It is a well known fact that in general, contemporary linguistic theory has made embarrassingly little headway into the world of New Testament studies. Scholars in the British Isles have for the most part done a better job than those in the United States in such integration of linguistics and Koine Greek, but their work is far from enough. In general the study of Greek from a contemporary linguistic perspective is limited to advanced doctoral studies, inaccessible (both physically and intellectually) to the vast majority of Greek students. A large amount of work is being down connecting Hellenistic Greek to contemporary linguistics (cf. opentext.org). Much has been published in the past decade.

But as a whole the majority of linguistic study has not trickled down to be at all helpful for first and second year Greek students. The two main exceptions that I can think of are the intermediate grammar by Young and Porter:

Intermediate New Testament Greek

Idioms of the Greek New Testament (Biblical Languages: Greek)

<UPDATE> there are also David Alan Black’s work:

Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek,: A Survey of Basic Concepts and Applications (This isn’t a grammar and its not inductive)

Learn to Read New Testament Greek

It’s Still Greek to Me: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Intermediate Greek

I don’t know how inductive or deductive Black’s books are…</UPDATE>

I propose that even a basic understanding of grammatical analysis would go long way in teaching even first year students Koine Greek. Thus instead of handing the student a sheet of paradigms for noun endings, teacher could teach the students how to make a position class charts in order to break up Greek words morphologically. The strength of this would be that students, instead of learning paradigms through rote memorization, would learn their morphological paradigms inductively - and thus relatively more natural than typical class room instruction. In a sense, the student would “discover” the paradigms on their own with the guidance of the professor.

By pulling four clauses from the text students could compare Greek forms on their own in order to determine the Greek morphemes:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος - John 1.1
in beginning was the.nom word.nom
In the beginning was the word.

ἡμεῖς δὲ τῇ προσευχῇ καὶ τῇ διακονίᾳ τοῦ λόγου προσκαρτερήσομεν - Acts 6.4
we.1stpl but prayer.dative and ministry.dative det.gen word.gen devote oneself.fut.1stpl
But we will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word

Καὶ τὰ νῦν παρατίθεμαι ὑμᾶς τῷ θεῷ καὶ τῷ λόγῳ τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ - Acts 20.32
and det.acc now entrust.1stsing you.acc det.dat God.dat and det.dat word.dat det.gen grace.gen pro.1stsing.gen
And now I entrust you to God and to the word of his grace

καὶ τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔχετε ἐν ὑμῖν - John 5.38
And the.acc word.acc his.gen not have.2ndpl in you.dative.2ndpl
And you do not have his word in you

Students would only have to focus on the word and forms at hand in bold for their analysis. From here the student would create paradigms of their own:

λόγος - ος Nominative (Subject)

λόγου - ου Genitive (descriptive/possessive [-ish])

λόγῳ - ῳ Dative (Secondary Object)

λόγον - ον Accusative (Primary Object)

Such an activity would help them gain and comprehend the information on their own instead of depending upon a simple paradigm sheet produced by someone else. Inductive learning gives opportunity for better retention of the information. I’ve learned more about Greek grammar through my personal studies than I ever did in my first year grammar class.

Guiding students through basic tree diagramming using Greek text would would be a beneficial method for teaching students basic syntax with regard to the distribution of words Earlier this week, I presented arguments for a structural representation for the Quantifier πᾶς (HERE). In explaining the function of various words there would be significantly more benefit for students if they were not only told what the attributive and predicative positions for adjectives were, but also shown the difference in tree diagrams and teach them how to create such diagrams of their own. This would give them an edge in the future in terms of developing their own personal understanding of the language.

Thus for the adjective instead of simply saying, the attributive position is ὁ ἀγαθὸς βασιλεύς, the teacher could show them the significance of the position structurally:adjective-attributive.jpg

To conclude, teacher can and should take advantage of contemporary linguistic theory in teaching languages. Greek is dead enough already, let’s not kill it any more by forcing unbearable deductive methods on to the student.

I know that much of what I’ve written might not even be understandable to those who have not studied grammatical analysis. But I hope that some out there who might come across this post might be convinced by my words. I want Greek student to develop an understanding of the language beyond being able to throw out paradigm at will or parse verbs. I want them to gain comprehension inductively and naturally through grammatical analysis and their own discovery of its structure.

For more discussion of learning Biblical languages, see HERE and HERE and the other links they refer to.