[B-Greek] Koine Greek Kashruth?
cwconrad2
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Apr 20 07:42:22 EDT 2011
As a certified card-carrying old fuddy-duddy, a.k.a. grumpy old man (that too), I see no
reason to keep my opinion all to myself while others are flaunting theirs (what else is
new about B-Greek discussions?). Now it's the battle for the "kosher" Koine keyboard
(after using GreeKeys for 20 years, I don't think I'll be changing over to Greek
Polytonic); with almost clockwork regularity we have a free-for-all over the "kosher"
Koine pronunciation method. And then there's the occasionally-recurring urgent
admonition to delimit the vocabulary with which one speaks or writes ancient Greek
to range of usage attested in the vernacular of the first and second centuries CE.
There was a certain grammarian Phrynicus who falls into that era (ἤκμασεν ὁ ἀνὴρ
ἐν τοῖς χρόνοις Μάρκου βασιλέως Ῥωμαίων καὶ τοῦ παιδὸς αὐτοῦ Κομμόδου
HKMASEN hO ANHR EN TOIS CRONOIS MARKOU BASILEWS hRWMAIWN KAI
TOU PAIDOS AUTOU KOMMODOU) who urged those who wanted to write "good
Greek" to observe the usages of the Classical Attic dialect rather than the "degraded"
Greek spoken on the streets and commonly written in his own era (text accessible at
Open Library: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6751108M/The_new_Phrynichus). When
I write Greek, I don't make any effort to steer clear of usage that isn't found in
the GNT or in Epictetus. I hear the urgent voices of my betters telling me, "You know,
you really ought to be writing Kosher Koine, not some weird idiosyncratic Kunstsprache
of your own," but I am too ornery to want to conform. I have reshaped my pronunciation
to the proper PROFORA, but I just can't go that step of delimiting my vocabulary and
writing style to a synchronic range that seems to me arbitrarily proposed on the ground
that we want to converse and correspond only with others who pretend that they are
living in the first and second centuries CE. 'Nuff said.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)
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