OK, I bought it and am reading it now.S Walch wrote: ↑July 28th, 2023, 6:30 pm Have finished reading this book now. It truly is a great book, very highly informative about the respective Discourse Markers (DM) as used in the Papyri and LXX. Lots of new terminology to get to grips with if you're not used to this sort of book, but nothing overwhelming in my opinion.
This is clear from the start. On page 4, he says this - in the following paragraph, DMs means "Discourse Markers", which are a good indicator of knowing and using the fine points of a language:S Walch wrote: ↑July 28th, 2023, 6:30 pmThough Fresch doesn't discuss it, his discussion on DMs sort of argues against the popular interlinear paradigm as it pertains to how the LXX books were translated - for them to have used the DMs the way they did, the translators were far more involved in understanding the text and getting it across in good Greek idiom than an interlinear-style translation would have done.
He is saying they aren't just woodenly translating the Hebrew, they are thinking about what it means and how best to convey it in Greek, including the bits of the language that most of us are not consciously aware of, and getting it right.Concerning my second purpose, DMs are often used in the LXX even when not lexically motivated by a translator’s Vorlage. Even when the DM can be argued as representing a feature of the underlying Hebrew, it is often the case that it is but one of multiple viable options. This is significant. Such uses evince contextually motivated decisions on the part of the translators and provide insight into how they themselves conceived of the flow and structure of the discourse. In other words, in the LXX, DMs are often motivated by reasons other than lexemic representation and thus witness to the translators’ own conception of the discourse and their desire to explicitly represent that conception. Because of this, I find DMs to be crucial in the study of translation technique.
Fresch, Christopher J. . Discourse Markers in Early Koine Greek: Cognitive-Functional Analysis and LXX Translation Technique (p. 4). SBL Press. Kindle Edition.
He uses this definition of Discourse Marker:
Instead, as Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen explains, the category of DM comprises any linguistic item that is used to provide “instructions to the hearer on how to integrate their host utterance into a developing mental model of the discourse in such a way as to make that utterance appear optimally coherent.” Discourse markers can include everything from particles and conjunctions to idiomatic phrases and even prosodic contours.
...
They may be thought of as linguistic road signs—they aid the reader in navigating the discourse, informing them of the structure of the text, alerting them to what is coming, and providing them with instructions on how to proceed.
Fresch, Christopher J. . Discourse Markers in Early Koine Greek: Cognitive-Functional Analysis and LXX Translation Technique (p. 4). SBL Press. Kindle Edition.