[B-Greek] Intricacies of Biblical Greek
Kenneth Litwak
javajedi2 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 5 02:07:40 EDT 2010
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:18:07 -0400
> From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
> Subject: [B-Greek] Reflections on the intricacies of Greek
> grammar
> To: B-Greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <ECF19296-2572-4A61-8F58-CF9DE6336A96 at mac.com>
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> Yes, that's the title of another blog-entry worthy of note,
> this one by Seumas Macdonald:
>
> http://jeltzz.blogspot.com/2010/06/reflections-on-intricacies-of-greek.html
>
> This one doesn't really so much offer ready solutions to
> the problems of second-year
> Greek study as it does raise the seriousness of the
> problem. Well, yes, there really is a
> uggestion, one that I have myself voiced and approve: "Far
> better, I contend, that we
> spend 2nd year Greek studies trying to get students deeply
> into reading Greek qua
> Greek, and far less on memorising 183 uses of the dative."
>
>
While I understand the idea, I'm afraid that I would have to disagree with this. By all means, students should read Greek, as that is the point of studying the language. At the same time, reading a text and not being able to make sense of it beyond being able to say, "This is a nominative, this is a 1 Aorist active subjunctive, and this is a dative" does not get one very far in many cases. I would want students to read Greek and read/study grammatical options for the dative at the same time.
Suppose, for example, that the student comes upon PNEUMATI PERIPATEITE in Gal 5:16, and does not know that the dative can have an instrumental sense (dative of means), reading the Greek is not going to be necessarily educational but might be only perplexing as the student attempts to understand what "walking to/for spirit/the Spirit" might mean, using the basic idea given of the dative in a first-year textbook (at least mine--Machen). Or, how is a student who only reads Greek to enter into the exegetical nuances of the debate over PISTEWS IHSOU (Rom 3:26) without having the grammatical options explained? Who would figure out on his/her own that there even is a subjective genitive (though I'm confident that's not what Rom 3;26 contains, but that's another story), that is to say, read this phrase in that way, regardless of whether it has a grammatical name or not?
I find that knowing recognized options is quite helpful, as long as I can map what I read to the options I know about. When I cannot do that, reading the text alone is not that enlightening. This is, after all, a foreign language and while the blog is correct that a native speaker of Greek (or any other language) does not analyze the grammar technically before making a statement as a rule (though i do wrestle at times with how to say something naturally without splitting the infinitive), that does not mean that there are no grammatical constructions present and it does not mean that I, as a non-native speaker/reader am going to figure out what the speaker/writer was trying to convey.
Ken Litwak
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