ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

It seems that the former is far, far more popular than the latter.

But I enjoy writing about the latter much more.

Sigh…

Some have called the claim that Modern Greek has something to add to the study of Hellenistic Greek controversial.

Perhaps.

But I think that depends on what you mean and what context you intend to use Modern Greek. For the first or second year student, I would heartily agree that Modern Greek isn’t going to be terribly helpful.

But when it comes to understanding the Greek text by the more advanced scholar, particularly for being able to teach the beginning student, Modern Greek is much more important.

Let’s look at an example.

According to Artemis Alexiadou, Liliane Haegeman & Melita Stavrou, the two demonstrative positions in Greek have distinctly different meanings (the footnotes are theirs):

Context A: Mary is at the butcher’s pointing to a pork joint that she wants to buy.

a. Mary: Thelo afto to butaki.
want-1SG this the joint
‘I want this pork joint.’

b. Mary: ??Thelo to butaki afto.[48]
want-1SG the joint this

Context B: A paragraph from a guide book about a Greek town.

c. I poli eci pola istorika ktiria pu xronologhunte apo ti vizantini epoci.
the town has many historical buildings that date back to the Byzantine period

d. Ta ktiria afta episceptonte kathe xrono ekatondadhes turistes.
the buildings these vistis-3SG every year hundreds tourists

e. ??? Aftra ta ktiria episcenpttonte kathe rono ekatondadhes turistes.
these the buildings visit-3SG every year hundreds tourists[49]

Manolessou & Panagiotidis (1999), Manolessou (2000), Panagiotidis (2000), and Grohmann & Panagiotidis (2005) observe that in Greek the pre-article position of the demonstrative afto entails greater deictic strength, in contrast with the post-nominal position in which the demonstrative is used as discourse anaphoric, namely to refer back to an entity that has been previously mentioned. Only the pre-article demonstrative can normally be used along with a pointing gesture: based on this observation it is generally agreed that only the pre-article demonstrative is genuinely deictic.[50]

Artemis Alexiadou, Liliane Haegeman & Melita Stavrou, The Noun Phrase in Generative Grammar (Studies in Generative Grammar 71; Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2007), 120-121.

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[48] For some speakers (b) is acceptable with contrastive intonation on the demonstrative and an accompanying deictic gesture.

[49] Notice that the ‘strategy’ discussed in the preceding note is not available for rescuing (83e) since the buildings in question are not physically present, and so one cannot point to them (unlike the butcher’s customer who actually sees the joint).

[50] Interestingly, a different proposal with respect to the interpretation of post-nominal and pre-article demonstratives is made by Tasmowski De Ryck (1990), who argues that the pre-article demonstrative has a thematic interpretation (i.e. it represents an entity already known/given) while the post-nominal demonstrative has a rhematic (i.e. new) interpretation.

These words, sparked my curiosity as to what we can say about the status of demonstratives in Hellenistic Greek. So I perused the texts for a bit. I didn’t do anything comprehensive, just perusing. But what I saw, in my randomness, fit – if we assume that footnote 48 was generally true for the Hellenistic Period.

Likewise, it *appears* that pre-nominal demonstratives are not allowed in situations like what we see in Context B above. Granted, this was more difficult to test. What I did was search through the non-narrative texts of the New Testament and examined the kinds of contexts and pragmatic situations where the author used pre-nominal vs. post-nominal demonstratives. The different, I though, was quite striking. For example, in Paul, pre-nominal demonstratives are only used in a couple different situations:

1. Pronominal situations: Rom 11:30, νῦν δὲ ἠλεήθητε τῇ τούτων ἀπειθείᾳ, “but now you have received mercy as a result of their disobedience.”
2. Quotes from Direct Speech: 1 Cor 11:25, τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ αἵματι, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.”
3. References to previous words written (i.e. the external real life referent is the text itself): 2 Cor 7:1 ταύτας οὖν ἔχοντες τὰς ἐπαγγελίας, “Therefore, since we have these promises…” (Cf. Eph 3:1
4. Abstact Concepts that cannot have an external referent: 2 Cor 11:17, ὃ λαλῶ οὐ κατὰ κύριον λαλῶ ἀλλʼ ὡς ἐν ἀφροσύνῃ ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ ὑποστάσει τῆς καυχήσεως, “ In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would, but as a fool.”

If what Alexiadou, Haegeman, & Stavrou say is correct for Hellenistic Greek as well, then it would have been ungrammatical for Paul to have said: ἐν τούτοις τοῖς κλίμασι instead of ἐν τοῖς κλίμασι τούτοις in Romans 15:23.

Now whether I’m right or not, I’m not sure, which is why I used the word “appears” above. I don’t think we can draw definite conclusions on the issue from this very cursory & ad hoc study I did this afternoon.

But if I am correct on this, then there are two important things to remember:

1) Greek word order issues are never discussed in beginning classes in terms of the why?. New students only learn the what?. They need to learn the reasons for different word orders.

2) What I just covered here is something you could very easily teach to your students: “Students, this is why the order of the demonstrative in the NP matters and this is what it means.” See, that was simple, wasn’t it?

The pathetically small llama knitted nervously under the _______________________.

I’m pretty sure that 2 Samuel 14:28-33 is a comedy or something:

²⁸ Absalom lived in Jerusalem for two years, but he never got to see the king. ²⁹ Then Absalom sent for Joab to ask him to intercede for him, but Joab refused to come. Absalom sent for him a second time, but again Joab refused to come. ³⁰ So Absalom said to his servants, “Go and set fire to Joab’s barley field, the field next to mine.” So they set his field on fire, as Absalom had commanded.

³¹ Then Joab came to Absalom at his house and demanded, “Why did your servants set my field on fire?”

³² And Absalom replied, “Because I wanted you to ask the king why he brought me back from Geshur if he didn’t intend to see me. I might as well have stayed there. Let me see the king; if he finds me guilty of anything, then let him kill me.”

³³ So Joab told the king what Absalom had said. Then at last David summoned Absalom, who came and bowed low before the king, and the king kissed him.

NLT

Over at his new page, Wanna be a Bible Scholar, Patrick McCullough asked a question in the comments after I wrote up a little note about the benefits of studying linguistics as a related field for Biblical studies:

I’d be interested to hear whether you feel many people taking a linguistics angle on biblical studies lean more conservative… i.e., are they pursuing linguistics because they believe in the inerrant and plenary inspiration of the Bible in which every single word comes directly from God?

Since its such a large question, I thought I’d devote a post to the question.

No, I don’t think its a theological issue – at least not entirely. Part of it, I think, is an accident of history I think its because most schools – whether conservative or not – over the course of the past 50-60 years have not been interested in literary, historical and theological questions over those of languages on the assumption that Greek had essentially been figured out – this is easily seen in this RBL Review.

The result has been that much of the linguistics work that has been done in the past two or three decades began with those involved in Bible translation which, as missions work, tends to be populated by theologically conservative Christians – so in that sense there is a connect, albeit indirect. The situation for Hebrew studies has been slightly different since its had much, much more non-Christian work.

So really, its no surprise that the most influential books that have interfaced linguistics and Biblical studies have either come out of those involved with Bible translation or Hebrew scholars:

James Barr – Semantics of Biblical Language (Hebrew Scholar)

Louw, Nida, & Smith – Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (Translators/Translation consultants)

[Tangent] (Rondal Smith left the project rather about 3/4’s of the way through – and should really be on the title page as Micheal Palmer lists him). His is another dissertation that has tragically been ignored by Koine Greek studies:

Smith, Rondal Bruce. "Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Interpretations of Greek Phonology: Prolegomena to a Theory of Sound Patterns in the Hellenistic Greek ‘Koine’." Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1972.

He’s also a friend of my wife. [/Tangent]

Cotterell & Turner – Linguistics And Biblical Interpretation (connected with missions and translation work)

Stephen Levinsohn – Discourse Features of New Testament Greek (SIL & translation).

Now, this is not to say that there haven’t been others who have done linguistics without “conservative” theology. Robert Funk did some great work with his grammar, as did , Daryl Schmidt with Hellenistic Greek Grammar and Noam Chomsky: Nominalizing Transformations (though transformational grammar hasn’t really taken hold in NT Studies. And in terms of Classical Greek, the framework of Functional Grammar (not Systemic Functional Grammar, they’re different) has had a big impact with classical grammarians/linguists like Bakker, Rijksbaron, Dik, Allan, and others. And beyond Greek, the world of linguistics as a whole is definitely not dominated by Christians at all.

Anyway, some thoughts. Others might have some other thoughts. And they are welcome to add them.

There’s been a good amount of discussion about the trinity at several different blogs:

Paul and Monotheism

1 Cor 3.23: Our Subordination to Christ; Christ’s to God (Monotheism in 1 Corinthians, 1)

The Subordination of Christ to God in 1 Cor 3? – A Response to Ecce Homo

Trinitarian and Historical Theological Ignorance

Great Minds…

In light of all of this, I thought I would share a few things I’ve read/written. The first is actually a post I wrote some time ago, which then turned into a post for the 2009 Trinity Blogging Summit: Exegetical Implications of NP Focus – its title for the Blogging summit was rather different.

The second is actually a Note from Facebook with some musings of Dan Wallaces’ very excellent book. I’ve reproduced the majority of the note below. I’m not sure you could consider this a review of the book, its just some random notes. But this is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Book Musings: Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance (Studies in Biblical Greek) by Daniel B. Wallace.

Wallace’s new book on Granville Sharp and the significance of the Greek article in various KAI constructions is easily one of the best Greek monographs I’ve read this year (currently tied with Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar. I read then entire book over a period of two days because I couldn’t put it down — though I must confess, the entire time I was traveling by car and plane.

I have a 101 fever, chills, and a variety of other symptoms. The good news is that its not swine flu. That bad news is that I still feel miserable.

Sometimes I feel as if they are too many people I that I want to dialogue with on this blog that I simply cannot keep up.

I have at least 5 posts that I want to write, relating to a variety of discussions that have popped up in the blogs I read.

What do you do when you cannot keep up with them all?

For me writing a good post is always a serious investment in time. And often that is time that I should spend doing other things.

Things I would like to write about right now:

1. The Greek Noun Phrase – its always on my mind.
2. Future education plans – what should I do next, where and when?
3. Language Learning/Acquisition as it relates to Greek, particularly in relation to the posts being written by other bloggers right now.
4. My camping trip from this past week. It was amazing. I hiked. I climbed. And I was really sore afterward.

Can I do all of these? Probably.

Do I have the energy to do all of these? I doubt it.

And so for now, instead, I simply post this panorama I stitched together from our hike. This is the view from Summit #1 of The Chief overlooking the city of Squamish, BC:

My wife and I will definitely be going back. Total all three summits of the Chief provide a comfortable 7 mile hike with a 2000ft elevation change. There is so much climbing to do. So come visit me and bring your gear. We’ll all go together.

I was reading Dik’s book Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue in Amazon’s preview, curious about what she says about Devine and Stephen’s work (Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek, 1999), which came out after her first book on word order in Herodotus (Word Order in Ancient Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation in Herodotus,1995).

Looking through the discussion, it seems like her second book is likely going to be the more important work simply because she has a larger number of other recent books to argue and dialogue with. What I’ve read has been so-so. There’s some good and some bad – I think she’s wrong to reject D&S’s combination of pragmatics and semantics for their explanation of adjective orderings (she prefers pragmatics only with at least one caveat), but I think (only intuitively, I haven’t checked) that her criticism of D&S’s claim (that adjective ordering differences between Herodotus and Thucydides is best explained by dialect difference) is spot on. With that said, D&S tend to make many more typological comparisons than Dik ever does, which is a clear strength to their book. And then there’s the issue of price. You can get D&S for less than $20 used while either of Dik’s books go for at least $75. Who knows, that might end up being the factor in who wins the debate – though at the same time, Dik is infinitely easier to read than D&S.

What is interesting, and I’m curious if Stephanie Bakker will continue the trend (see below), is that Dik in her 2007 book consistently follows D&S’s terminology for the different types of discontinuous phrases in Greek syntax – e.g. Y1 Hyperbaton (AXN) & Y2 Hyperbaton (NXA).

There are more books coming out on the subject though. Stephanie Bakker (any relation to Egbert J. Bakker?) is writing a book on the Noun Phrase in Greek (The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek: A Functional Analysis of the Order and Articulation of Np Constituents in Herodotus). And according to Dik (Word order, 2007; page 88), Rijksbaron is currently researching definiteness in Greek and S. R. Slings is currently working on a functional analysis (as opposed to D&S’s generative analysis) of Hyperbaton in Greek. I don’t know how I feel about this. I think that D&S are generally correct in their explanation of hyperbaton. Why can’t we simply work from different theoretical perspectives and build on each other? Framework rivalry is always such nonsense.

Finally, what is up with Herodotus? Why is he so popular for word order studies? I don’t know…

So all in all, it looks like the next ten years are going to be quite productive for Classical Greek word order studies.

I hope we actually get somewhere with all of this writing (yes, that’s cynicism you hear).

And I hope some of it spills over into the Hellenistic Period (more cynicism – though I do hope to make my own contribution to this subject at some point in the relatively near future – 3 to 5 years).

The majority people, I would suggest, are significantly better* at critiquing and criticizing translations than they are at actually creating them.

Incidentally, criticizing is also quite a bit easier than actually translating, too.