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Jonathan Burke

Posted: July 27th, 2011, 4:04 pm
by Jonathan_Burke
I'm Jonathan Burke, director at a corporate training company, and PhD student at Taiwan National University of Science and Technology. I took two years of Greek and a year and a half of Latin during my Bachelor of Arts degree (double Classics major). Having lived in Taiwan for the last seven years, I wish I had taken Chinese instead. I have found my Greek of some use in my Biblical studies, but I haven't used it formally for many years.

I very rarely have a need for personal skill in Greek, which is fortunate because the two years for which I studied it successfully dissuaded me from studying it for any longer (my tolerance for Latin, and even more dreadful language, was still lower). However, I remain interested in the language from the point of view of its relevance to Biblical translation and its usefulness when I am studying certain original source language texts for my historical studies. The remains of my original skill in Greek are now (thirteen years later), very fragmented. Last year I was delighted to find I could read a passage in Dittenberger's Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (1915-20), the meaning of which was important to my studies, but I struggled to parse a passage of Galen I was looking at recently.