[B-Greek] sheep, pronunciation of Biblical Greek
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Jul 18 11:29:14 EDT 2009
On Jul 18, 2009, at 10:21 AM, Leonard Isaksson wrote:
> Where does this reference in this poem about scuttling claws come
> from?
>
> Eliot, eh?
Aye, from the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
>
> 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?
I'm tempted to answer with one word (Yes), but that's not really what
I had in mind. I really meant no more by it than to express a mood,
like that of the "old curmudgeon" who refers to himself by Horace's
characterization of the typical dotard: "Laudator temporis acti," one
who misses the so-called "good old days" and almost certainly
complains too much.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
> 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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