Asides

Many of our readers are likely familiar with another excellent, but no longer available, blog: Old School Script. Chris Fresch, one of our contributors here, joined us from OSS. We have also added the site’s other writer, Kris Lyle, as an author and welcome any contribution or discussion that he might consider making to our humble abode.

OSS closed it doors in 2017 and since then, its delightful essays on Greek, Hebrew, linguistics, and theology have been absent from the world. But no longer. We are excited to announce that we are working on integrating the many excellent essays and blog posts from there into this site.

  • That includes the Scholars in Press interviews series, which both Rachel and my self participated in–and perhaps we will also continue those interviews going forward.
  • The new Hebrew Corner page (above) will slowly be filled with some of OSS excellent Hebrew content, as well as, (hopefully) some new discussion as well.
  • The numerous essays on cognitive linguistic topics, lexical semantics, quantitative methodology, etc. will all be showing up here.

Currently, we’re working on figuring out the best way to go about this. There’s a significant amount of material to go through and organize at the moment. We certainly do not want to simply dump it all at once in such a way that the all gems get lost in the pile.

As plans are solidified for how we roll out this content, you can expect to enjoy a wide variety of lovely reading.

We’re looking toward 2019 and have exciting plans for the future of Koine-Greek.com.

  • First up is the addition of a few more contributors to the site.
  • In conjunction to that, we’re considering adding a Hebrew language corner, though the primary focus will continue to be Greek.
  • We’re hopefully going to have more book reviews
  • We want to expand the number of longform and multi-part essays, too.

In December, we will have more discussion of where we are headed and we will probably be looking for feedback as well.

Stay tuned for more details.

Will Ross and Greg Lanier took some time to answer some questions with Hendrickson Publishers about all the work they put into their Reader’s Edition LXX.

LXX Q&A with Will Ross and Greg Lanier

It’s a really excellent Q&A with them and worth taking a few moments to read.

And aren’t we all just slightly scared by that one time we read through 2 Maccabees? Yeah. Been there.

We’re sad to hear that BibleWorks, after 26 years in business, is coming to an end.

BibleWorks has been serving the church for 26 years by providing a suite of professional tools aimed at enabling students of the Word to “rightly divide the word of truth”. But it has become increasingly apparent over the last few years that the need for our services has diminished to the point where we believe the Lord would have us use our gifts in other ways. Accordingly as of June 15, 2018 BibleWorks will cease operation as a provider of Bible software tools. We make this announcement with sadness, but also with gratitude to God and thankfulness to a multitude of faithful users who have stayed with us for a large part of their adult lives. We know that you will have many questions going forward and we will do our best to answer some of them here.

Over at the front page of their website are all the details and answers to common/potential questions people might have: Bibleworks.com.

 

Brill’s Etymological Dictionary of Greek by Robert Beekes has been sitting quietly on prepublication page at Logos.com for about two and a half years now. It languished for some time, particularly because it was priced, as all Brill books are, exorbitantly high. That seems to have changed recently.

It’s now on pre-order for $104.

rather than, I can’t remember, $299? The original pre-order price was something like that. We have left the realm of astronomically unaffordable and have arrived in the realm of a great deal for 1,808 pages of Greek and proto-Indo-European lexicography.

Etymological dictionaries are a special breed, of course. The mode of operation for their usage diverges from a standard lexicon like BDAG or LSJM. The coverage is more specific to words with a longer history and you crack them open for the purposes of research rather than reading or interpretation of texts. Nevertheless, Beekes’ etymological dictionary is an essential for any serious linguistic research on Greek diachronically or proto-Indo-European more generally.

$104 for a digital version of Beekes? I’m in—especially since I don’t go for using print lexicons any more. Digital is better. Now we just need Peeters to realize this so we can have digital edition of Muraoka’s LXX lexicon, too.

In the meantime, all I can say is: “Well done Brill & Logos.”

There is a lot of significant work on Ancient Greek that came out in the 19th century. Some of it was by native Greek speakers. The challenge is that during that period, the politics of language in Greece was a source of constant debate and argument. Many times the ancient language was used as a meant to prop up one’s understanding of the modern one (or as a cudgel against those whose way of speaking one disapproved of). I picked up this book last year and only recently started reading it. It has been an extremely helpful book and has given insight into the various forces that can have an effect on grammar writing, even when you are seeking to be as objective as possible.

And it’s a stern reminder: Even academic work is not done in a vacuum and it cannot escape the political climate in which it is produced.

Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 by Peter Mackridge

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Looking toward the future of our grammar writing endeavors, we would like to get a better grasp of where the state of knowledge for the average Greek student/scholar.

You can help us. If we can get good results, we’ll put together a few more polls that deal with more specific issues. Your participation will help us gain a better view of what language topics are important to people and which ones need better explanations in grammars.

How well do you feel you understand what Aspect is?

 

 

 

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Robert Crellin’s Ph.D. dissertation is now available in monograph form at an incredibly reasonable price (retail of $40, currently $33 on Amazon) in the Publications of the Philological Society Series.

The syntax and semantics of the perfect active in literary Koine Greek (Amazon)1119243548-1

It’s an excellent piece of research. He and I have some differences on theoretical issues–I do not at all like Klein (1994) Time in Language, which Crellin uses heavily.

That issues aside, however, his conclusions are basically in agreement with my own simply within a different terminology set and framework and I wholeheartedly recommend his work. I’d like to review it at some point, but my writing is pretty busy for now.

Perhaps this fall.

Of course, you can also read my own analysis of the Greek perfect on Academia.edu here: Aubrey (2014) The Greek perfect and the categorization of tense and aspect.

 

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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.