greek as an internal
> process, Technology has played a key role in that transformation by
> making it ever easier to rely upon predigested and mediated
> understandings of a cadre of professional Biblical Greek scholars. But
> that's another story and my recurrent statements about it probably are
> as welcome to others as the ebb-and-flow of discussions of Biblical
> Greek pronunciation are to me. "I should have been a pair of ragged
> claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>
>
> ---
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