Back in September 2007, I published a couple of impromptu recordings of my kids singing the Greek alphabet to the tune of Sarasponda. That post continues to get an amazing number of visits. Personally, I wouldn’t imagine that there is so much interest in learning the Greek alphabet. But as you can see from the stats above that page is consistently getting multiple visits per day.
The number one referrer for that page is Babel Hut which is a polyglot collection of posts about learning languages.
One of the few things that John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry and I agree on is that learning of Biblical languages can be fun. Well, OK, we agree about a lot of things but we just happen to enjoy disagreeing. Poor Nathan Stitt keeps buying Greek grammar books in hopes of finding living water in those dry books. Someone save him! Get him a Tin Tin book in modern Greek. Or how about Greek pop music. Or a Greek conversation partner. (John learned Italian by marrying an Italian signorina) I’ve yet to meet a Greek scholar that can actually converse in Greek! But why not? If Koiné is a language it should be able to be spoken.
During my disastrous semester of seminary Greek, I at one point called up American Bible Society and asked if we could produce a comic book Bible with Koiné instead of English. The representative I spoke with was happy to consider the idea.
The language acquisition skills are four:
| Oral | Written | |
| Comprehension | Listen | Read |
| Production | Speak | Write |
But most Biblical scholars are only taught “Read.” And then they have to translate to tell you what the “original means.” That’s cheating. But learning to write and speak a dead language is impossible, right? Well, consider a couple of examples:
I was just reading about Pierre de Fermat’s famous “Last Theorem.” Back in 1637 he wrote a little marginal note that has caused mathematicians centuries of headaches:
Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.
What is amazing to me about this is not the content itself but the fact that Pierre was writing in Latin! How did a 17th century Frenchman get to the point where he could scribble notes to himself in a language that had been dead for more than a thousand years? And he wasn’t an isolated case. We know about his theorem and his marginal note because his son transcribed all of his jottings and published them after his death1.
There is also Desiderius Erasmus who in 1511 wrote an entire satirical monologue in Latin called Moriae encomium. He also compiled a critical text of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus used to get together with his friend Thomas More and translate Greek classics into Latin just for the fun of it2.
Until seminaries start treating Greek and Hebrew like real languages instead of giant mental logic problems I refuse to admit that anyone is learning these languages. Memorizing verb paradigms will not help you to internalize Greek any more than hablo hablas habla hablais hablamos hablan is going to help you buy a fish taco in Tijuana.
In closing, I would like to here register a marginal note saying that I have a marvelous proof that Fermat never did solve his theorem. Euler discovered a note in Fermat’s Arithmetica saying that “lack of time and paper prevent him from giving a fuller description.” This clearly showed that Pierre just produced this convenient excuse every time he cooked up a problem but couldn’t devise a solution.
There is no proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
1 Fermat’s Last Theorem, Simon Singh (Fourth Estate: 1998.)
2 The Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus. trans. Clarence H. Miller (Yale: 1979)
Thanks for the link! It might be interesting for you to know that a lot of the google search traffic to babelhut comes from searches for “greek alphabet song” and by extension to the post linking to your post. I’m glad to know that much of the traffic gets forwarded to you, as your site is really the destination that google searchers want to go.
As for Greek, it is actually Peter who is learning New Testament Greek, although the thought of translating Greek classics into Pali has sparked an interest in the profane part of my brain
Thanks for stopping by, Thomas. Your site is an example of how language learning doesn’t have to be dull. And what exactly is Pali?
While in seminary, one of my colleague translated Genesis 1 into Old Babylonian – in cuneiform script – from Hebrew. Yup, just for fun.
[...] Language and learning, in which seminary Greek is coined “not learning” a language. [...]
[...] Language and learning, in which seminary Greek is coined “not learning” a language. [...]
So have I, but only because I have not actually had the pleasure of meeting Randall Buth, who can.
But I have met a man who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. More precisely, I met him before he solved it. Andrew Wiles was a fellow student with me in Cambridge in the 1970s.
Well, maybe you’re convinced by his mathematical miasma but it all sounds like Greek to me.
@David Ker: Pali is the language of the Pali Canon (Tipitaka), the oldest extent written source of the Buddha’s teachings. More information at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali
Ah, I see. You’re a nut.
I can explain the Fermat Theorem to you — next time you make it out to Uz we’ll get together with three of my “buddies” and the ol’ potsherds to discuss modular elliptic forms. The current thinking is that Fermat had fooled himself with an incorrect proof; mathematicians even have candidates for that incorrect proof.
Latin was used much, much longer than you might think in academia. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard was deeply enamoured of the Danish language and worked throughout his writings to assert the strengths of his mother-tongue over the invasive, imperialistic influences of Latin and German. With respect to the former, Kierkegaard had to petition the king to be allowed to write his philosophy dissertation On the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates in Danish. Even though permission was granted he was still required to defend his dissertation publicly in Latin.”
Finally, two lessons:
(a) Wide-margin books — they make the difference between having mathematical proofs and not having them. Don’t buy non-wide-margin Bibles.
(b) Andrew Wiles was the son of the famous liberal theologian Maurice Wiles (who recently died, and still exerts an enormous influence over the field). I leave the lesson to derive from this fact as an exercise for the reader.
Iyov, I knew about Wiles father and son. The father was affectionately known among my evangelical friends as “the Wiles of the devil”.
If I found a proof of a theorem I wouldn’t write it in the margin of a Bible even if it was wide enough.
Some of us think it’s hilarious that Aristotle wrote about tricky Greek speech (i.e., retarick, in English) when Plato warned him about writing stuff down. Then Greek (Rhetoric) Scholar George A. Kennedy listens in to Vasile Florescu saying “letteraturizzazione” and writes it down as English so that he can let it be written it up in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism as “slippage from a phenomenon of speech to the art of written composition.” Can you say letteraturizzazione? John?
Also funny is how people in America go into any one of the myriad locations of the Family Christian Store to buy this plastic taco-shaped thing made in third world countries formed with unspeakable Greek letters that is supposed to represent a fish to stick on their cars. Which uses some of the same letters used for the Greeks in Animal House, which is all rather koiné at the Academy now. “Vulgar” is how we say that out loud in English now. It’s scholarship and biblicism at its finest filtering up (which explains why there’s all that marginal stuff way down there at the bottom of your post).
I’m planning to follow up this post with a rather scandalous conjecture of my own but that will have to wait until after a good night’s sleep.
I just realized that comments are the bloggy version of marginal notes.
I have been trying to cajole a friend into learning Greek but his pastoral ministry keeps him too busy. I’d desperately love to learn Greek the way that Randall Buth teaches it, by immersion and orally, in addition to the text. Unfortunately that is not a reality and so I’m experimenting with some other ideas, see here:
http://www.pocm.info/good_books_read_greek.htm
David, Criswell College in Dallas has classes in Greek as a real language. They are learning to speak and listen and comprehend.
The prof is working on a pictorial dictionary of NT vocabulary so that people can get away from learning translation Greek.
Mike,
Quick, tell the γάτος to enroll before it learns too much more “translation Greek” (meow!).
Mike, I’m there!
me too! I dream of being able to actually speak it…
for practice though, here’s a site for listening to Greek using the historical pronunciation