BART and Interlinears

Patrick Maxwell
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Joined: November 7th, 2013, 9:25 am
Location: South Africa

BART and Interlinears

Post by Patrick Maxwell »

While browsing on the Web I was led to one of Stephen Levinsohn's pages. One of the items on the top menu was BART. Clicking this term allowed me to download a Greek-English interlinear of the New Testament, with enhancements and markings done by the BART tool.

Even without understanding the exact purpose of all the BART layouts and markings, I found these documents easier to use than the conventional Greek-English interlinears.

I searched in Google for more information about BART. I found a number of resources relating to Levinsohn and his work (and also SIL), but I found very little about BART. I managed to access a BART manual but the URLs in it were defunct. Is the BART project now dormant? Has it been discontinued? Or replaced by a better tool?

Moving away from the BART issue but staying on the topic of interlinears, can anyone comment about the merits and/or demerits of the "Apostolic Bible Polyglot" LXX interlinear? I think it was F.F. Bruce who said that studying the LXX was a good way to enhance one's understanding of N.T. Greek.

Whether a student like me who is doing introductory Greek should (or should NOT) resort to interlinears is another question. If I need to be rebuked to some extent for my interlinear pursuits, please go ahead and do so!

Thanks,
Patrick
κατα μικρον, κατα ὀλιγον
paorear
Posts: 18
Joined: January 2nd, 2012, 2:16 am

Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by paorear »

Hello Patrick, I currently support the BART project for Wycliffe Bible Translators/SIL. I'm sad to say that the tool is currently restricted in use to translators due to various licensing agreements around the texts used.

It's my personal aim to produce a version that leverages freely available texts and that could be freely distributed, but I am unable to make any promises at this time.

As (and if) I make progress in this area you can be sure that news about it will be posted here.

My apologies for the somewhat vague response!

Grace and Peace,
Paul O'Rear
Paul O'Rear
Jonathan Robie
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Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I just went looking for the pages you referred to in the OP, and found this treasure trove:

Levinsohn's Discourse Analysis for the Entire Greek New Testament, in PDF.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Jonathan Robie wrote:I just went looking for the pages you referred to in the OP, and found this treasure trove:
Indeed. Grabbed them all. These opportunities have a way of disappearing.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Jonathan Robie
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Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Good point. I just did the same. wget also found a few extra PDFs worth snagging - EnhancedBARTdisplayNT.pdf, EnhancingBARTDisplayOT.pdf.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
George F Somsel
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Joined: May 9th, 2011, 10:11 am

Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by George F Somsel »

Patrick Maxwell wrote:
Moving away from the BART issue but staying on the topic of interlinears, can anyone comment about the merits and/or demerits of the "Apostolic Bible Polyglot" LXX interlinear? I think it was F.F. Bruce who said that studying the LXX was a good way to enhance one's understanding of N.T. Greek.
I assume you wish to learn to read Greek with some proficiency. If that is the case, I would advise you to avoid interlinears like the plague they are. If you make yourself dependent upon having a translation of the text immediately beneath the original text, I can assure you that your eyes will automatically be attracted to the language with which you are most familiar. If you become accustomed to using interliears,you will NEVER become proficient in the language. I do not say that you should not use a translation at all. I understand that C S Lewis was allowed a "pony" when he was studying Greek—in Latin. If you feel the need for a translation, keep the translation underneath the original text where you must make an effort to access it.

I constantly use the Logos software in my studies. Logos abounds in interlinears and reverse interlinears (where the original language is reorganized to follow the English word order), but I can assure you that these are unused resources in my library. While I appreciate the Logos software, I don't believe they are doing any favors to their customers with these products.
george
gfsomsel



… search for truth, hear truth,
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth,
defend the truth till death.



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Jonathan Robie
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Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I agree with George. For most purposes, I would MUCH prefer to have these PDFs without the English.

For someone who doesn't know Greek, I guess I'd prefer they use something like this than the garden variety interlinear.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Barry Hofstetter
Posts: 2159
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Jonathan Robie wrote:I agree with George. For most purposes, I would MUCH prefer to have these PDFs without the English.

For someone who doesn't know Greek, I guess I'd prefer they use something like this than the garden variety interlinear.
There is not too much concerning which I am dogmatic. A few theological issues and the fact that interlinears are the spawn of the devil. They are the linguistic equivalent of brain eating zombies. They are the dark side, the power of which you don't want to experience...
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Stephen Hughes
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Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Interlining is used as a way to learn languages.

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Patrick Maxwell wrote:Whether a student like me who is doing introductory Greek should (or should NOT) resort to interlinears is another question. If I need to be rebuked to some extent for my interlinear pursuits, please go ahead and do so!
Let me answer your last question and give you a different perspective on interlinear useage and language learning. I have seen many different people take many diverse paths to language proficiency - interlining is one of them.

If you are a student doing a course in introductory Greek, the path you have chosen is probably analysis and translation and you will acheive your goals in learning Greek in that way. In the way that courses usually run, the student is told a lot of fancy names for the different words in the text and a lot of English translations for various Greek words, then using that framework, Greek is connected to "good" English. In effect Greek grammar is a series of abstracted transformations between one language and another. ὁ υἱός μου becomes masculine nominative singular noun υἱός "son" with the masculine nominative singular defininte article and the common genitive singular possesive pronoun "my". Which if taken altogether means "my son".

An interlinear is a different way of understanding - bridging the gap between two language - and can help people who are following a different path often their own (often) self-study path to language proficiency. In this path, there is no need for grammatical terminolgy or abstracted rules - really strange sounding English bridges the gap between the languages. ὁ υἱός μου becomes "the son of me", which by force of habit become "my son" in good English. There are a small measure of people who do learn language very well by this way, and as they advance in their experience of the target language, they can drop the middle (interlinear) step from their processing and for an ever increasing number of situations go from Greek to good English directly. About 5% of students will use the interlinear method to understand what the grammar is saying anyway, even if they are force-fed an analyse/translate way of learning, and left to themselves with more freedom, it will be about 25 or 30% either soley or partially using this method. Like that there are interlinears on the market to help students master NTG, there are books to teach English (and other languages) based on this interlinear-like method, and the results for simple readily recognisable sentence transformations are good, but for transformations longer than a half-dozen words, it falls apart. Such short-comings are subordinate and relative clauses and the order of phrases withing a sentence. Teachers generally decry such books, but students still buy them, and to some degree have some success with them. Besides the difficulty of handling longer utterances well, another problem is that learning in not comprehensive - there is no listing of different possibilities all in one place, so the learning will be sporadic rather than comprehensive.

In your situation specificly, if you use the interlinear while you are learning via the grammar/translation you will most probably get confused. Imagine what you are trying to do, you are learning technical names and abstract transformations AS WELL AS hardwiring a set of transformations. That is like integrating programming in BIOS with progamming in JAVA or another highlevel language. In my experience, those who interlineate their target language with a really poor version of their mother tongue go on to be great communicators and get the point of things more quickly than analytical learners - they are social and communicative and can readily understand multi-way conversation, but they suffer from occasional (or frequent) production of "strange" English, and have an uphill battle to master "grammar" when they have to pass exams.

Using an interlinear is only effective if you use all three things together. Greek text - interlined English - translated English together. Just using Greek-text - interlined English together will be quite useful for a student's vocabulary (especially in seeing how polysemy works in different situations) but detrimental for their overall understanding of the language. For those who do use this method, the main working will be between the interlined English and the real English - or in other cases between bad Chinese and real Chinese - and the effort spent to learn the language will be similar. Another draw back is that the system is more "mechanical" (rigid) and doesn't equip one to readily deal with variance and provides no ready way of abstracting and discussing language. But if you are in a class, you will most likely need to discuss things with others, so grammar (or even linguistics) will be useful. Likewise for computer programmes; if the computer programme presents you will only the Greek text and the strange English, avoid the programme it is limitedly useful and ostensibly deleterious, but if a computer programme allows you to readily work from the weird English to "good" English then it will be useful for learning for people who don't handle grammar well.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Patrick Maxwell
Posts: 9
Joined: November 7th, 2013, 9:25 am
Location: South Africa

Re: BART and Interlinears

Post by Patrick Maxwell »

paorear wrote:I currently support the BART project for Wycliffe Bible Translators/SIL... It's my personal aim to produce a version that leverages freely available texts and that could be freely distributed, but I am unable to make any promises at this time. As (and if) I make progress in this area you can be sure that news about it will be posted here. Grace and Peace, Paul O'Rear
Thank you very much for this, Paul. Much appreciated!

Patrick
κατα μικρον, κατα ὀλιγον
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