Author: Micheal Palmer

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The Greek Verb Revisited

Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch have edited the papers from the Greek Verb Conference in Cambridge last year into a new volume entitled The Greek Verb Revisited. The book is available as an e-book from LOGOS or as a paperback from Amazon.com. You can preorder from Amazon, and the book will ship when supplies come arrive.

Scholars representing the fields of Linguistics, Classics, and New Testament Studies have contributed chapters, creating a valuable collection from a wide range of perspectives.

The contributors include:

  • Rutger J. Allan (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
  • Michael Aubrey (Faithlife Corporation)
  • Rachel Aubrey (Canada Institute of Linguistics, Trinity Western University)
  • Randall Buth (Biblical Language Center)
  • Robert Crellin (Faculty of Classics, Cambridge)
  • Nicholas J. Ellis (BibleMesh)
  • Buist Fanning (Dallas Theological Seminary)
  • Christopher J. Fresch (Bible College of South Australia)
  • Peter J. Gentry (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
  • Geoffrey Horrocks (Faculty of Classics, Cambridge)
  • Patrick James (The Greek Lexicon Project; Faculty of Classics, Cambridge)
  • Stephen H. Levinsohn (SIL International)
  • Amalia Moser (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
  • Christopher J. Thomson (University of Edinburgh)
  • Elizabeth Robar (Tyndale House, Cambridge)
  • Steven E. Runge (Lexham Research Institute; Stellenbosch University)

Mike Aubrey, one of the contributors, announced this publication on his blog back in September. I decided to post a notice here to add my recommendation that you purchase it!

 

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γραφὴ ζῶσα

Γραφὴ Ζῶσα ICON 3 x 2-and-a-half inchesOn November 19 in the 1:00 pm session of the Global Education and Research Technology section of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in San Antonio, Jonathan Robie and I will present our ongoing work on a communicative Koine Greek course. I would love to see you there.

Here is the abstract of our talk.

Γραφὴ ζῶσα is a freely licensed communicative Koine Greek course centered on the text of the New Testament. It is currently in early stages. In this talk, we will present sample lessons as they would be used in a classroom or online, discussing how they are developed and presented, and the adaptations required for online presentation.

We believe that the main goal of language acquisition should be comprehension rather than translation, and that the main focus for biblical Greek should be the text of the New Testament and the Septuagint. Therefore, we are designing a communicative language course that revolves around biblical texts, asking and answering questions about these texts in Greek both orally and in writing, using approaches commonly used in ESL and SSL classes to make the texts accessible to students.

We believe that there are many people who want to learn Greek but have no teacher, and many people who have learned at least basic Greek but have no experience with communicative approaches and cannot themselves produce the materials they would need to teach a class. Therefore, we focus on producing materials that can be used to teach others communicatively, in the hope that former students will dust off their Greek, teach others, and form small learning communities who can teach and learn from each other. These materials include teacher workbooks and student workbooks, videos for teachers who want to learn how to teach a class, and videos for students who do not have access to a teacher.

We believe that systematic instruction is important, tracking vocabulary and grammatical structures to ensure that we teach the things that a student needs to learn. We also believe that text-based instruction reveals the importance of teaching some things not typically taught in introductory courses, but common in the texts that we read. The ability to generate large numbers of examples that illustrate specific concepts by querying syntactic treebanks and other sources is crucial to our approach, ensuring that we can provide adequate practice using authentic ancient texts.

Join us in San Antonio, TX for a lively discussion of this approach. If you plan on attending, but are not yet registered for the SBL conference, click here.

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A Treebank-Based Study of Subject-Verb Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in Ancient Greek

 

Journal of Greek LinguisticsAn article in the current issue of the Journal of Greek Linguistics by Francesco Mambrini and Marco Passarotti illustrates well the tremendous benefit provided by the development of electronic treebanks for the Ancient Greek data. Mambrini and Passarotti examine subject-verb agreement with coordinated subjects and bring to bear on the problem a breath of data that would have proved inaccessible only a short time ago.

Whether or not you agree with Mambrini and Passarotti’s conclusions (that partial agreement—where one of the coordinated subjects rather than the entire coordinated phrase controls the number of the verb—is “more than a mere deviation from a rigid syntactic behavior” and that “semantic and discursive factors influence the choice” between possible controllers of the verb’s number), you now have the amass a very large amount of data to argue with them, and the tools needed to amass that data are much more available than they were even a few years ago.

Mambrini and Passarotti used two annotated treebanks. The Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT), part of the larger Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank (AGLDT), was created in 2009 and is the first syntactically annotated corpus of Greek literary texts of the Archaic (Homer, etc.) and Classical Age (Bamman et al. 2009).  is a project from the University of Oslo that provides aligned treebanks that can assist with translations of the New Testament in a broad spectrum of Indo-European languages (Haug and Jøhndal 2008). In addition to the New Testament, though, PROIEL includes a selection of other prose texts. The morphological and syntactic annotation of Herodotus, for example, is ongoing.

Mambrini and Passarotti’s use of these syntactic treebanks foreshadows what is certain to be the norm in future research on Ancient Greek. We are all greatly indebted to those who have put the time into developing the databases that will serve and greatly expand our research in the decades to come.

I’ve added the article to A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics.

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Epigraphy Page

Ancient Greek resources on the internet are in a constant state of change, with pages moving to new locations and new tools being added from time to time. Over the past few days I have updated the epigraphy page to correct links, update descriptions, and hopefully make the page more useful. Check it out to see what you think.

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GreekCNTR.org

CNTRIt is with great delight that I can now announce the launch of an updated version of The Center for New Testament Restoration with hosting support through Greek-Language.com.

We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Alan Bunning for making his resources freely available online. I am proud to be able to support his work by giving those materials a home here at http://cntr.greek-language.com. While it is possible to access Alan’s materials at that address, though, to avoid confusion, I recommend that you bookmark them at his new domain name: http://greekcntr.org. You will see exactly the same resources at both addresses.

The Center for New Testament Restoration provides a wealth of data on manuscript readings in a very user-friendly format. If you are interested in textual criticism and have not yet discovered this resource, you should take the time to get to know it.

Here’s what Alan had to say in his announcement earlier today:

Announcing that the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) website has been updated with several significant improvements. The most notable being the move from the unreliable free web hosting services I have been using, to a more permanent home at http://greekcntr.org. Please update your links accordingly. Many thanks to Micheal Palmer for providing services to host this website under his Greek-Language.com domain.

As has been eagerly awaited for some time, all CNTR transcriptions have now been released in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML format for free download under a Creative Commons license. Realize that these transcriptions are still a work in progress, so derivative works will not be allowed until later when more of the bugs have been worked out of the system.

Besides this, there have also been many other bug fixes and improvements in the manuscript transcriptions which are listed under the News tab. In particular, the position of the words in the collation has significantly improved due to a new and improved alignment algorithm.

Let me know if you see any errors or can suggest any improvements. Feedback is welcome as I look to improve this valuable resource and make the constructs of the New Testament free and accessible to all.

 

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The Greek Verbal System and Aspect Prominence

A new article by Nicholas J. Ellis, Michael G. Aubrey, and Mark Dubis has recently appeared in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society discussing the need for revising the terms we use to discuss the Greek verbal system. You can download the article from Academia.edu.

Their proposals have grown out of the work they have done with BibleMesh and are influenced by the work of other scholars such as Stephen H. Levinsohn and Randall Buth as well as conversations with Christopher Fresch and Steve Runge.

Here is the abstract:

Verbal systems can give prominence to tense, aspect, or mood. The morphology of the verbal system within biblical Greek provides important evidence to suggest that Greek is an aspect-prominent language, though one that also incorporates tense within the indicative mood. Certain traditional grammatical labels inappropriately treat Greek as though it were instead a tense-prominent language like English (e.g. the use of “present” or “tense formative” outside of the indicative mood). We need to reform our descriptive labels and general conception of Greek accordingly. In doing so, the simplicity and beauty of the Greek verbal system emerges, offering pedagogical advantages for teachers of Greek and challenging exegetes to properly account for Greek’s particular configuration of tense, aspect, and mood.

The well-informed discussion Ellis, Aubrey, and Dubis provide is long overdue. The terminology we use to label particular forms and their usage play a large role in informing interpretation of those forms. More accurate nomenclature will lead to better understanding and greater efficiency in describing the language.

I have added this article to the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com with notes to the names of each of the authors.

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Inheritance and Inflectional Morphology

LeBlanc, Inheritance and Inflectional MorphologyIn Inheritance and Inflectional Morphology MaryEllen A. LeBlanc addresses inflectional morphology in four languages: Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek. The section on Koine Greek comes in the sixth chapter (of eight). This is volume 94 of Peter Lang’s “Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics.”

The book is an updated version of LeBlanc’s doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of California Berkeley in the Spring of 2014.

Here’s the abstract from Peter Lang:

Inheritance, which has its origins in the field of artificial intelligence, is a framework focusing on shared properties. When applied to inflectional morphology, it enables useful generalizations within and across paradigms. The inheritance tree format serves as an alternative to traditional paradigms and provides a visual representation of the structure of the language’s morphology. This mapping also enables cross-linguistic morphological comparison.
In this book, the nominal inflectional morphology of Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek are analyzed using inheritance trees. Morphological data is drawn from parallel texts in each language; the trees may be used as a translation aid to readers of the source texts as an accompaniment to or substitute for traditional paradigms. The trees shed light on the structural similarities and differences among the four languages.

The dissertation is available in two different places online:

I’ve added the book to the online bibliography.

 

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Reflections on Lexicography: Explorations in Ancient Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek Sources

ReflectionsOnLexicographySix articles from the recent Gorgias Press release of Reflections on Lexicography: Explorations in Ancient Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek Sources deal specifically with Hellenistic Greek Lexicography. This volume was produced for the International Syriac Language Project. Here is a list of the papers in the section entitled “Reflections on Greek Lexicography.”

  • A Linguistic-Cultural Approach to Alleged Pauline and Lukan Christological Disparity (Frederick William Danker) (page 267)
  • Contextual Factors in the Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament (DGENT) (Jesús Peláez) (page 289)
  • The Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament (DGENT): Meaning and Translation of the Lexemes; Some Practical Examples (Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta) (page 301)
  • The Genitive Absolute in Discourse: More Than a Change of Subject (Margaret G. Sim) (page 313)
  • Now and Then: Clarifying the Role of Temporal Adverbs as Discourse Markers (Steven E. Runge) (page 327)
  • ‘Therefore’ or ‘Wherefore’: What’s the Difference? (Stephen H. Levinsohn) (page 349)

This volume is number 4 in Gorgias Press’ series, Perspectives on Linguistics and Ancient Languages.

I have added these articles to the online bibliography.

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Structural Lexicology and the Greek New Testament

I have added Todd Price’s Structural Lexicology and the Greek New Testament: Applying Corpus Linguistics for Word Sense Possibility Delimitation Using Collocational Indicators to the bibliography.

The book was published in 2015 by Gorgias Press and sells for $180 at Amazon.com.

I do not own a copy of the book (due to the price!), but here’s what I’ve gleaned from the abstract provided by the publisher and available in the Library of Congress online catalog. If you own a copy of the book, feel free to tell me how far off I am!

ToddPriceBook

Price’s book addresses both lexical meaning and phrase-level meaning in context. After introducing the concept of structural lexicology as developed through the use of computational linguistics, computational lexicography and corpus linguistics, Price explains his method for determining the contextual meaning of New Testament Greek words and phrases through an analysis of their collocations (with what other words does word x tend to appear?), colligations (in its various contexts, with what kinds of words does word x tend to hold grammatical relationships?) and semantic preferences (with what words does word x share key elements of meaning?). His approach emphasizes defining words in context by disambiguating their possible meanings.

He argues, uncontroversially, that an analysis of large (digital) corpora of Hellenistic Greek can advance our understanding of lexical semantics, and he includes numerous case studies in the Greek New Testament applying his method to exegetically problematic texts.