[B-Greek] You Are Smarter Than a Lexicon (?) The beat goes on ...

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 5 01:16:43 EDT 2010


Jonathan wrote:

<There are many good reasons 
for learning Greek. But efficient 
communication with others is not one 
of them. No one is saying 'Hey, this language is really great, much 
better than what we use today, 
let's get back to it!', because it isn't. 
It's a really clumsy 
language filled with accumulated grammatical junk 
and massive 
redundancy. >

Hi, Jonathan,

I like your style.

When I try to use Koine to communicate with real people,  I find that what you
wrote above is sort of true.  One has to change and simplify the language for
it to be more clear.  Most of of the conjunctions and particles can be discarded,
You have to say stuff like  "I like the letter PARA SOU"instead of just "SOU. " Your Ancient
Greek has to become more like Modern Greek or English to be an effective vehicle
of communication.  The dirty little secret of using Koine is that the more like "real
Greek" one tries to make it, the less useful it becomes as a "real language."



 Mark L



FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: Fortigurn <dixit-dominus at thechristadelphians.org>
To: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
Cc: B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Fri, June 4, 2010 10:54:57 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] You Are Smarter Than a Lexicon (?) The beat goes on ...




Carl,

>
The comments on that blog-entry that I've read suggest that the program 
is a sort of philosopher's stone that will turn lead, i.e. a desire to 
know what the Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible can tell us that 
English translations cannot, into gold, i.e. authoritative knowledge of 
what the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible mean.

My advice to those who do not wish to take the steps required to attain 
competence in Hebrew and/or Greek are to consult several translations 
rather than one and several commentaries rather than any one. I still do 
not believe that one can learn to USE Greek or Hebrew without learning them.
>

Yes, I'm certainly in agreement with you here.

>
The Chinese are not teaching Chinese using the old logographs any more.
>

No they aren't teaching it that way, but you still have to use them 
eventually. That's the idiotic part. They teach you with an alphabet, 
and then throw away the alphabet and get you to learn the characters. 
It's a complete waste of time. Here in Taiwan the adopted a phonetic 
alphabet (/zhuyin fuhao/ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo>), with 
which you can write absolutely anything in Chinese. It has only 35 
characters, and you can learn it in less than a week. Instead of 
switching from characters to the alphabet, they teach it to children as 
a phonetic system by which they can learn the characters more easily. 
Then the children use the characters, and the phonetic alphabet is 
abandoned. By the time they're 20, some locals can't even remember the 
phonetic alphabet. This is tragically redundant, and makes no sense at 
all. The phonetic system is being used to perpetuate a clumsy system 
which has no redeeming features. Why? The stock answer is 'tradition, 
we've always written this way'. This simply shows how little many people 
know about the history of their own language, because they haven't 
always written this way. Chinese has been through several dramatic 
shifts over thousands of years, with an overall tendency to 
simplification of the character system, and a removal of redundancy. But 
now they're stuck on a plateau again.

In China of course they switched to 'simplified characters 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters>'. Here in 
Taiwan such characters are disdained as 'ugly' and of course 
'non-traditional' (in Taiwan we still use the 'traditional 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters>' character 
set). I even have people telling me with confidence that it's not even 
possible to write Chinese with simplified characters, the meaning sort 
of 'leaks out' if you reduce or change the strokes. Again, this simply 
betrays ignorance of how the written language actually works. The 
relationship between meaning and character strokes is almost completely 
arbitrary, with only a small number of characters retaining continuity 
with their original ideogram. A character consisting of strokes 
originally meaning 'tree', 'moon', and 'house' doesn't necessarily mean 
anything related to any of those things, it could mean 'sausage'. The 
character meanings are arbitrary and non-intuitive. That's why it's 
actually so easy to replace them with something better.

>
What's ludicrous is the comparison of learning Greek to filling a well 
with a bucket with a hole in it.
>

That wasn't the comparison. The comparison was a preference for 
perpetuating deficiencies in a language, as opposed to reforming the 
language or using a more efficient language. There are many good reasons 
for learning Greek. But efficient communication with others is not one 
of them. No one is saying 'Hey, this language is really great, much 
better than what we use today, let's get back to it!', because it isn't. 
It's a really clumsy language filled with accumulated grammatical junk 
and massive redundancy. And I don't see even accomplished modern Greek 
scholars saying 'Hey, we really should start writing Greek in all caps 
again, with no spaces between words, and no diacritics, that was much 
better and of course it's more Old School and awesome'. It is recognized 
that the Greeks themselves knew the language could be improved on, and 
that they made improvements to it for that reason, like everyone does 
with their language.

>
But those who feel that they're beating their heads against the wall 
trying to learn Greek would be better to rely on translations and 
commentaries than to rely upon a predigested interpretation of what the 
Greek and Hebrew texts mean.
>

Yes, absolutely. That is what I do. For me learning Greek again would be 
a waste of time which I need to spend learning Chinese. Greek is 
unfortunately a luxury from my personal point of view. I envy my friend 
Dr Stephen Snobelen, who casually translated the book of Revelation into 
Greek (complete with text critical notes), during his undergraduate 
studies, and my friend Steven Cox, who reads and writes Greek at least 
as fluently as he speaks Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, 
Korean, and Japanese. Incredibly, I'm finding Chinese a lot easier than 
Greek, not because of the characters (which are a nightmare), but 
because the grammar is sensible, intuitive, economical, and efficient. I 
am unfortunately a very bad rote learner (my brain just doesn't work 
that way), so I need all the help I can get from a language. Chinese 
grammar looks like someone actually sat down and thought about it from 
the point of view of communicating with other people. Greek grammar 
looks like someone who wanted to make life difficult. On the other hand, 
whoever thought of logographs was clearly a complete misanthrope.

Jonathan Burke.
---
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