ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

The pathetically small llama knitted nervously under the _______________________.

My Google Alerts e-mail for “New Testament Greek” came today and I found these couple Gems:

Will you read the original DEAD SEA SCROLLS when they come to the Internet?

Two of the comments are:

The Dead Sea Scrolls verify that the “New Testament” was originally written in Hebrew, not Greek, as the early “church” has claimed and lied about for centuries.

In fact, that was why the scrolls were originally hidden. The Jews didn’t want the Romans or Greeks to get their scriptures, so many were hidden for that reason.

It’s interesting and exciting to learn about!

And:

NT Greek fans think the New Testament “must” have been written in Greek because Paul’s letters were circulated to groups of believers in some Greek cities like Corinth. But remember that those letters went to Jewish believers first. They had to be circulated to EVERY group of Jewish believers. That could only happen if Hebrew or Aramaic was used, because either of those languages were the common languages understood by all Jewish believers everywhere. So there is nothing problematic about the early letters and New Testament writings being in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Golden.

My last name is spelled with a “e” not an “i” – just so you know:

mike aubriy

But by far this is my very favorite search.

things to do when not studying

I’ve had it a few times and it makes me laugh every time I see it.

I’m finally picking this up after about two weeks. Rick tagged in this meme (and also Stephen Carlson tagged me in its apparently different, but obnoxiously similar counterpart) And with all the backlash that appeared, I’m going to preface my books with some of Rick’s words in his update to the original post
(cutting out the points that were only relevant to his own list):

1. The meme is based on an offhand thought [Rick] had while responding to yet another “five book” meme (the “Five Influential Primary Sources” meme, see the second sentence). Too many serious memes were floating around, some levity was required.
2. It was time for a sampling of not-so-great books. You know, equal time and all that.
3. “Books that make me stupider” are equivalent to those books you read and end up with the only response of “huh?”. Alternately, it could be, “no, he/she can’t seriously be arguing that!”
4. I fully expect that if I ever publish a book, there will be some proportion of readers who will claim that my book made them stupider.

If you’re still uncomfortable with the name of the meme, then you can change the title to something like, “Five Biblical Studies Books that Vexed me” following John Anderson (I can’t seem to get onto his blogroll…).

Okay. My FIVE Books:

1. Leland Ryken’s The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation

I’ve already made a number of comments on this book a few days ago. Ryken truly doesn’t know anything about translation if he actually believes what he writes in this book. He starts with a flawed premise and runs with it. Its truly amazing.

2. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today

I’m specifically talking about the second edition of Countryman’s book, which came out in 2007. The main problem with the book is the way he applies cultural anthropology to the texts. Its not that he’s wrong. Its that he’s not right. You’ll consistently thinking to yourself, “Hmmm, that’s a good point.” And then two sentences later you’ll say, “Wait a second…that doesn’t flow from that point.” The main flaw seems to be that Countryman consistently writes things like “X exists in the Old/New Testament culture, therefore X existed to the exclusion of all else.” That’s often how the book seems to argue. Its incredibly myopic. Will Deming’s review of the book at RBL says it all.

3. Ivan Kwong’s The Word Order of the Gospel of Luke: Its Foregrounded Messages

I’ve written about Kwong before. I’m not sure what’s more amazing: his purely statistical approach to word order or his literature review. Both of them have serious problems. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Steve. There is some good stuff here too, but its like mining for diamonds. You need to dig deep and its dark down there.

4. Stanley Porter’s Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, With Reference to Tense & Mood

Some of you might be surprised that this is here. Don’t be. For one, its an obnoxiously difficult read. Its small print and esoteric vocabulary by themselves are enough to make it a challenge. But then when you add to the fact that Porter has completely misread at least 100 years worth of scholarship on the Greek verb in his literature survey, you hopefully begin to grasp that this book shouldn’t be viewed as groundbreaking as we’re told that it is. The problem isn’t that the dead grammarians were wrong on the verb. The problem is that around the 1930-40s we stopped understanding them. The main contribution of Porter isn’t a “brand new theory of aspect.” Rather it’s a reminder of what we shouldn’t have forgotten to begin with…with a novel view of tense thrown in.

5. Chrys Caragounis’s Development of Greek and the New Testament, The: Morphology, Syntax, Phonology, and Textual Transmission

Caragounis and I have a difficult relationship. There’s so much good in this book combined with so much, well, not-so-good. I agree with so much in here. I love all the excellent grammatical information and exegetical studies. I’m with him 95% of the way that Greek needs to be understood more diachronically than it has. He goes a bit too far on it at times, but its a reasonable claim. The key to its acceptability is to read it in light of the past century of scholarship where the NT was read and interpreted in light of Classical Greek, rather than a response to any claim about synchronic description.

BUT. Caragounis’ phonological/phonetic description is less than helpful for a variety of reasons. For one, he shows now awareness of the fact that vowel alterations could and did occur for more reasons than pronunciation. He also provides no information for where his various vowel alterations are from geographically (i.e. are these sound changes from a specific area at a specific time?). And then there’s the fact that his descriptions of how to actually pronounce the letters of the Greek alphabet are imprecise and unhelpful (see HERE and HERE). [UPDATE: See Dr. Caragounis' own comments on pronunciation below. You can either scroll or, if you're lazy, click HERE]

Josh over at his new Son of the Fathers blog has tagged me in his meme: A Meme: Funniest things in ancient literature.

Well, the funniest thing that I’ve read recently was 1 Samuel 13:13 (discussed here):

καὶ εἶπεν Σαμουηλ πρὸς Σαουλ Μεματαίωταί σοι

Which comes out relatively close to something like:

And Samuel said, ‘That was a really stupid move you’ve just made.’

Or perhaps:

And Samuel said, ‘Wow, Saul, you really blew it this time.’

Or what about:

And Samuel said, ‘Way to go, Einstein. You’ve just lost your crown.’

Now I don’t think Samuel’s words are really that overblown, but imagining is half the fun!

Let’s see if we can get something funny out of Bryan and Rico.

I wasn’t satisfied with the Biblical Studies Blog picture from the Top 50 Biblioblogs site:

So I decided to make my own – in two different incarnations:

The first is in just plain old IPA accurately reflecting the pronunciation of “linguistics.”

The second is also IPA, but I chose all sorts of characters that don’t match phonetically:

ɬ is an Alveolar Lateral Fricative.

ɨ is an Close Central Unrounded Vowel (pronounced similar to the Historical Greek upsilon).

ɲ is a Palatal Nasal (kind of like the Spanish ñ)

ʛ is a Voiced Uvular Implosive (put your tongue as far back as you can and pretend to gulp water).

ʊ is a Near-Close Back Rounded Vowel

ᵼ is a Near-Front Near-Close Unrounded Vowel (technically not “official IPA”)

ʂ is a Voiceless Retroflexed Alveolar Fricative (kind of like in Russian – curl your tongue back on your alveolar ridge and go “shhh”)

ƭ is a Voiceless Dental Implosive (similar to ʛ, but with your tongue just behind your teeth – its harder)

ɪ is a Near-Close Front Unrounded Vowel

ç is a Voiceless Palatal Fricative (move you tongue behind your alveolar ridge and go “shhh”)

ᶘ is a Voiceless Post-alveolar Retroflexed Fricative (curle your tongue back on your hard palate behind your alveolar ridge and go “shh”)

ɓ is a Voiced Bilabial Implosive (like ʛ and ƭ but articulate with your lips instead of your tongue)

ǂ is a Voiceless Palatal-alveolar Click (like in the movie, The Gods must be Crazy).

ɔ is an Open-Mid Back Rounded Vowel (this one is actually correct)

ɣ is a Voiced Velar Fricative (like in BaCH, except use your vocal chords, and incidentally, how the Greek gamma should be pronounced.)

Anyway, the copy and paste code for using them is here:

<a href=”http://evepheso.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bibliolinguisticsblog2.jpg” target=”_blank”><img style=”display:inline;border-width:0;” title=”Biblio-Linguistics Blog2″ src=”http://evepheso.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bibliolinguisticsblog2-thumb.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Biblio-Linguistics Blog2″ width=”204″ height=”57″ /></a>

and

<a href=”http://evepheso.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bibliolinguisticsblog1.jpg”><img style=”display:inline;border-width:0;” title=”Biblio-Linguistics Blog1″ src=”http://evepheso.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/bibliolinguisticsblog1-thumb.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Biblio-Linguistics Blog1″ width=”204″ height=”57″ /></a>

You can dable with that as much as you want.

Language is Funny:

“This is only indirect support for our hypothesis, since it comes from different languages and a different empirical domain. But it does give some independent evidence that syntactic movement can have different effects on the features involved in agreement in different languages, which is our central theoretical proposal.”

Mark C. Baer, Roberto Aranovich, and Lucia A. Goluscio. 2005 “Two Types of Syntactic Noun Incorporation: Noun Incorporation in Mapudungun and Its Typological Implications.” Language: 81, no. 1 (March): 138-176.

Now you don’t need to know what they’re actually talking about in the article or even the context of the these two sentences to know that this is completely ridiculous.

Look at their central theoretical proposal:

…syntactic movement can have different effects on the features involved in agreement in different languages…”

To paraphrase, “Our theoretical proposal is that languages are different.”

Wow, we linguists are a brilliant bunch.

Those of you who are familiar with IPA (and I know your name is Legion) will definitely enjoy this.

Those of you who have any sort of familiarity with Russian will probably like it too.

The Latest Edition of the Speculative Grammarian.