[B-Greek] Intricacies of Biblical Greek
Seumas Macdonald
jeltzz1 at yahoo.com.au
Sat Jun 5 02:41:48 EDT 2010
In response to Ken's post,
I certainly do not want to suggest that students should remain in a studied ignorance about grammatical possibilities. Being able to say "this is a dative" isn't a lot of use, in and of itself. Learning the range of senses that a dative may carry gets a student a lot further. What I am suggesting, though, it that (a) many of the categories that are given for various cases, moods, tenses, etc., are so defined that the category is either obvious and wasn't in need of a technical terminology anyway, or else the nuance is so refined that one wonders whether it deserves to be a category at all, (b) a taxonomical knowledge of grammatical categories is roughly parallel to a rote memory of paradigms: a useful, hard-won tool that is less and less useful when one does extensive reading.
When I read Greek, and I am certainly not fluent, I do not normally stop and puzzle over the semantic category of a dative. I take it in the sense that best makes sense in the context, a skill which I have largely acquired by reading datives in context. I *do* agree with Ken, that a student who does not have any idea of an instrumental sense of the difference between subjective and objective genitives is going to really struggle with understanding them, but my point of disagreement is over whether taxonomic analysis of those categories and diagnostic memorisation is the best way to learn to read, recognise and comprehend those nuances.
I am also trying to help us avoid situations where (and I've heard things like this said) someone asks, Did Paul choose to use a subjective or an objective genitive? By all means, there is quite a difference in meaning, but we would be fools to think that Paul could even make such a choice: the choice between a genitive and a genitive is not a choice, it's just the structural case that is open to him to use to express his meaning (whichever it might be).
Regards,
Seumas Macdonald
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