[B-Greek] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: An Argument for a Large Corpus Size (i.e., Reading WIdely)

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Mar 25 19:41:20 EDT 2010


On Mar 25, 2010, at 5:33 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
> 
> On Mar 25, 2010, at 2:27 PM, Dr. Don Wilkins wrote:
> 
>> Very interesting. I wonder what (if anything) this says for the  
>> conflicts between the linguistics approach to Greek and the old  
>> school. Some might say that this supports the former, but it could be  
>> argued that it actually supports the latter, i.e. those students of  
>> Greek who base their conclusions on a wider personal familiarity with  
>> the extant literature.
> 
> Show me one contemporary NT linguists who does not advocate using a Corpus beyond NT and LXX.

An interesting thread. This particular question is one that I find particularly interesting and 
would very much like to know more about: I've read that Matthew O'Donnell, who wrote
the book on corpus linguistics in the NT (which I haven't read) has considered a somewhat
broader range of Greek texts than just the Judean and early Christian literature, but I wonder
exactly how wide-ranging he would really go. Has anyone read his book?

One tendency among the academic linguists of NT Koine Greek that I have found disturbing is
the insistence upon a synchronic perspective on the language. I think that's myopic. The work
of Chrys Caragounis certainly runs counter to that attitude, but my impression is that the academic
linguists don't regard Caragounis as highly for precisely that reason and they may not even be
willing to acknowledge him as a linguist. I personally think there's much to be learned from
Caragounis' work.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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