Translation Greek

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Stephen Hughes
Posts: 3323
Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Translation Greek

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Stephen Carlson wrote:most of my Latin reading lately has been ecclesiastical including the Vulgate
Barry Hofstetter wrote:so you were talking about translation literature
Picking up this conversation sideways, and probably cause the apples to go rolling off the table, I have a question to ask about "Translation Greek".

I've read that the compositions in Greek by Roman authours are touched with Latin colours, but not knowing Latin, I didn't really notice the differences so much or in the same way. Besides things written by the unlettered, the most "distinctive" writing I've read in Greek was Eusebius's expletive style. His composition is, however, a Greek composition in Greek. More different to my sense of Greek than the Latin historians.

While I'd like to know more about the situation with Latin and translation, what I do know something about is that compositions in Coptic such as the Shenouda's monastic rules are much more difficult to read other translation texts (or their derivatives). Going the other way, the Apophthegmata Patrum which are said to have been originally spoken in Coptic and which eventually come to us in simple but good Greek (and Latin).

I suppose from looking at some early Byzantine texts that the latinisation of Greek was one of the features of the development of Greek from Koine to Byzantine, but we also see a few Latin words in our Eastern Mediterranian Imperial Koine Texts, but not to the same degree. I guess that more latinisation occured in Roman Imperial Koine Texts and that form of Greek accompanied the division of the Empire from Ravenna to the East in Constantinople). And the latinisation of Greek was subsequently lost in the Atticism movement - taking Greek back to Greek. What we have in the desert in Egypt is the another type of Imperial Koine Greek. Which presumably had an effect on the LXX, but perhaps not (directly) on the NT (I'm not suggesting that Coptic had a great effect that time, because historically it is suggested that many of the early converts in Alexandria were from the Jewish diaspora community).

Looking at things from that perspective, translation Greek, could be confused with different varieties of Koine Greek within different communities. Another point that this raises is that our NT may not be in a direct line sequence from classical to Modern Greek, and the "scholarly" presupposition that that is in fact true may not be as true as we currently assume it to be.

Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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