[B-Greek] Fwd: In defense of "Orthography"
Leonard Isaksson
leonardo1orchardcity at mac.com
Fri Jan 8 08:59:43 EST 2010
You are not deflating my argument, kind Sarah. I do like to look at
pics of these manuscripts, whether uncial or cursive. There are the
abbreviations and symbols that you have to learn about.
> Here is a letter that I had meant to send to b greek, and now send off.
> This was part of my point.
>
> If you look at photographs of early papyri, such as the Beatty and
> Bodmer papyri, or the uncial texts, you see no breathings, no
> accents, and capital letters. And the letters of the words are all
> put together in a continuing stream. It is not so easy to read. Are
> you able to read these manuscripts well, with the words all pushed
> together, and the various abbreviations and symbols? That is how they
> are in the bush of real life as a text.
>
> Ι like to take a picture of a real manuscript and see what I can make
> of it, but I would not learn Greek well by not having the words
> separated, and some of those marks help us to know whether you have a
> pronoun or what, or a number or a preposition. Those things one would
> get from context, I think, but that necessitates learning the language
> well enough.
>
> To learn the language, some things are helpful, such as learning what
> the whole words look like. I think we will not get away from this.
> Personally, I love the little primer that Kinchin Smith and Melluish
> wrote, and I like the Nunn/Wenham/ primer, too. Like Smith and
> Melluish said "If Aristotle and Plato did not need the accents, why
> do we?" Those two primers ("Teach yourself.." and "Elements of NT
> Grk") don't have accents.
>
> (I know that Sarah and Mark Lightman and Carl are talking about
> breathings not accents(except Carl brought up the grave accent).
>
> But there is some good in being able to tell articles from relative
> pronouns or any other words or numbers, especially for the learning
> student.
>
> As I gather it, the marks were put in there to help readers also speak
> the text, and have such knowledge not get lost. Even if we don't know
> how the Greeks in the various city states spoke, or how a Galilean
> would speak. Ιt is handy for me to have the little black marks to
> inform me a little more, until I grow up enough to be able to read
> those photographs.
>
> Leonard Isaksson
>
>
>
> On Jan 7, 2010, at 6:05 PM, jonathon wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 13:11, Leonard Isaksson wrote:
>>
>>> These marks are handy for distinguishing between various words, it
>>> helps me. We rely upon the work of those in antiquity who have
>>> handed down to us the classical and Biblical texts(and the papyri in
>>> Egypt too:) )
>>
>> But are you reading photographs of those manuscripts, the actual
>> manuscripts, or something that has been derived from those
>> manuscripts?
>>
>> From my personal perspective, if it isn't in the original manuscripts,
>> then it should not in modern renderings of those manuscripts.
>>
>> jonathon
>> ---
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