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Re: Major's 50% and 80% lists

Posted: November 23rd, 2015, 9:20 pm
by Stephen Hughes
"Shirley Rollinson"] I can learn all the fancy grammar and chant the paradigms, but if I can't ask for "a gallon of gas and a dozen eggs, and how much does it cost?" (or the GNT equivalent) then the language becomes a series of hurdles rather than a means of communication.
That comment hints of wanting to see Greek as a vehicle of everyday communication or of wanting to see the language taught along the lines of communicative need, rather than patterns and structures. I'm a little ashamed to say that even after so many years of reading, I would still be more comfortable filling a page with memorised tables than with contiguous and meaningful text. Now, these past few years, trying to talk to a child who does not yet know the world beyond the confines of her own senses is also a much greater challenge than I could have anticipated - the fall-back that Greek doesn't have a word for such and so doesn't make sense.

Specifically arising from this discussion though, let me ask, Is there a topic in the New Testament, for which all or most of the grammatical structures are used, but the vocabulary is limited? or perhaps one in the wider Koine? I guess that for Latin, it is war. Does that hold true with Koine Greek too?

Re: Major's 50% and 80% lists

Posted: November 26th, 2015, 8:34 pm
by Stephen Carlson
jtauber wrote:(b) a big believer in showing words in constructions rather than glossing them in isolation
This.