Lexical Fallacies by Linguists

Biblical Greek morphology and syntax, aspect, linguistics, discourse analysis, and related topics
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cwconrad
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Lexical Fallacies by Linguists

Post by cwconrad »

Dan Wallace has some very helpful advice regarding this matter, and it seemed to me that it ought not to be filed away under flash-in-the-pan "cool stuff/seen on the web" -- even if that's what it really is. What he has to say here is every bit pure common sense, but as someone has nicely put it, "Nothing is more uncommon than common sense."

http://danielbwallace.com/2014/12/08/le ... linguists/

There are several comments below the presentation; among them Wallace's own lengthy comment should not be missed.

For what it's worth, I might remark that I remember several years ago how Rod Decker emphasized the necessity of keeping a synchronic focus on Biblical Koine and I responded, "That's fine, but Biblical Koine is a language in flux, and for that reason it's worth having some sense of what elements in it have changed from and how they will change further in later Greek. I'm thinking of things like the less frequent ἀποκρίνασθαι and much more common ἀποκριθῆναι or the alpha-endings on second-aorists. I guess there's something to be said for taking principles seriously but not taking them as inflexible absolutes.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
MAubrey
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Re: Lexical Fallacies by Linguists

Post by MAubrey »

It's good advice.

I would just say that these aren't actually lexical fallacies by linguists, at least, not in the past three decades or so.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Lexical Fallacies by Linguists

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Unfortunately, "synchronic" is sometimes (mis)used as "limited to the NT corpus." I've really rarely seen much if any appeal to non-NT synchronic texts.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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