In just over a month Rachel and Michael Aubrey will be presenting at the Bible Translation Conference 2023. We will be discussing the ways in which existing biblical language grammars, the ones that biblical scholars use every day in their work in scholarship and classrooms, fail to be effective grammars for minority language Bible translation. You can read our abstract and those of all the other papers being presented here: BTC23 Abstract Compilation.

Long time readers know that we have been thinking and writing about this topic for many years now, including a five part series back in 2020 that served as a significant impetus for this paper. I wanted to give a bit of a hint of some of the themes that we will be discussing next month. Not all of the content below will be in our presentation, but it is all connected to the larger article we are working on.

Biblical language linguistics & research

Nathan Yowano, a local translator in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, speaks of his experience studying Hebrew for himself at the Pacific Institute of Languages, Arts and Translation (PILAT). He describes the ways that getting education in the Biblical languages benefits him directly in his personal life and in his work.

This course really helped me as a Christian. When I look at the church there are many translations of the Bible – many versions in English, and in Tok Pisin, too – but because I took this course, I can now go straight to the original. In the Highlands we grow coffee and there are middlemen – factory buyers offer a different price to the middlemen – but in this course I can go straight to the original language that God used for the Bible – that is something else! I was very happy to come and am looking forward to coming back for further training.*

* This quote is from the stories page on PILAT’s website. PILAT is using communicative language methods for Hebrew and Greek.

Now, we do not highlight Nathan’s words to suggest that we are working on a new communicative learning tool (many others better equipped for that are already doing a superb job), but rather to raise two important questions about the grammars that exist for translation: Who do biblical language grammars serve today? Who do they need to serve in the future?

“A grammar is a communicative act”

Most existing biblical language grammars are in English. They are also grammars for English. Grammars for English are not grammars for Bible translation. Existing biblical language grammars are not accessible. These are grammars in and for English are full of the jargon of their tradition. As such, they are written using a metalanguage that linguists and translators do not understand. Additionally, such grammars in and for English are not asking the same questions Bible translators are asking.

Grammar teaching operates with the goal of squeezing Greek or Hebrew grammatical patterns into English grammar. It is far from uncommon to hear students, or even teachers, make statements like: “I never fully understood English grammar until I studied Greek”. William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar (Mounce 2019), one of the most commonly used textbooks in North America for teaching the language, helps illustrate this point in his introduction:

At the beginning of most chapters there is an “Exegetical Insight” based on a biblical passage. … Next comes a discussion of English grammar and then a summary of Greek grammar where I make as many comparisons as possible between English and Greek, with an emphasis on the similarities between the two languages (2019, xv).

Elsewhere, beginning his chapters on Greek nouns, he writes, “As strange as it may seem, the first major obstacle many of you must overcome is your lack of knowledge of English grammar. For whatever reasons, many do not know enough English grammar to learn Greek grammar. I cannot teach about the Greek nominative case until you know what a case is. You must learn to crawl before walking.” (2019: 27). If a grammar is a communicative act, then Mounce is already admitting that in English-speaking classrooms, communication is already breaking down.

Later on, discussing non-verbal predication, Mounce comments, “It is incorrect English to say, ‘The teacher is me,’ regardless of current usage, because ‘me’ is objective while ‘I’ is subjective. We should say, ‘The teacher is I.’” (2019: 69). This is not only Greek grammar for English grammar, but also a specific one: a prescriptive “grade school” English grammar. This means that in a global context, even in nations where English functions as a language of wider communication (LWC), these extra traditional rules function as an additional barrier. Teaching Greek from Mounce in the context of global Englishes would produce substantial challenges. This also has consequences. We do not expect Mounce or any other traditional biblical scholar to fill this gap, but we need to, as a community of scholars, recognize and acknowledge publicly that this gap exists.

Nevertheless, the larger point here involves how many standard grammars deal with actual Greek (or Hebrew) grammatical description and to that issue we now turn with a case study. In all these grammars (and this is true, whether the grammar is a reference grammar or teaching grammar), the language of description sets the tone for the contents. Payne (2010) argued that the process of grammar writing ought to be viewed by the writer as a communicative act in the vein of speech act theory. Rather than attempting to write a grammar as a logical machine (Payne 2010: 130), the writer needs to decide what communication they want to attempt and for what audience. Payne emphasizes the implications for grammar writing when this position is taken:

Like all communicative acts, its communicative effectiveness will be derived from the interaction of the information presented, and the context available to the audience. (Payne 2010: 141).

We would take that position a step farther. Payne is primarily focused on making recommendations to those working in language documentation to make their grammars as effective as possible. He juxtaposes the grammar-machine as one metaphor for grammar writing to his own grammar as speech-act. But of course, there is no true logic machine grammar. Even those that claim to be the most scientific are written in a context and are defined by “the information presented, and the context available to the audience” (2010: 141). The so-called scientific or scholarly grammar has a communicative context, but that context has the privilege of being the default, presupposed without question or examination.

In Biblical Greek and Hebrew, the communicative act of grammar writing from the first-year teaching grammar through the 900-page reference grammar has the purpose of progressively integrating students and scholars into a research tradition that focuses on academic publishing and training primarily for the pastorate. Both Greek and Hebrew grammar writing have such a tradition and students as they learn are expected to participate in that tradition. Together, the language and the tradition influence descriptive decisions. These are perfectly legitimate goals: students coming into biblical studies most certainly do need to be able to engage with their scholarly community: read the commentaries, the articles, and monographs. It makes perfect sense for language classrooms to work to maintain continuity between the past and the present.

Still, grounding language resources in terms of English also causes troubles, as Waltke and O’Connor (1990) astutely observe with regard to Hebrew lexicons:

Because English and other European-language verbal systems are impoverished in morphological treatments of transitivity, causativity, and reflexitivity [sic], most modern Hebrew lexicons also fail to show adequately the subtle differences in meaning among the verbal stems (1990, 139).

In a comparable way, Greek grammars in English tend to say very little about the Greek gender system beyond that it exists and that every noun has gender (e.g., Decker 2019). Intermediate grammars might just assume the existence of grammatical gender is basic information and just not discussed at all (e.g., Wallace 1997). Greek grammars in German tend to say more, since German also has a gender system, where there is an awareness that there are semantic categorization patterns in gender systems. This is clear from how an advanced or reference grammar written first for English presents gender. Siebenthal (2011) even in his English translation/revision (Siebenthal 2019, 50) discusses the semantics of Greek gender/word classes and some sense of the categories of entities included in them, provided in‎ Table 1:

Gender:	Typically refers to:
masculine	male beings (human/non-human) as well as inanimate entities such as (especially) rivers  or streams, winds, months, e.g. ὁ Ἰορδάνης the Jordan, ὁ Κεδρών the Kidron, ὁ νότος the south wind, ὁ Ξανθικὀς [the month of] Xanthikos (2Macc 11:30), but also to abstract concepts, e.g. ὁ ἁγιασμός sanctification
feminine	female beings (human/non-human) as well as inanimate entities such as (especially) fruit-trees, countries, islands, cities, e.g. ἡ συκῆ The fig-tree, ἡ Ζυρία Syria, ἡ Κύπρος Cyprus, ἡ Αντιόχεια Antioch, but also to abstract concepts, e.g. ἡ πίστις faith
neuter	phenomena without natural gender, fairly frequently also to male or female beings in diminutives, e.g. τὸ θυγάτριον the little daughter, but also to abstract concepts, e.g. τὸ θέλημα what is willed.

These brief observations are still short of the vast account of grammatical gender in modern languages, but they do well to illustrate the point. The needs of a German audience for an Ancient Greek grammar are different in many ways from those of an English audience. The language of description affects the end product because it changes the audience.

Languages of description, for grammars and lexicons, function as part of the context available to the audience and necessarily establish the perspective through which any given grammar must or can be read. Their own linguistic structures contribute to how information about Greek and Hebrew are framed and presented. Siebenthal (2019) understands this. He made substantive changes between the (2011) German edition and the (2019) English translation. He emphases how audience affects grammar presentation in his English preface:

It was clear to me from the outset that a straightforward translation would be of limited value only. A fairly thoroughgoing revision was definitely called for. Above all it would have to do justice to the special background from which typical English-speaking users will approach Ancient Greek, a language whose structure is so radically different from Modern English particularly regarding the nominal and the verbal systems. So, although the AGG in its substance is the same as the German original, its explanations are quite different due to the many adjustments to the needs of the prospective users (including bibliographical ones) (Siebenthal 2019: xvii).

Siebenthal intuited this insight into how languages of description influence the grammatical description itself and adapted as needed—he recognized both that grammar is a communicative act and also that the language of description and the language of the audience contributes something to the communicative context.

Of course, grammatical gender might seem like a fairly simple example, perhaps even one without much interpretive import. It is possible that some people, particularly English speakers, might not be convinced that it is a grammatical category that really matters for Bible translation—this is perhaps why Wallace (1997) does not seem interested to include it in his “Exegetical Syntax.” Yet surely that ought to be a decision for the people working in these target languages rather than western scholars. We should not be the ones who decide and gate keep what elements of grammar are or are not relevant for other communities who desire to engage with the Bible through the Biblical languages.

These are all themes that Rachel Aubrey and myself are tackling in our paper at the Bible Translation Conference this coming October. We know some of you will be there and we hope you come here our paper. Otherwise, we will have it recorded and on YouTube toward the end of October, 2023.

Cited.

Mounce, William D. 2019. Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar. Fourth Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Payne, Thomas L. 2010. “A grammar as a communicative act, or what does a grammatical description really describe?”. In Thomas L. Payne and Devier J. Webber (eds.), Perspectives on grammar writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Siebenthal, Heinrich von. 2011. Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament. Gießen; Basel: Brunnen Verlag; Immanuel-Verlag.

Siebenthal, Heinrich von. 2019. Ancient Greek grammar for the study of the New Testament. New York: Peter Lang.

Waltke, Bruce K. & Michael Patrick O’Connor. 1990. An introduction to biblical Hebrew syntax. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.