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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Mar 31 14:48:30 EDT 2010


On Mar 31, 2010, at 12:36 AM, drdwilkins at verizon.net wrote:
> I'm late in responding in large part because I spent yesterday in Yosemite. While we were admiring one of the magnificent waterfalls, it was also edifying to hear someone say, "Who says there's no God?!" Anyway, Carl, if you don't mind, Im going to delete some of our earlier discussion from the original long account below, and I'm also going to try to wind down my comments.

Fine, I'll delete even more of the previous stuff that's no longer part of the conversation.
> 
> Mar 29, 2010 08:12:07 AM, cwconrad2 at mac.com wrote:
> 
> ===========================================
> 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?
> 
> DW: This is a false duo of options Carl; it's not either bow down to the linguists or ignore everything they'd like to tell us. We can hear them out with the same critical ear that we would use for anyone not extensively read in Greek itself. If what they claim resonates with our own experience and offers something useful of which we have not previously been aware, then we have something to gain. They in turn would do well to listen to what we have learned. These are basically the ground rules that Steve Runge and I are going to follow as we compare notes, and I don't see what if anything is wrong with them (i.e. the rules).

Well, I'm glad to learn this. It sounds like a much more open mind than I discerned hitherto.

>> DW: 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.
> 
> DW: I haven't finished the dissertation and might have more positive things to say when I do in the next couple of days. But in trying to understand you, I would ask again what it is that you found especially enlightening. The main substance of her work seems to be the background of relevance and context, which she attempts to create for her selected passages much the same as an ordinary commentator would. Is this what appealed to you, or something else? Quite possibly I just have not read far enough yet.

Well, why don't you read deeper in and stop asking me to give away the surprise ending? 

>> 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.
> [breaking in]
> DW: I acknowledged that possibility already. That alone is not enough. We can say that the same phenomenon occurs in languages x, y, z etc. but unless those languages provide a rationale for the phenomenon that we have not yet discovered in Greek, little or nothing is gained. It's like having a sore shoulder for no apparent reason and running into 20 other people with the same condition. If one of them has been to a doctor and had it successfully diagnosed, then it might or might not be the same explanation for all the others. We would be foolish to assume that it was actually true for all the others. So I'm not nearly as interested in how widespread the "middle" voice is, as in the basis for it in Greek. Kemmer's list is a fairly convenient collection of examples, as far as it goes, but anyone could derive a similar or more comprehensive list by working through a lexicon.

In point of fact, a good deal more is required than working through a lexicon for meaningful data. There's much more to Kemmer's analysis than the list. What she demonstrates, and what Rutger Allan demonstrates much more thoroughly in more precise detail regarding Homeric and Classical Attic Greek, is that middle-voice morphology or an equivalent type of specialized reflexive morphology is used in a great many languages, not merely Indo-European languges, to distinguish verbs designating the same varieties of action or process as the middle verbs in Greek.

> 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.
> 
> DW: And this would probably have much to do with Aktionsart, i.e. the effect of the meaning upon the grammar (IMO).

It has something to do with Aktionsart, but that, of course, goes far beyond what is distinctive to the middle voice.

> 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: If that were what old dinosaurs like myself had been teaching our students, then we would deserve a dinosaur's death. And if terminology is the only problem, then we should be proud of ourselves for correcting it. I'm sure you never told your students that so-called deponents had "laid aside" their active forms. While we're on terminology, I don't think "middle" does the job either. Does that imply they're between active and passive? I don't know what that would mean at face value, especially if a given "middle" verb did not even have an active voice as many do not. "Active" has its problems too. I think it means acting upon an object, which requires transitivity, and in that case stative verbs can't be active. But I assume that we all work through these issues with our students, reducing the problems mainly to terminology as opposed to concepts. Perhaps our friends in linguistics can suggest better names for these categories, but the suggestions need to be simple and self-evident. Like a great scientific theory, a good name should be elegant, not just correct. Need an example of the inelegant? How about "grammaticalize"? I understand it, but it's about as pleasant to the palate as lukewarm coffee. I know you've used it and I mean no disrespect, but I hope one could do better.

As I've noted elsewhere in this forum today, I do indeed believe that "grammaticalize" is a barbarism.
I would be curious to know how you did teach voice to beginning Greek students. 
The terminology of voice is indeed quite unsatisfactory. What you just said about "active' is what I've been saying myself for several years: we use it inconsistently, as when BDAG referss to a verb as "passive with active meaning." The Greek ENERGHTIKH is more accurate, but if it's understood to mean English "active," it won't do. There's quite a difference beween a transitive and an intransitive verb in the "active" voice with W/EIS/EI morphology. "Agentive" is a useful adjective and Rijksbaron has made good use of it in his shorter work on Greek Syntax. "Middle" is by no means a good word, and "Reflexive" is misleading even if more accurate. What is particularly difficult is formulating terms that accurately indicate functional category but do not burn the bridges to older grammars. I think much of our difficulty with the linguists is that they've invented new terminology and then invented new dialectal forms of the terminology and many of us feel like we are totally outside the loop.

> ...(CWC)
> 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).
> 
> DW: Did your geometry teacher teach from a hopelessly outdated text without correcting it? I hope I've made it plain that I never did.

Why would anyone ever teach from a hopelessly outdated text at all? Who do you know who does that? I did use Machen one year, complaining and making adjustments again and again and warning students, but I could never use it again. To me Machen is the epitome of the hopelessly outdated text. You evidently don't think so, because you've said you like it.

> Otherwise, if that was a compliment, thanks. We'd all like to have the perfect Greek primer, and some certainly come closer than others. I suppose the best one is the one you have the least need to correct. For you, that would be your own. If I haven't already, I would strongly encourage you to write one!

I long aspired to it, but ultiamately I was very pleased with Reading Greek and used it for my last ten years of teaching beginning Greek, supplmenting it with additional materials of my own. If I were to teach Biblical Greek, I would work from our online Funk, BIGHG, adding a few notes of my own.

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






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