GreekLinguistics.com and Greek-Language.com

The domain name greeklinguistics.com, which for some time now has worked as an alias for greek-language.com, will be out of service for a few days as we make the move to a more secure web server. I will be using the name greeklinguistics.com to set up the new server and test the site to ensure that everything works well before everything goes live there.

You should not experience any disruption of service as long as you use the address greek-language.com. If you try to go to greeklinguistics.com, you may notice glitches or the site may refuse to load. Just be patient. We will get there!

Monosemy and Polysemy in Biblical Studies: A Minimalist Basis for Empirical Analysis of the Biblical Languages

Ryder Wishart has completed a masters thesis that fits very well into the category of works applying concepts from the field of Linguistics to the study of Ancient Greek. His theses has a broader focus on the biblical languages more generally, but the application to Greek is of direct relevance for the community here at Greek-Language.com.

I have added Wishart’s thesis to the bibliography where you will find a link to download a copy from Academia.edu if you would like.

Congratulations to Ryder for completing this work!

A Linguistic Analysis of the Articular Infinitive in New Testament Greek

Dennis Ray Burk DissertationI have added Dennis Ray Burk’s doctoral dissertation “A linguistic analysis of the articular infinitive in New Testament Greek” to the bibliography.

Dr. Burk wrote this dissertation in 2004, and the data he compiled has contributed positively to the ongoing development of open data resources.

If you have other works that you would like to see included in A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics, you can check the criteria for inclusion and make a suggestion by clicking the bibliography link at the top of any page on this blog.

Improving the Online Grammar

Alphabet StoneI would like to thank those of you who, over the last several years, have submitted suggestions for improving the online grammar here at Greek-Language.com.

I have added a link to a new report page at the top of every lesson and at the top of the table of contents to make doing this easier. Keep the suggestions coming, and it will make the grammar more useful for everyone.

Alan Bunning's Textual Criticism Resources

cntriconforhamepageI’ve updated the homepage to give more prominent placement to Alan Bunning’s Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR). The transcriptions of New Testament manuscripts he has provided are amazing. Having these available in machine-actionable form is an incredible boon to the work of textual criticism!

I linked the image on the homepage directly to the manuscripts page at CNTR rather than the project homepage to give quick access to the carefully aligned transcriptions. Once you get there, though, the menu at the top of the page gives you quick access to the project’s homepage and other resources to help you understand the transcriptions and the process used to produce them.

We all owe sincere thanks to Alan for his careful and thorough work.

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.

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.

 

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.