[B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.

Curtis Hinson curtis at curtishinson.com
Thu Mar 29 16:51:42 EST 2007


It's not entirely a benign relationship, either.  While the importance 
of linguistics theory cannot be denied, whether one should or must learn 
linguistics in the formal scientific sense to understand Greek is rather 
like saying one must understand biology to appreciate a beautiful human 
being, or astronomy to appreciate a sunrise.

I've seen students who get bogged down in the linguistics and thus 
entirely miss actually learning the language, loving it, or using it.  
Aren't there students out there who can parse any verb or throw the 
terms around, but can't actually read or speak fluently, or think in the 
language?

I'd say language is not merely a science, but also an art.  Without the 
art, it's dead and cold.  It's rightly a sensual experience, which 
should not be subtracted or discarded.

Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com

John Sanders wrote the following on 3/29/2007 7:42 AM:
> The problem is not the capacity of an individual to learn both, but the 
> efficiency of learning the language.  It appears that linguists are 
> attempting to piggy-back on the teaching of Greek by also teaching 
> linguistics, two for one with no added effort.  One wonders then why 
> Universities do not teach one course instructing calculus, physics and 
> chemistry, easing the work load of science students; or one course for 
> political science, social science, world history and world geography.  It is 
> not the inability of an individual to learn all these different subjects, 
> that they can do, but a "unified field theory" type couse is more 
> efficienctly taught after one has acquired the rudiments of each basic 
> subject.
>
> In addition, although both linguisitics and language learning have a common 
> material to work with, they each have different agenda.  Language learning 
> is developing a skill in commerce with other human beings.   It is an 
> amazing thrill to get into a taxi cab and tell the cabby where you intend to 
> go and how to get there in a different language than your own native tongue, 
> and he (or she) understands and goes there and even starts having a 
> conversation with you, talking about traffic, or the weather, or even 
> politics or religion, whichever is their bent.  Or, for Koine Greek, to open 
> the GNT and start reading a passage and actually comprehending it withour 
> resorting to English (or whatever your own native tongue is).
>
> A kind individual sent the following from the preface from Funk's grammar:
>
> ". . . It is the language itself and not a grammar about that language that 
> the student who wishes to learn to read Greek needs to confront. For that 
> reason, the grammar itself is suppressed wherever possible. And, if modern 
> linguistics is correct in its fundamental affirmations, the one needful 
> thing in learning a new language is familiarity with its grammatical 
> structure. Such familiarity need not be explicit; the learner needs to 
> "know" the structure and structure signals only in the sense that he is 
> able, immediately and without deliberation, to respond to them.". . .   
> traditional grammar might be something apart from the ability to read Greek, 
> in fact, might be an impediment to such ability."
>
> My wife has started to study Chinese herself.  She actually keeps a diary in 
> Chinese.  How many students attempt to keep a diary in Greek, or write their 
> shopping lists in Greek, or write doggerel (spelling?) to a boyfriend or 
> girlfriend.  Instead, I suspect they are putting out meaningless jibberish 
> about overlapping domains of imperfectives with perfectives while the 
> aktionsart of the stative is modifying the lexeme of the following 
> perfective.
>
> I have not seen the impact of linguistics on language instruction in 
> Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese as I have seen it in Biblical Greek.  I 
> conjecture it all began with Erasmus.  When he attempted to reconstruct a 
> "correct pronunciation" of Greek for the classical period, he set in motion 
> a consequence not predictable at the time (or so I think).  What he did was 
> remove Greek (and Latin) from a language spoken by other human beings to one 
> that could be "intellectualized".  In other words, it is not related to 
> actual human commerce, but one that can be treated as if it were caballa (or 
> kaballa, spelling?) and bring in all this gnostic reasoning and get to the 
> real meat behind the GNT (all without having to have real human 
> communication restraining our thinking).
>
> At least that is how it looks to me.
>
> John Sanders
> Suzhou, China
>
>
>   
>> From: James Tauber <jtauber at jtauber.com>
>> To: John Sanders <jfs at jfsanders.com>
>> CC: B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Iterative, Customary, Gnomic, Conative, etc.
>> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:11:48 +0800
>>
>>
>> On 28/03/2007, at 1:33 PM, John Sanders wrote:
>>     
>>> In other words, I think you can sit down and read the GNT in Greek  
>>> without
>>> knowing any of this linguistic theory.
>>>       
>> Yes, but if you truly believe in a distinction between "talking a  
>> language" and "talking about a language" then you'd have to agree  that you 
>> can't adequately talk *about* Greek without knowing the  metalanguage.
>>
>> In other words, while I agree that being able to talk about a  language 
>> doesn't mean you can talk the language, the converse is also  true: just 
>> because you can talk the language doesn't mean you are  able to talk about 
>> it in a clear way.
>>
>>     
>>> I think each of you need to make a decision about why you are  learning 
>>> Koine
>>> Greek, do you want to learn to talk about the Greek, or do you want  to 
>>> "talk
>>> the Greek".
>>>       
>> It's an important distinction (albeit hardly a new one). But anyone  who 
>> has studied linguistics is proof that you can learn both. You  just learn 
>> them differently.
>>
>> James
>> --
>> James Tauber              http://jtauber.com/
>> journeyman of some   http://jtauber.com/blog/
>>
>>     
>
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