Month: July 2011

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Updates to lessons 22 and 23

I have updated lessons 22 and 23 (Present and Imperfect Middle/Passive). The changes to lesson 22 are very minor—just a few wording changes. The main change to lesson 23, though, is the deletion of the discussion on transitivity. I will introduce that topic in a later lesson with much better examples. This change helps unnecessary complication, tightening the focus on the issue of voice.

I also made a few changes to the course lexicon (cumulative vocabulary list) to improve entries for some of the verbs presented in these lessons.

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New look for the blog

I changed the theme of the blog today to match more closely with the look of my online grammar. While a few things are in a different place on the screen now, I hope you will enjoy the new look and not find the changes frustrating.

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B-Greek Forum

This is a very late notice of an important change to the most used discussion list related to the Greek text of the New Testament. I thought I had mentioned it before, but it appears I have not.

On May 30, 2011 the B-Greek email list became the B-Greek Forum. (Actually, the change just became public on that day. It had been in the works for some time.) If you are not familiar with B-Greek, I suggest you take a look at http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/. The email list began in 1992 and has for the last 18 years been a very active place for discussion of the Greek texts of the New Testament. I was quite active on that list in the late 1990s, but dropped off the list because of the huge volume of email it produced.

The new forum format avoids that problem, allowing you to read what you want, and easily ignore the topics that don’t interest you.

I help moderate the Greek Language and Linguistics topic in the new forum.

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SBL Greek Langauge and Linguistics Site

On June 30, while I was away at a retreat in the mountains of North Carolina with my daughter, Mike Aubrey announced over at ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ that the Greek Language & Linguistics section of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) has a new website up and running. You can find that site at

http://greeklanguageandlinguistics.wordpress.com/

The site has preliminary abstracts for the papers that will be presented in November.

Here’s what the site says about its purpose:

This site has an informational purpose. While it provides some information from past meetings, it will mainly serve to post announcements about future meetings of the Section at SBL and provide details of the papers to be presented.

This seems to hint that more information on the papers will be forthcoming, but it’s hard to tell.

The Greek Language and Linguistics Section of the SBL holds two sessions at each meeting of the SBL. One is an “Open Session” often presenting papers on a wide variety of topics. The other session is “Thematic,” that is, focused on a single theme. This year’s thematic session will focus on discourse markers. If you are interested in discourse studies and their relation to Linguistics, you will want to read the abstracts for the “Thematic Session.” Follow the link above and scroll down to find them.

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Lesson 23 Temporarily Disabled

I have temporarily disabled lesson 23 (Imperfect Middle and Passive) pending revisions. Thanks to Carl Conrad for pointing out to me by email some clear ways to improve the lesson. I hope it will serve users of the grammar much better after a few key changes.