Introduction

Please introduce yourself here, if you haven't already.
Thomas Dolhanty
Posts: 401
Joined: May 20th, 2014, 10:13 am
Location: west coast of Canada

Re: Introduction

Post by Thomas Dolhanty »

John Wright wrote: Anyway, but when I think about the break between me and a few others and the main current in the teaching of that other language, I realize that the goals are different -- I think a positive and reasonable goal for reading / writing is to be able to read and write well, as an educated 'native', and that a positive and reasonable goal for speaking is to speak well and intelligibly, and to understand a wide variety of kinds of speech. Many people involved in teaching this are just not interested in those goals.
The great constraint with Koine Greek as opposed to something like modern Spanish is that you are working with a "fixed" language. As a modern I can dive into Spanish and apply all of my modern mindset and vocabulary and world view etc. in becoming a real practitioner of that language. I can "vocalize" as it were myself and my world view and my typical experiences/thoughts in Spanish. Moreover, I can continuously test my development against "native" practitioners of Spanish, and I can access the language from innumerable real life settings - pizza parlors to university classrooms.

In Koine Greek, I am really confined to "play acting" in my efforts to express myself in that language. If I introduce my world view, modern vocabulary, normal 21st century life experience, into the Koine language than I am in danger, as Jonathan Robie has noted a few times, of creating a kind of "pidgin" Koine Greek. I have seen that happening in some quarters. I am no longer dealing with the ancient language as it existed two millennia ago. And once again, not only am I hampered by a language that doesn't easily 'fit' my world; I am also unable to interact with native speakers of that language which is a huge limitation. This, I believe, puts a big constraint on how far one can go in using living language methods to learn Koine Greek. The methods are powerful and useful there. I can attest to that personally and as a teacher. But they cannot compare with the same methods applied to learning a living modern language.
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John Wright
Posts: 15
Joined: December 13th, 2015, 10:12 pm

Re: Introduction

Post by John Wright »

Sure, all that makes sense. I only mentioned my experience with a modern language because as a teacher, I found I couldn't even get behind the goals that many worked towards, and my goals were to them utterly alien. So it was nice to see similar goals from people with different approached. I see now that my post was a little unclear.
Shirley Rollinson
Posts: 415
Joined: June 4th, 2011, 6:19 pm
Location: New Mexico
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Re: Introduction

Post by Shirley Rollinson »

John Wright wrote:Thank you for the reply, Thomas. This all sounds good. My NT has no dictionary in the back, however -- can you suggest a solid one that will be serve as a solid NT lexical reference for years?

I've already had some participles and infinitives in this textbook -- very fun stuff, and I feel like I have a dim idea of the good times to come in Greek syntax. I'll try the approach you described and plan to start with Mark in a bit.

I ordered a copy of Smyth after seeing it at the library (I know, maybe premature, what can I do). I guess I'd want to start with the first volume of Funk, if I get there.

I'm anxious about listening, but I believe you know what you're talking about, so I'll try to look into it...
You might find it useful to get a GNT with the dictionary bound in the back
( American Bible Society, ISBN 0-438-05-1109, with Aland given as the editor ) - that particular one cross-lists the Aorist forms of verbs in the dictionary, so one can find them easily.
Also, Langenscheidt's Pocket Greek Dictionary by Dr. Karl Feyerabend, ISBN 0-88729-081-7 is a handy-sized dictionary which claims to include all the words in the GNT as well as the classics.
Smyth's focus is classical Greek - sometimes he does not deal with what developed in koine. It's a great book for reference - but not one to try to work through from paragraph 1 to the end.
For reading the GNT, probably all you'd need at this stage would be "A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament" by Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor - it explains things by book, chapter, and verse.

Happy reading :-)
Shirley Rollinson
Emma Ehrhardt
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Joined: December 23rd, 2014, 10:28 am
Location: IN
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Re: Introduction

Post by Emma Ehrhardt »

For reading environments, I also like http://biblewebapp.com. You can set it up to read Greek alone, or parallel to various translations. Clicking on a Greek word brings up parse information, and often highlights the associate phrase in the parallel passages.
Emma Ehrhardt
Computational Linguist
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