Why Koine?
Why Koine?
Why teach Koine as a living language, as opposed to Classical Greek (namely, the Attic dialect)? The corpus of Greek literature heavily favours the Classical dialects I would imagine.
-
Mark Lightman
- Posts: 300
- Joined: May 6th, 2011, 6:30 pm
Re: Why Koine?
Hi, Nooj,
1. Many people who are interested in using Living Language methods to increase reading fluency want to read above all the Greek New Testament, which was written in Koine.
2. If you are going to really use Ancient Greek to communicate with real people, the language you use will inevitably have certain features. It will have a simplified word order. It won't use a lot of particles. It will prefer finite verbs to infinitives and participles. It will show some "interference" from your native language. It will prefer words like πλοῖον, which are easy to decline, to words a word like ναυς, which is not. Now, all of these happen to be features of what we call Koine. Of course, if you want to, you can try to develop a spoken language which more closely resembles certain Attic writers. But I'm not sure that this is worth the extra effort. What Buth calls "care taker" Greek is hard enough to learn, and has been shown to be effective at improving reading fluency applied to any dialect or writing style.
1. Many people who are interested in using Living Language methods to increase reading fluency want to read above all the Greek New Testament, which was written in Koine.
2. If you are going to really use Ancient Greek to communicate with real people, the language you use will inevitably have certain features. It will have a simplified word order. It won't use a lot of particles. It will prefer finite verbs to infinitives and participles. It will show some "interference" from your native language. It will prefer words like πλοῖον, which are easy to decline, to words a word like ναυς, which is not. Now, all of these happen to be features of what we call Koine. Of course, if you want to, you can try to develop a spoken language which more closely resembles certain Attic writers. But I'm not sure that this is worth the extra effort. What Buth calls "care taker" Greek is hard enough to learn, and has been shown to be effective at improving reading fluency applied to any dialect or writing style.
Re: Why Koine?
χαῖρε Mark.
If people want to only read the NT or the Septuagint, there's no problem of course. But even if people aren't interested in Greek for its own sake, knowing the context of the Bible would help understand where the writers are coming from. Isn't this why Biblical scholars study the Mediterranean community? Judging from other people's experiences, it seems to me that's it's somewhat harder to transition from Koine to Classical as opposed to the other way around.
If people want to only read the NT or the Septuagint, there's no problem of course. But even if people aren't interested in Greek for its own sake, knowing the context of the Bible would help understand where the writers are coming from. Isn't this why Biblical scholars study the Mediterranean community? Judging from other people's experiences, it seems to me that's it's somewhat harder to transition from Koine to Classical as opposed to the other way around.