[B-Greek] Can any good thing come out of Linguistics? (was "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data ...")

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Mar 29 09:11:55 EDT 2010


On Mar 29, 2010, at 1:37 AM, drdwilkins at verizon.net wrote:

CWC: The question was whether ATRobertson had gone overboard in explaining GNT grammar in terms of the history of the Greek language (whether he overemphasized diachronic over synchronic perspective). 

> Mar 27, 2010 11:38:56 AM, cwconrad2 at mac.com wrote:
> 
> What you said: "A. T. Robertson went too  
> far IMO in trying to apply the opposite approach." When my first
> Greek teacher, J.B. McMinn of blessed memory, brought my 
> attention as a freshman to ATR, I was fascinated, all the more when
> we went from GNT in first year to Homer in second year. I recall
> how illuminating it was to learn that the pronominal usage of the
> article in the GNT had been regular in residual usage in Greek
> since the Homeric poems where it was a standard third-person
> pronoun.
> 
> DW: I'm on the road and unable to consult my ATR, and in any case this thread isn't about evaluating ATR. If you really want me to defend my comment, which was a general one, I will. In this case, I don't recall that ATR said any more about the pronominal article other than to observe that it was very old. I think that simply calling it a residual use is not enough to explain its use in the NT and other late post-Homeric Greek. So if we need a new thread on evaluating ATR, I'm willing, but I won't start it.

CWC: No, I’m not interested either in pursuing that matter; our disagreement here is probably more over details than substance. We agree (I think) that NT Koine needs to be understood in terms of a language in flux, shaped both by survivals of earlier stages of the language’s history and by changes currently in progress in the NT era, so that older and newer forms and usages are to be found in texts of the GNT and other Hellenistic literature of the era.


> 
>>> 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.
>>> 
>> When you talk I always listen, Carl, but it would help me if you  
>> provided one example. Since I know your passion for analyzing the  
>> middle voice, that would be a good one, but any would do. What  
>> specific linguistic input did you personally find eminently rewarding  
>> and helpful?
> 
> 
> CWC: Is it really not sufficient to name the books and articles and
> indicate where they can be accessed? Working through Margaret
> Sim's dissertation which is accessible as a PDF is too much trouble?
> 
> If you will check §§7-8 on my web-page devoted to Ancient Greek Voice
> (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/GrkVc.html), you will
> see Suzanne Kemmer's list of the kinds of actions that are commonly
> indicated by middle-voice or reflexive verb-forms in a great variety
> of languages, not merely Indo-European languages. That is fully
> sufficient I think, to establish a legitimate category of what should
> be called "Middle" verbs and to rid ancient Greek pedagogy from
> reliance upon the bogus doctrine of deponency that still holds sway
> in traditional NT Koine primers such as Machen. I might note that
> the revised edition of Reading Greek deals with that issue as it
> should be dealt with.
> 
> DW: First, a word about "linguistics-bashing." Maybe that's a fair description of what some of us are saying, maybe not. But the linguists have been bashing traditionalists for years, largely unchecked and uncriticized, and some might say that turnabout is fair play.

CWC: Perhaps “linguistics-bashing” better describes what I myself have said (ad nauseam, of course) about the Tower of Babel of Academic Linguists. I do think -- and I said this earlier in this thread -- that the dust storm over whether the Greek tenses do or do not “encode” time, at least in the indicative mood, has soured a lot of the discussion of the significance of academic linguistics as a discipline and whether it really has anything to contribute to those who are beginning or continuing their study of Greek. The real question is: would we who seek to understand ancient Greek do best to ignore all that the academic linguists would tell us about how the language works?

> Now as for the sources, I regret that I do not have access to all the sources you do, nor do I have the time to read them all, because I have to deal with more pressing matters.

CWC: I’m no better off than you in that respect; I’m not near a good academic library and I’ve had to pay through the nose for some books that I felt I really needed to read but that weren’t accessible on the internet. But I haven’t felt that what I’ve spent has been wasted money, for the most part. Printed books are getting more and more to be a luxury that few academics can really afford.

> Since I respect your opinion, I was hoping that you would point out to me a good example (or more) of what has led you to your judgment. You mention Sim's dissertation, which I promptly downloaded and began reading. So far I am very disappointed. In most cases, Sim acknowledges the obvious telic force of hINA, followed by "But here's what I think" and then she proceeds to argue that inferences from the context give the word a different meaning, overriding its telic force. We all know that the real problem with hINA is its use where it seems to be interchangeable with hOTI. My reading of this situation is that the telic force continues and the purpose clause does double duty as statement. E.G. Matt. 4:3 (EIPE hINA). We can explore this in detail if you like. You might feel that there is no ground for maintaining the telic force in such constructions, but that would probably boil down to an agree-to-disagree stalemate between us. As far as I am concerned, stripping hINA of its telic force is throwing the baby out with the baby water. I can't imagine that the ordinary Greek scholar who had read a huge corpus of ancient Greek and seen hINA repeatedly used to introduce purpose clauses would decide that it has nothing to do with purpose, or that the sense of purpose is superficial.

CWC:I’m sorry you’ve felt that way. I honestly found it unusual as the work of an academic linguist, both readily intelligible -- making little use of terminology that wasn’t clearly explained at the outset -- and illuminating. Of course the telic hINA is present int he GNT beyond dispute -- but the non-telic usages of hINA extend so far beyond their usage in earlier stages of the language that one feels (i.e. I feel) a need for an effort to understand the expansion of the substantive hINA-clause into semantic ranges that are more extensive and see how these varied usages might be understood in a more comprehensive framework. I think that Sim has contributed to that understanding, and I’m sorry you haven’t thought so.  I would still recommend her work to others.

> I also went over Kemmer's list and was similarly disappointed. I always told my students that the middle voice in some way focuses attention on the subject. If you'll forgive me for saying so, Kemmer seems to document the substance of this statement. Indeed, I imagine that a fourth-year Greek student might come to the same conclusion after looking up middle-voice verb meanings a few hundred times. I don't doubt that there are languages, including non-Indo-European, that have a similar concept and construction, but knowing that adds very little to our understanding of the concept. What if we could say that all languages had it? If we had the same construction in English, perhaps we would have a feeling of normalcy when we used it (along the lines of relevance and context), but that still would not give us a definitive answer to "why?". At this point I would still have to say that the middle focuses on the subject in a large variety of ways. We could also talk about the active voice in stative or intransitive verbs. Sure, all these things occur in other languages, but why? You've mentioned the niphal and hithpael in Hebrew as possibly being analogous to the middle for some verbs. My own experience shows some relatively overlapping instances, but not much really analogous to Greek. Notably, the Greek middle is infrequently reflexive, while the Hebrew hithpael is rarely otherwise. We can all probably think of possible contextual and relevance-based reasons for why a mysterious construction exists and is used, but we need factual (indisputable) reasons, or at least I do.

What Kemmer shows is a great deal more than that "he middle voice in some way focuses attention on the subject." She shows -- and Rutger Allan has expansively demonstrataed further in Homeric and Classical authors -- that a number of distinct categories of subject-focused verbs appear regularly in middle or reflexive inflected forms in languages all over the world. And she shows that in languages that do not have a distinct middle but use reflexive verb-forms, there is still a distinction between direct reflexives and subject-affected verbs. Traditional Greek pedagogy still teaches that these verbs are "deponents" and claims that they are inexplicable middle-passive forms with "active" meaning (confounding at the same time -- by calling their meaning "active" -- transitivity and intransitive activity. The doctrine of "deponency" has muddled and befuddled the understanding of voice in ancient Greek and impresssed upon new students of the language that there's something irregular and inexplicable about verbs like ERCOMAI and DUNAMAI and POREUOMAI: any self-respecting Greek verb should have an active form; perhaps we should call them "deponents" and attribute them to some intellectual misbehavior in otherwise intelligent and grammatical law-abiding Greek-speakers/writers. The facts about the way these verbs behave have not changed from what the older grammars told us, but they've been cast in a new and more intelligible light: they are "middle verbs" and we can understand them instead of shaking our fingers at them and calling them "naughty children."

> DW: Perhaps you and I are just impressed by different things. I was a participant in some of the past aspect wars on b-greek, and to me the arguments of the linguists seemed speculative, simplistic, and sometimes old, in the sense that they were echoing what the well-read scholars had already said, without crediting them. Stuff like the difference between photographing a parade and filming it.  But I am honestly open to real improvements that may have been, or may yet be introduced by the linguists. Steve Runge has graciously offered to share some of his work with me and I thoroughly applaud his attitude toward the issue. I'm of course open to any other examples you would like to present, but hopefully Steve will enlighten me. Besides, you have more important things to do. One final note: I'm rushing this reply and it's late, so I hope I can get away with apologizing in advance for any misstatements or other statements not well said.


I think it is probably true that we are impressed by different things. I think I'm with you for the most part on the aspect wars. But your attitude reminds me of a high school geometry teacher who was one of the best I've ever had. He taught plane geometry with a textbook that was not much more than an English translation of Euclid. You know the old saw, "If Euclid was good enough for St. Paul, he's good enough for me." Horace Chenet's version of that was, "The good books are not new and the new books are not good."
I'm one who thinks that most of the new beginning Greek textbooks are not good and that they could clear up some of the most confusing features of Greek grammar by taking some cues from what the academic linguists are saying. For my money this is what makes Funk's BIGHG better than any Biblical Greek primer in use in American colleges and seminaries today. And I think that's because Funk studied linguistics at some point in-between translating Blass-Debrunner into the English BDF and composing his Biblical Greek primer. My fundamental concern in this discussion is for improving the way ancient Greek is taught. I think that linguistic studies have already had a positive impact on the teaching of Classical Attic; I only hope that it can have a positive bearing on the teaching of Biblical Greek (the odds don't seem very favorable).

I have the permission of a B-Greek "lurker," Ruth Mathys, to cite her off-list response to me regarding an earlier message in this thread. She makes clear, far better than I have been able to do, how linguistic studies can positively impact the teaching of Biblical Greek:

RM: "Thank you for that post, and for ‘admitting’ how much you have learned from the discipline of linguistics.  I personally learnt Latin then Greek in a fairly traditional structure, though from courses (the Cambridge Latin Course and Reading Greek) that were shaped by modern linguistics.  When I came to study big-L Linguistics, I realised that I already had a big head start.  What could I encounter in phonology that was more mystifying than trying to work out why ‘quick’ and ‘bios’ are cognate?  Identifying morphemes…yep, done that too.  But I’ve also found that exposure to the grammars of many other languages has helped me break away from the syndrome of treating English as the norm and Greek etc. as weird.  For me the most useful subdiscipline of linguistics is discourse analysis, which does provide a principled method for working out why DE differs from KAI, what genitive absolutes are for, where the emphasis falls in a sentence, etc.  I think discourse analysis really does help to deepen understanding of a text, rather than just provide an alternative framework for describing the language’s grammar.

"When I read your approach to voice, it absolutely clicked with me.  You have found that principled explanation for what is happening.  This was clarified even more for me when I tried to explain Greek voice to a class of people with English as their second, third, fourth…language.  (I don’t know if they understood better at the end of the class, but I did!)  When I researched the semantic categories of verb that typically appear only in the middle-passive, it immediately tied in with what I’d learnt from formal linguistics about the difference between agent, patient, experiencer, etc. semantic roles.  Greek isn’t doing anything weird with its middle-passive, it’s just making an overt distinction in the grammar between agent and experiencer.  It helps to know that plenty of languages do that."

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






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