Dennis Kenaga Intro

Please introduce yourself here, if you haven't already.
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DennisKenaga
Posts: 6
Joined: July 2nd, 2018, 7:48 pm

Dennis Kenaga Intro

Post by DennisKenaga »

My name is Dennis Kenaga. I live in Lansing, Michigan and am Antiochian Orthodox. I went to university in Germany in the 1960s and started reading the Greek New Testament (GNT) in the 70s. About 15 years ago I started reading the New Testament and LXX with Pastor Stephen Pribble. We were taught the modern Greek pronunciation by a native speaker. Later, Ian Clemens joined us.

One of my jobs was as an SQL quality control programmer and developer, so I bought the GNT database from Paul Miller at Gramcord for purposes of coding syntax. My goal was to answer a number of grammar questions by researching language patterns. I experimented with various linguistic structures and settled on the simplest: a word grammar with head-dependent relations between words, each with a grammatical relation.

Over the years I kept refining it and have completed grammatical relations for about a quarter of the GNT and added other features. I also watched the progress of other electronic syntax projects such as Open Source at McMasters, Cascadia in Logos, and the Leedy diagrams in BibleWorks.

With this database I was able to confirm for our study group a number of Koine constructions that could help answer questions or tell how Greek worked; the goal was to confirm the grammar rules by testing them against the coded sample. Eventually, Ian, who is an IT entrepreneur and project developer, suggested we form a non-profit to make some of the findings of the research available.

We are just getting started with our GNT Grammatical Commentary (GC) which will have diagrams for each verse. We started a website, greeknewtestament.io, and found the b-greek site and thought we would make contact to see if we could network on Greek grammar issues. We like the idea of testing and feedback and think that ideas from others could make the system better. We started looking at your interesting discussions and thought we would try responding with our findings.

I understand that on B-Greek we respond as individuals, not organizations; however, in the posts I will refer to the GC constructions to add statistical support for interpretations.
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