[B-Greek] What biblical GReek is for, or, a pretty book with Greek columns on the side

Leonard Isaksson leonardo1orchardcity at mac.com
Mon Feb 15 08:48:13 EST 2010


If this is tiring, just pitch it in to the can, so to speak.

For a year or two I have been on this mail list, I forget just how 
long.  This last round is the most attention that I have paid to a 
discussion of interlinears.  The contributions by the linguists was 
interesting to read, and for any folks who are new to the list, or who 
are learning Greek, the particular criticisms of interlinears, and the 
experiences of those who wrote in, probably would be helpful.  If I 
don't find a conversation to be useful or interesting to me, I just can 
it, which I actually had done to the interlinear talk before.

I got an interlinear many years ago, with a subscription to Chrstianity 
Today. It had a nice  blue cover, with Corinthian(I think)  columns 
pictured on the side.  I could see that the sentence structure of Greek 
was different from English, and I did not look at it more than a few 
times.

Then some years later the seed for Greek blossomed inside me.  And so I 
took  a classical Greek primer from a library, which was really meant 
for a classroom, and after that Machen and then Kinchin Smith and 
Melluish(I enjoyed that book), I started to learn Greek.  I got a start 
on it, but busyness in life got me stale, if I did not keep up regular 
study.  So having gone through quite a few lessons and gotten some 
vocabulary helped when I took elementary NT Greek at seminary.

In that time of the class,  I saw that old interlinear, but I didn't 
like having the interlinear English, it seemed to interfere with the 
experience of the text.  Besides, the teacher for the NT Greek 
recommended the purchase of Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor's 
Grammatical Analysis, which I had seen very favourably reviewed by Ward 
Gasque in Christianity Today some years before.  I like that book, it 
is helpful for one on their own, who goes about reading.

So I only ever wound up  using an interlinear a few times, as it seemed 
to interfere with the experience of the text, better to struggle, even 
though I did turn to Zerwick and Grosvenor, or  at times to an analytic 
lexicon when there was a word I could not ken.

It is a good thing to find what you don't know about Greek, so if an 
interlinear stunts one, or contributes to a false sense of knowledge, 
then it is good to serve a warning.

I would have to say that I did not mind reading this last round of talk 
about the interlinears, or much of it, anyway, although it sounds like 
it was tiring to a number of folks.

A conversation now and then  may be of help to new students of Greek, 
if the cons and the pros are well explained.  Its the kind of thing 
that a teacher winds up doing(may their hands and souls be 
strengthened), and it does seem like there are a fair number of folks 
who read this site who are learning Greek, even if they do not write 
into it too much.

Leonard  Isaksson


On Monday, February 15, 2010, at 04:34  AM, Carl Conrad wrote:

>
> Considering the proportionate distribution of discussion topics on
> B-Greek, one might suppose that B-Greek is "about" the goal of
> actually learning the language, but in fact, that has historically been
> only a secondary concern. The opening  paragraph of our FAQ cuts
> a pretty wide swath which takes in pedagogical resources, but the
> intended central focus of B-Greek has always been more upon
> the text and the language of the Greek Bible:
>
> "B-GREEK is a mailing list for scholars and students of Biblical
> Greek. Our main focus is upon understanding the Greek text of the
> Bible. Discussion topics include scholarly study of the Greek Bible
> and related Jewish and Christian Greek texts, tools for beginning and
> advanced students of Biblical Greek such as textbooks, reference
> works, bibliography and research tools, and linguistic topics such as
> morphology, lexicography, syntax, and discourse analysis."
>
> I confess that I have contributed my own 2 bits -- or 2 cents -- to
> on-list discussions of interlinears, nor have I ever thought that
> discussion of interlinears on B-Greek was inappropriate -- but I
> do think that this recurrent discussion of interlinears is tedious
> and unproductive every time we do a re-run of it.
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>
>
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
> B-Greek mailing list
> B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek





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