[B-Greek] In defense of "Orthography" (was: "Excluded Middle (was 'B-Greek Year End Awards')"

John Sanders john.franklin.sanders at gmail.com
Fri Jan 8 03:37:37 EST 2010


There is probably no right or wrong, but it does no harm to present our
views, preferences and biases.  Recalling what I was required to do in
grammar school and what worked for me; I was required on demand to be able
to take any word, identify its syllables, identify the syllable that was
stressed, and identify the long and short vowels. But our graded readers
were all plane, unadorned, "unpointed" text.

If I had my preferences, that is what I would want in my readers, plane,
unadorned, "unpointed" text.  It would be my responsibility to produce on
demand or need the word with with tone marks and aspirated marks.

For the NT, I print out texts without chapters or verse and there are sites
on the internet that do not have any markings on the text.  I am not even
opposed to eliminating the sentence markings, letting me read the text and
attempting to "feel" how the sentence should be constructed.

I do not hold my breath and expect any text, even the Iliad, to come into
print without all those dictionary forms right in the text itself.  I just
ignore them while reading, unless I have a problem with the word itself,
then I will give attention to those marks and use them to look up the word
in a dictionalry.

Just an aside, a casual view of languages that allow the written form to
display a difference in homonyms allows the language to be more tolerant of
homonyms, that is those languages tend to have more homonyms-or so it
appears to me.  So I have no problem with to, too, and two or so, sole,
soul, sow (or even sew in my dialect).

-- 
John Sanders
Suzhou, China



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