Ancient Greek, mostly Hellenistic
Louis Sorenson has produced a nice reading of the first nine chapters of Mark’s Gospel following Westcott and Hort’s 1881 text using the Restored Koine pronunciation. His Let’s Read Greek website has numerous helpful resources for reading Greek texts. This is one among many.
I’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.
James Tauber has published a short video explaining the accentuation of Ancient Greek words in a way that is more precise than what is found in beginning grammars that deal with the issue. If you don’t follow the argument fully, just watch a second time.
If you have never studied Greek accents before, here are some terms that may help you understand the video:
Syllable Positions
ultima = the last syllable in a Greek word
penult = second to last syllable
antepenult = third to last syllable
Accentuation Patterns:
oxytone = an acute accent (´) on the ultima
paroxytone = an acute accent on the penult
proparoxytone = an acute accent on the antepenult
perispomenone = a circumflex accent (῀) on the ultima
properispomenone = a circumflex accent on the penult
Thank you, James.
NOTE ADDED April 14, 2023: The following notice, published in 2016, remains here for historical reasons, but the domain name GreekLanguage.blog is no longer valid. I no longer own the domain name “GreekLanguage.blog”, and you cannot access this blog from there. The “Greek-Language.com/grklinguist” address still works, and it redirects to the secure homepage of this blog (blog.greek-language.com).
You can now access this blog by typing GreekLanguage.blog into the address bar at the top of your browser. GreekLanguage.blog and Greek-Language.com/grklinguist now point to the same place.
I have added Paul Danove’s New Testament Verbs of Communication: A Case Frame and Exegetical Study to the bibliography.
Danove has been developing his Case Frame analysis since the mid 1990s, and along the way he has contributed significantly to our understanding of the argument structure of Hellenistic Greek verbs. It is good to see this new addition.
I have added The Greek Verb Revisited to the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com. Each of the papers contained in the book now also has its own entry in the bibliography.
I just found out today that the book is available for Kindle. You can read it on any device with the Kindle app.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow (November 19, 2016)! Jonathan Robie and I will present our ongoing work on the communicative Koine Greek course, γραφὴ ζῶσα. Our presentation will take place at the 1:00 pm session of the Global Education and Research Technology section of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).
We will demonstrate the results of combining technology with best practices in second language instruction, where even an ancient language can become a living language for those acquiring it.
We are in San Antonio, TX with a very large number of Biblical Scholars, but our presentation will attract mainly Linguists, Greek Teachers, Software Engineers, and Open Data Geeks. The American Academy of Religion (AAR) is also meeting here. The SBL and the AAR have jointly coordinated their national meetings for many years.
We would love to see you at 1:00 in room 209 of the Convention Center.
If you are interested in Open Source software or Open Data projects for the Biblical languages, I would like to recommend the following sessions at SBL:
For more about Open Data in Biblical Studies, visit http://biblicalhumanities.org/.
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)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!
On 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.