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Re: Meaning of case



Colleagues:
		In the midst of final exams and final papers and the like,
I hardly have time to read my email, much less respond to it. But when I 
read Micheal Palmer's response about the Greek of the Apocalypse, I felt 
compelled to make a brief statement.
	Micheal is exactly correct.  The Apocalypse to John is VERY easy to 
read.  That doesn't mean it uses Greek well or grammatically, it only means 
that it has a very narrow range of vocabulary and grammatical forms, and 
the errors pose few problems in seeing what was intended.  The analogy to 
papers by ESL students is quite apt; and if that isn't the explanation for 
its Greek, at least it explains why it LOOKS that way.
	May I add that my training was entirely classical; at the 
University of Chicago (at least in my days, half a century ago +), no 
course in NT Greek was offered, though I did have a graduate course in 
Hellenistic Greek grammar (which did not include the NT).  Being easy to 
read and easy to translate in no way guarantees that the Greek is any good.
	I have been very sorry to see repeated statements on this List that 
this or that non-NT Greek author uses bad grammar, or invents his own 
grammar, when in fact the problem is with the would-be reader.  Much Greek 
is difficult for moderns to handle, unless they have much, much experience 
with Greek (Thucydides for example is not the easiest Greek to read--but 
that is NOT because his Greek is bad!).  American high school students of 
today often find that Shakespeare is difficult for them to understand; but 
the explanation is not that Shakespeare wrote bad English.  Perhaps in the 
future, relative novices in reading non-NT texts could refrain from 
pronouncing on the quality of the authors they are struggling with?--and 
admit that they simply don't know enough Greek to grasp the Greek readily?

Thanks again to Micheal for putting it in a nutshell (which I haven't 
managed to do).


Edward Hobbs


---------------------------------------------------------------

At 7:18 PM +0000 5/14/97, Clayton Bartholomew wrote:

>I remember a few years ago when I was translating the Apocalypse of John
>reading in the commentaries and grammars that the Apocalypse was a
>grammatical nightmare, full of impossible constructions and syntactical
>barbarisms. But when Richmond Lattimore, a Homeric scholar, translated
>it he didn't find it hard to read. Wonder why?


And Micheal Palmer replied:

When I translated it (both times) I didn't find it hard to read either. I
did find it to be 'full of impossible constructions and syntactical
barbarisms,' though. Specifically, I found it to read much like many of the
papers I have to read which are written by people who speak English as a
second language. They are often quite easy to understand, but they use
English in a way which no native speaker would.




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