[B-Greek] referential complexity: frames & scenarios and Galatians 6:18
Dr. Don Wilkins
drdwilkins at verizon.net
Sat Apr 24 21:19:39 EDT 2010
Thank you for the additional comments, Elizabeth. I think you've done
very well explaining, but I took your advice and read Hoyle. A good
deal of food for thought. Certainly the different scenarios of author
and audience are critical for exegesis and translation. It's easy to
talk about linguistic methodology in the task of translating from a
modern language for a modern target audience. I'm reminded of the
fact that the Wycliffe organization's standard SOP used to be (and
probably still is) the use of "informants", i.e. native speakers from
the target audience who were bilingual and were invaluable for the
process of learning the target audience's cultural and linguistic
background, i.e. the scenarios and overall cultural context. As Hoyle
notes, the basic problem for biblical studies is that we have no such
informants, and have to figure out the source scenarios and frames by
other means.
I used to tell students that they would probably be disappointed in
the unabridged LSJ Greek lexicon because of the relatively brief
explanations, when in fact the lexicon supplies the most critical
information, viz. citations and short excerpts. Other unabridged
lexicons sometimes go into more detail about the context, with less
in the way of citations, but it seems to me that they all are giving
us information about different scenarios and how these scenarios tend
to specify a particular meaning within the universe of concepts for a
given word. My point is, the standard lexicons have always given the
user a rough distinction in scenarios, or vectors (citations) to
studying them. Of course the user is dependent on the lexicographer's
opinions, unless the user chooses to follow the vectors and do his/
her own research. You mentioned Louw & Nida's lexicon previously, and
I'm sure something better is in the works. L&N was cumbersome to use
and IMO essentially did the work of a thesaurus because it lacked the
kind of information found in the standard lexicons. So perhaps a new
lexicon could be formally organized in ways you have suggested, while
including the vital information (and more) found in the standard
lexicons. Now, too, there is the fact of the TLG and the ability to
process it that must be employed in doing a thorough word study.
Looking at this discussion from the standpoint of a translator, I
hope I can ask you a question, and that Steve (Runge) and Yancy will
also respond. Hoyle's perspective is mainly that of a translator
trying to communicate the source meaning to a modern target audience
in the hope that mistakes in meaning will be minimized. The end
product would not be a "Study Bible," but (to use an old term) a
thought-for-thought translation whose accuracy depends entirely on
the understanding of the translator. In reading Steve's Grammar in
particular, I get the impression that a very mechanical or wooden
"word-for-word" translation is essential for study by a person
without Greek knowledge who wants to make use of linguistic analysis.
It is not so much that the translation of any given word is the best
possible, but rather that it provides a connection to the original
Greek, which can possibly be clarified further by artificial means
like Strong's numbers etc. I'm asking this partly because I've just
started teaching a class on hermeneutics. Another reason is that when
I worked on the '95 update of the NASB, one of the changes we made
was to eliminate some initial KAI's at the beginning of sentences for
smoother English, a practice that was commonplace for some other
translations but a significant change for the NAS. But it seems the
practice would be problematic for linguistic exgesis by someone who
does not read Greek. What led to this, of course, was the original
imposition of English punctuation where Greek has none. For exegesis,
English punctuation can be detrimental. In any case, if you and the
gentlemen (if they read this) could tell me what you would prefer as
a study Bible if you could not read the original languages, I would
be very interested. This is probably off-topic for b-greek, so it may
call for off-list replies. Thanks very much.
Don Wilkins
On Apr 24, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
>
> On Apr 23, 2010, at 3:49 PM, Dr. Don Wilkins wrote:
>
>> every element of
>> language or communication has its place in a frame, and the
>> shortcoming of Smyth et al. is the failure to associate grammatical
>> constructions with a given frame or frames. The frames are in turn
>> associated with a given scenario or scenarios. Yancy's example of the
>> spirit, I take it, presumes that without the prayer scenario, the
>> reader might be justified in thinking that "your spirit" is "your own
>> piece of the Holy Spirit." So once a particular word or phrase
>> activates a known scenario, the reader is tipped off as to what to
>> expect, signaling a new frame with its own set of vocabulary, syntax,
>> and (possibly) sub-frames. Furthermore, exceptions to expected terms
>> and constructions naturally stand out, drawing attention to
>> themselves. They can be conscious or even subconscious attempts by
>> the writer to engage the reader's attention in some way. Hope I'm
>> doing ok so far.
>
> Once again, we are not beating up on Smyth, his book is extremely
> valuable and we wouldn't expect him to be doing this sort of
> linguistics which hadn't been invented yet.
>
> I have been trying to figure out to what extent Yancy and I are
> speaking the same language. I think we are close but there is a
> perspective difference. Yancy is preoccupied with social cultural
> religious context. I am preoccupied with semantic analysis of the
> sort that goes into computer based lexicons.
>
> Scenario and Frame can be used interchangeably but in my thinking
> there is a difference in focus between them. Scenario focuses on
> social cultural religious context. It doesn't necessarily imply
> anything about formal semantic structural representation. On the
> other hand, Frame is a semantic structural notion, a formal method
> for encoding information about Scenarios.
>
> Picture a linguist sitting in front of her laptop at a table in
> Starbucks in Istanbul. She is refining an entry for QEOS in a frame
> based semantic network. She is using wifi web access to gather
> information which will help her deal with the issue of
> distinguishing NT/LXX QEOS from Allah in a Turkic language. She
> already has a well defined entry for QEOS in her network of frames,
> however she is trying to figure out what cultural (target language)
> associations are attached to an Allah frame which make it
> unsuitable as gloss for QEOS in the NT Gospels. In other words, her
> primary task is to build a small subset of a target language
> culture frame network where Allah is one frame title so it can be
> compared to QEOS in the NT lexicon.
>
> I suspect this will lead to further questions. Once again, Hoyle is
> much better at explaining this than I am. Study the first chapter
> on his methodology.
>
> Elizabeth Kline
>
>
>
>
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