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Re: The terms, "Biblical Greek" and "NT Greek"

Posted: January 3rd, 2012, 5:51 pm
by MAubrey
Ken M. Penner wrote:
MAubrey wrote:Funk is easily the first *teaching* grammar that uses surrounding literature consistently.
I don't want to cast any shadows on Funk's work, but I want to avoid providing the impression that Funk's BIGHG uses non-biblical literature frequently. BIGHG's abundant examples from the Greek New Testament far exceed any from the Apostolic Fathers, and I don't recall seeing any from beyond these two corpora.
Funk wrote:
Robert Funk wrote:It had been my original intention to draw far more on texts outside the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers than has in fact been the case. If it proves possible to reduce a significant number of Greek sentences to a code that can be manipulated by a computer, it will be easily possible to work with a much larger body of data. In that case, the promise of the title (hellenistic Greek) will come to fulfillment; as it stands, it is more promise than achievement.
Yeah...I know.

"Consistent" probably isn't the right word. Okay, so may it isn't the right word at all. At the very least, Funk did more than any other teaching grammar to date that I am aware of.

Re: The terms, "Biblical Greek" and "NT Greek"

Posted: April 29th, 2013, 9:26 pm
by mwpalmer
I was so overwhelmed with work when this discussion appeared in January that I didn't get a chance to read it. Now that I have, I regret not having participated back then.

Expanding the corpus of texts we use to inform our understanding of the language is a serious challenge, and one very much worth the effort.

As one who served on the team directed by Funk to revise/replace the Blass-Debrunner grammar (the failed project Carl referred to above), I would like to add that this was one of our goals. I have spent a great deal of time reading texts from the period of the New Testament outside the available Christian and Jewish texts. Those texts range from lengthy discourses, official state correspondence, and philosophical arguments, to brief personal letters, shopping lists, and much more. As Kathy Mac______'s discussion illustrates so well, the experience of reading those texts can be very enlightening and leads to viewing the biblical texts with new questions and fresh understanding. I hope to eventually see a major grammar of Hellenistic Greek that focusses on the early Christian texts, but discusses the language in light of a much broader sampling of the literature of the period. By not completing our replacement for BDF, we missed a great opportunity to produce that grammar.

Re: The terms, "Biblical Greek" and "NT Greek"

Posted: May 3rd, 2013, 5:46 am
by Paul-Nitz
Many on B-Greek have promoted reading outside of the NT. Kathy Mac showed the value of it.

M. Palmer, I would like to hear more about Funk and his grammar from an insider like you. Since B-Greek is a great promoter of Funk, I'm sure others would be interested.

Re: The terms, "Biblical Greek" and "NT Greek"

Posted: May 3rd, 2013, 6:30 am
by cwconrad
Paul-Nitz wrote:Many on B-Greek have promoted reading outside of the NT. Kathy Mac showed the value of it.

M. Palmer, I would like to hear more about Funk and his grammar from an insider like you. Since B-Greek is a great promoter of Funk, I'm sure others would be interested.
Micheal can speak for himself, but I can add some background here and, I hope, clear up some confusion. The Funk grammar that we've been promoting on B-Greek is the Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek *(which will soon be published in a 4th print edition by Polebridge Press on the basis of scanning and HTML preparation by B-Greek members). That's something different from the Blass-Debrunner-Funk Greek Grammar of the NT and Other Early Christian Literature, Funk's English translation of the classic German grammar of the GNT by Blass and Debrunner. It is also different from the work which was sponsored by Funk's Westar Institute, a new unabridged grammar of Hellenistic Group that was to be produced by a team of scholars working under the chairmanship of the late Darryl Schmidt; Micheal Palmer was one of the members of that committee, the work of which was never completed -- and that is a very sad fact.

Re: The terms, "Biblical Greek" and "NT Greek"

Posted: May 8th, 2013, 9:44 pm
by mwpalmer
Carl has summed up the history very nicely. The University of Chicago Press requested that Robert Funk revise the BDF grammar, but he informed the press that too much research had been done since the last edition to allow for a simple update to the grammar, and that it was no longer reasonably possible to expect a single scholar to adequately cover all of the known literature and be competent in the relevant developments in the field of Linguistics. He suggested assembling a team of scholars to re-envision the grammar and plot a course for producing a replacement for it.

He assembled the team, and we produced a proposal for UofC Press. Several of us worked on the grammar for a number of years, but the contract from the publisher never appeared. Without a clear commitment from the publisher, those of us committed to the project were not able to invest the needed time to see it to completion. Each of us had other obligations that demanded our attention. I was one of the last holding out for the possibility that the project could be completed, but that was not to be.