Author: michaelaubrey

David A. Black, in his Sunday morning blog post (you’ll need to scroll for it–April 23, 8:30AM) mused about the possibility of hosting a Greek linguistics conference at Southern Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He asked for feedback on the idea and since I was mentioned in the post directly, I thought I should take a moment and provide some. He brought up several issues and I have given them headings below:

Topics to Cover?

Dr. Black mentioned a number of possible topics that such an event could cover:

  • Lexical semantics
  • The usefulness of “semantic domains”
  • Verbal aspect theory
  • Developing oral competency in Greek
  • The place of electronic tools in Greek pedagogy
  • Replacing the Erasmian pronunciation
  • Deponency
  • Discourse analysis
  • Linguistic “schools”

Some of these topics are very large and general (lexical semantics), while others are very specific (replacing the Erasmian pronunciation). If the goal is deal examine multiple topics, then it would probably be useful to create a sense of equal footing in terms of how they related to linguistics hierarchically. Something like this might work:

  • Lexical semantics
    • Semantic domains
  • Morphosyntax/semantics
    • Tense & Aspect
    • Voice
    • Predicate types
  • Pedagogy
    • Oral competency
    • Electronic tools
    • Pronunciation
  • Linguistic Theory
    • Discourse analysis
    • Linguistic schools/frameworks

Things worth adding?

Probably syntax, at the very least.

  • Syntax
    • Valance/Argument structure
    • Syntactic treebanks & their frameworks
    • Problems with discontinuous structures

I would also probably want to add to the Lexical Semantics section:

  • Polysemy-monosemy
  • Metaphor theory

And to the Linguistic theory section:

  • perspectives on diachronic and synchronic analysis
  • The relevance of language typology to grammatical analysis
  • Perspectives on method in grammatical analysis

Another issue that come to mind that wouldn’t necessarily neatly fit elsewhere would be: the importance of using a corpus larger than the New Testament and then also the need for open research data beyond merely published prose.

Those ideas are just off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more if I sat down and really thought about it. That is part of the problem. There is so much to do. Most of the time, my concern is that NT scholars are so incredible caught up in the debates and the controversies that we lose sight of everything else that needs to be done.

The other difficulty is this: It would be possible to have a conference on any individual one of these topics listed above and still never do much more than scratch the surface.

Who should participate?

For my own part, I would be quite interested, though I am also aware that I continue to lack the traditional qualifications. Still, I have dedicated the past ten years to participating in many of these discussions online and I certainly have a vested interest. I think it would be wise to also include the people in the Biblical Humanities community. Beyond that, I’m not sure that I’m in a position to suggest participants.

Papers or Discussion Groups?

When I attended the Biblical languages and Technology workshop at the Lorentz Centre in 2012, we had a mix of both. Invited papers, followed by discussion groups. The downside to that approach was that you had to choose a topic from amongst the papers. That was not always easy. Then after the discussion groups, we came back together and effectively shared our findings. The structure of the event might be something you would want to hold off on decided on until after the topic or topics were established.

 

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I recently got an e-mail notification that Robert Beekes’* (2010)  Etymological Dictionary of Greek has received quite a dramatic price drop on its Logos.com prepublication page (link).

Going from over $500 downs down to a much more comfortable $105. This price change on the part of Logos.com moves their pricing from that of the hardcover edition’s $550 (Amzon for reference) to just under the softcover pricing of $120 (Amzon for reference).

Beekes Logos

That puts the price on par with most other Greek lexicons. And it’s a lexicon that is definitely worth the time of anyone studying Ancient Greek. Those us of who study the Greek of the Hellenistic and koine period of the language need to stop pretending that diachronic linguistics doesn’t apply to them.

Syncronic analysis is essential and important, but language does not exist in a vaccuum. Syncronic language systems do not just ex nihilo. They came from somewhere. Of course, Saussure’s chess metaphor tells us that we do not need to know the history to analyze the current state of the game. That is still true. In choosing chess, Saussure certainly knew that the paths a game can take are regular and even predictable. We may not need to know the history, but the history has much to offer in terms of insight into why the syncronic system is what it is. Moreover, when it comes to language, there is no true syncronic system. At any given point, there is a multiplicity of them, from person to person, from speech community to speech community, and from region to region. Each is affected by the language’s history in ever so slightly different ways.

In light of that, Beekes’ dictionary is probably the most important Greek reference work in the past ten years. LSJ etymologies are, at best, many decades old without correction. At their worst, they literally centuries old, and pre-laryngeal theory** (Brief overview here: The Laryngeal Theory***, or see Wikipedia).

Coming back to the price change, this is an excellent move. In print, both the hardcover and paperback editions are massive, but only the the hardcover has a binding designed to handle the weight of the text block. The paperback is effectively a throwaway print-on-demand copy. That’s frustrating given its high price. The new pricing of the digital edition solves that problem while also providing a lot more functionality at the same time.

*for reference to my non-Dutch readers (probably the majority), the correct pronuncation of Beekes in IPA is: [ˈbeːkəs]

**fun fact: While NT scholars love proclaiming the rise of syncronic language study by pointing to Saussure, most of them do not realize that Saussure is of the great giants of Proto-Indo-European studies and the laryngeal theory is predicated on his groundbreaking work.

***it’s probably worth a moment, additionally, to give a shout out to the excellent library of online editions of Winfred P. Lehmann’s books on Indo-European linguistics and language typology, provide by the University of Texas at Austin’s Linguistics Research Center: Indo-European Languages and Historical Linguistics.

Martin Haspelmath has an interesting piece about the intersection between grammar writing and typology on his website, responding to a recent article in the journal Linguistic Typology:

Should descriptive grammars be “typologically informed”, and what does this mean?

The thrust of the post is probably this quote here:

“While the language documenter’s and describer’s work is no doubt “greatly enhanced” by knowing about typology, are description and comparison also part of the same enterprise? I have argued that they are not, even though they are of course mutually beneficial (Haspelmath 2016). The difference is that description relies exclusively on language-internal distribution (Croft 2001), while comparison relies on substantively defined semantic and/or formal concepts.”

As someone currently working on a grammar project, this is food for thought. It seems to me that there’s a case to be made for a greater inclusion of typological information in a grammar depending on the intended audience. The intended audiences of writing a grammar of a well-known language vs. the writing of a grammar of a heretofore undocumented language are going to be different.

(also: Happy Easter!)