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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Mar 27 06:52:19 EDT 2010


On Mar 27, 2010, at 2:34 AM, George F Somsel wrote:
> 1.  That Wallace is basically correct in his identification of many / most constructions has no relevance to his basic methodology since he can correctly identify a construction but for the wrong reason.
> 
> 2.  This is not simply his methodology with regard to the possessive Genotive.
> 
> 3.  What is in error is his methodology.  The relationship indicated by the genitive (or other case) is not dependent upon how one would TRANSLATE the construction since it may be that one is wrongly translating the construction.

What I have found disturbing about many of the comments in this thread is that they are unqualified or absolute in approval or disapproval of approaches to understanding and explaining the way ancient Greek works. My motto is still, "Ad meliorem linguae Graecae explicationem" -- we need a more suitable, usable way of understanding and talking about how ancient Greek works. For my part, I think we should be open-minded to the possibility of more satisfactory accounts of the patterns of usage by means of which ancient Greek communicates meaning. I don't think we can chuck out the older traditional grammars if we find that they can help us understand patterns of Greek usage. For my money, Smyth and BDF remain indispensable, and ATR remains eminently worth consulting because of the breadth of Robertson's learning, an extraordinarily judicious assessment of questions, and a diachronic perspective on NT Koine the range of which I do not find, as does Don Wilkins, excessive. I am not going to chuck out Wallace's GGBB but will consult it from time to time; I don't like the fact that he constructs exegetical categories by combining syntactic patterns with pragmatic factors  and seems essentially to offer a heuristic for conversion of NT Koine into idiomatic English -- but that is what he says at the outset he's going to do, and one using his work as a reference should be prepared to find the patterns of usage dealt with in that fashion; I don't like it, but I haven't chucked it and don't plan to.

Linguistics-bashing seems to have become a fashionable sport in this forum lately. I have played that game myself, sometimes too gleefully, I fear. But I have to say that I have found traditional grammatical references inadequate in my own studies of ancient Greek voice: ATR has some very perceptive comments on the inadequacies of traditional voice terminology and offers to a careful reader a nuanced account of much of what's going on in voice-form usage in the GNT; I have found in Smyth just about all the elements needed for constructing a new framework for understanding ancient Greek voice -- but the terminology is problematic and often misleading and the pieces are scattered all over the contents of the grammar. On the other hand, I've come to understand more than I can adequately acknowledge about default ("active") and reflexive-type dichotomies in many languages and gleaned key elements of an understanding of the middle voice in Greek from Suzanne Kemmer;. A relatively short paper by Egbert Bakker helped me to understand how transitivity, aspect, and Aktionsart bear upon voice-forms in Classical Attic. More recently a major dissertation by Sidney Allan has set forth a linguistic accounting for the nature and development of middle and passive forms in Homeric and Classical Greek. I have found these works hard reading because of the terminology I've had to become accusstomed to, but I have found the effort eminently rewarding and helpful, even if they have left some questions unanswered. And I have learned from what I thought was a splendid dissertation by Margaret Sim on ἵνα hINA and ὅτι hOTI in NT Koine, and I have only recently said that I thought Steve Runge's Discourse Grammar of the GNT was a breakthrough achievement in making the fruits of a major item of linguistic studies accessible to those who have no background in linguistics.

I'm sorry that the insights of linguists haven't had more impact upon the preparation of primers in Biblical Greek. There is, of course, powerful linguistic underpinning to the oral methods of Randall Buth and Christophe Rico. I personally continue to believe that the best primer in Biblical Greek in English is still the 1977 work of Robert Funk, _Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek_ (http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/funk-grammar/pre-alpha/); that was probably much too-heavily grounded in linguistic principles to make a dent in Biblical Greek academic pedagogy.  Ward  Powers, who was once an active member of this list, based his own primer  on his linguistic studies, _Learn to Read New Testament Greek_ (http://www.amazon.com/Learn-read-Greek-Testament-cross-referenced/dp/0802835783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269686771&sr=8-1 = http://tinyurl.com/ybstuvp), but I think it was more successful in Australia than in the U.S. Linguistic theory has been a major factor in two primers for Classical Attic, Athenaze and Reading Greek. NT Koine Greek pedagogy, however, seems pretty much stuck in a rut, as witness the continued republication of the old fossil textbook of Machen.

I honestly believe that our best understanding of the "how's"and "whys"  of ancient Greek usage is tentative and incomplete. We are reluctant to try to learn about ancient Greek from the linguists but I think we fail to appreciate how tenuous and incomplete, sometimes very fuzzy the accounts we are offered by traditional grammarians of such things as "objects of passive verbs" or "passive imperatives" or "participial imperatives." We cling to the traditional grammatical lore of the centuries because it's the only lens through which we think we can contemplate the lofty complexities of ancient Greek; I think we just hate to conttemplate that our vision might possibly be improved by better lenses.

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






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