"Bashing" D&M

From: Dale M. Wheeler (dalemw@teleport.com)
Date: Mon Dec 13 1999 - 21:01:07 EST


<x-flowed>I've been accused of "bashing" D&M...golly, I thought that I had bent over
backwards NOT to go into great detail as to the multitudes of errors in the
book (which are well known to every Greek Prof I know; which is why I don't
know any Greek Profs who use it as their textbook for Greek Syntax, though
probably all of the Profs I know had it as a textbook when they were
students...I certainly did), so as not to bash them (NB Gary Dykes'
comments)...ah well, no good deed goes unpunished...

But a couple of points came up that I think do need to be addressed, so
that misperceptions are not left dangling in the air.

Clay Bartholomew wrote:

>I find it highly ironic that we bash Dana & Mantey for being out of
>date since it is an old work and then turn around and recommend Wallace
>which is in linguistic terms pre-Saussure. Dana & Mantey is out of
>date. So is Isaac Newton. So what. Wallace was published in the '90s and
>in a lot of ways it (the book) is using a language model which is at
>least as old or older than Dana & Mantey.
>

Boy, I sure pushed your hot-button... (-:

The problem as I see it, is if Newton was wrong, then he was wrong and
there's nothing inappropriate about pointing it out. But of course that's
not the real issue you are discussing here. I've always tried to be
careful to point out that Greek "grammars" are NOT (entirely) written from
the standpoint of how original language speakers understood or used their
language, they are clearly written from the perspective of the target
language, thus the 30+ uses of the genitive. My personal sense is that
Greek grammars and syntax books are getting better and better in terms of
trying to both understand Greek as Greek and Greek as not-English (ie., how
the two languages communicate the same thing but in different ways). This
is why understanding how Greek uses/doesn't use the article is important;
namely because its quite different than English in many places. And unless
English speakers know where those places are they will inevitably think in
English, not Greek terms.

Thus, regardless of what linguistic theory you adhere to, when finally
trying to describe a specific language, you MUST look at the language and
see what kinds of patterns and forms the speakers of that language chose to
express their ideas. In this sense I'd say that you SHOULD care about the
Granville Sharp construction, and the aspectual choices of verbs tenses,
and all the other patternistic things that speakers do when they
communicate in their native tongue. Otherwise your just describing what
you feel about communication based on your own native language sense. So
whether you approach a language from the standpoint of "Whole Language" or
"Deep Structure" or whatever, you still must ultimately look at how this
particular language communicates this particular idea...and that pretty
much is what syntax books do; without getting into all of the philosophical
and linguistic background data as to why...they are pragmatic in that sense.

On the sentence level I do share your frustration, since very little real
research has been done on the clause and sentence level
construction. We've done alot on the individual elements, down to the
morphemes, but the broader strokes of how speakers use their language is
still lacking. This is one of the reasons that I use the textbook that I
use; it forces students to read stories right from the beginning, which
makes them at least develop intuitively a contextual sense of understanding
language on the clause, sentence, paragraph, and story level...something
that can NEVER happen by translating isolated nonsense phrase back and
forth from Greek to English. As I've said before, those types of
exercises, I suspect, are one of the main reasons that generations of Greek
students have come to think of Greek as a wooden, word for word, almost
mathematically formulaic language, rather than a living entity like their
native English.

Finally, until you or someone else rises to the challenge and writes a
linguistically based Greek grammar or syntax, we are stuck with what we've
got...and for my money, Wallace is still heads and shoulders above everyone
else in terms of accuracy, being up-to-date with current grammatical
discussions, breadth of examples, wrestling with difficult passages,
etc. Its not perfect (I've sent him pages and pages of stuff that I
disagree with) and its a bit much for students to swallow (if their prof
demands they digest the whole thing in one semester), but I think its the
best thing available right now...my opinion, of course.

Justin T. Alfred wrote:

>The point has been made by some (e.g., Dale Wheeler) that D&M have not
>clearly presented, or even incorrectly presented certain aspects of Greek
>syntax (e.g., Granville Sharp, aorist, etc.). However, on that point, can
>one say that the Granville Sharp is never applicable? Or would it be better
>to say that the application of that rule has some merit, but there are other
>instances where it needs to be modified? I believe the latter is the more
>accurate and correct position to be taken.

The problem is NOT with the Granville Sharp rule, which is certainly
applicable when correctly identified, but the fact that D&M leave the
impression that it applies to any sort of nouns by not indicating that it
only applies to Singular, Non-Proper, and Personal Nouns. Historically I
suppose D&M can be forgiven their lack of precision on this issue, since
virtually no other grammar until Wallace seems to have actually read G-S's
treatise carefully and realized that he was imposing these restrictions
himself, since he didn't explicitly state them in his "definition" statement.

>With reference to the aorist, while it is true that a great many pastors
have
>in many instances not fully understood the use of the aorist, it is just
>plain wrong, in my humble opinion, to blame D&M for that. Indeed, if one
>would carefully read D&M with regards to the aorist, one would find that
they
>clearly present the aorist's aspect as signifying "nothing as to
>completeness, but simply presents the action as attained" (p.193).

I suppose then that we should blame their Greek teachers... (-:
The problem is not the overall discussion in D&M, but their concluding
statement, which most evidently latched on to (p 194) "It presents the
action or even as a 'point,' and hence is called 'punctiliar.'" Now you
and I may understand what that means, but history has shown that a lot of
students (and perhaps their teachers) certainly didn't, and they turned it
into "once for all, point action."

XAIREIN...

***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
***********************************************************************

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