Greek Language and Linguistics
Ancient Greek, mostly Hellenistic
Seumas Macdonald has posted a great discussion of a problem facing many who are using communicative methods to teach Ancient Greek in institutions that require students to know the traditional metalanguage for talking about Greek rather than simply speaking Greek. I highly recommend it.
You can find the post here.
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Richard Wilson, designer of LaParola.net, for the work he has put into producing an online reader for the Greek New Testament complete with variant readings.
What is particularly outstanding about the site is that it is based on the work of many people committed to open resources. For morphological tagging, for example, he uses James Tauber’s MorphGNT. The Greek text is the SBLGNT (not completely open source, but open enough to allow what LaParola is doing with it). And Wilson has also provided access to Westcott and Hort (1881) and Tischendorf (8th edition; 1869-1872) drawing on open source materials, and he has even made it possible to embed these materials in other websites.
This is a real gift to the wider community.
Kevin Madden has written a helpful review of Randall Buth’s Living Koiné, Part One. His review even has a video of the first lesson.
If you are interested in learning Biblical Greek, and you want to know how it sounded at the time of Jesus, you will probably enjoy these materials tremendously. Using drawings and audio, Buth employs a method commonly found in books on modern languages. It’s a great way to internalize the language!
Thank you Wray Bryant, for pointing out the following bibliography of Greek Palaeography. While it does not apply a particular variety of Modern Linguistics to the study of Hellenistic Greek (the criteria for inclusion in the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com), it is certainly of value to anyone interested in the history of writing in Greek.
The bibliography is available at Academia.edu. Log in (or sign up for a free account), then paste the following link into your browser:
https://www.academia.edu/14070939/Papaioannou_Greek_Palaeography_and_Byzantine_Book_Culture_A_Bibliographical_Essay_Version_3_Updated_and_Revised_June_2015_along_with_Descriptions_of_Minuscule_Hands
Enjoy.
Mike Aubrey has uploaded his anxiously awaited thesis to Academia.edu:
Click on the title to download a copy or read it online.
Mike has posted two reflections on his blog that you will find very helpful as you read his thesis. I’ve included links to those reflections below along with what he says about their value:
If you’re a Greek student/scholar. I would encourage you to read the two posts dedicated to discussing my thesis. This is because it’s not a work that’s oriented toward biblical scholars [or] to classicists. It’s a work by a linguist for linguists. The two posts I’ve put up […] on my blog are designed to provide some orientation for people whose primary interest is Greek rather than linguistics proper.
Part I: Challenges in language analysis: thesis prefatory material
Part II: Thesis Prefatory Material: A Narrative Account
Here’s the abstract that Mike included on Academia.edu:
This thesis attempts to expand the theoretical and methodological basis for operators within Role and Reference Grammar for purposes of language description, using the Greek perfect as a test case. This requires first examining the current theoretical and methodological approach to tense and aspect in RRG and its strengths and weaknesses. Here I demonstrate that while some areas of RRG have a well-developed and robust set of theoretical and descriptive tools for language description, operators such as tense and aspect are distinctly lacking in this regard. To that end, I propose a model for tense and aspect operators that attempts to fill in the gaps that exist in RRG while also maintaining the integrity and spirit of the linguistic theory. This involves three steps. I begin with a survey of the broader typological literature on tense and aspect in order to establish a set of morphosyntactic tests for the evaluation and categorization of operators. This is followed by an application of the proposed morphosyntactic tests to a particular grammatical problem: the Greek Perfect in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the tests. I then concluded with a synthetic model for tense and aspect operators that both satisfies the theoretical and typological claims of the broader literature and also validates the existing structure of the Role and Reference Grammar framework, thereby furthering the goals of RRG as a useful theoretical model for language description.
I encourage you to take the time to look at Mike’s work.