New Testament Greek
in the Light of Ancient
and Modern Linguistics
INTRODUCTION
Students of the New Testament are generally expected to have a knowledge of the language of the New Testament. Many of these students will find themselves exposed at the same time to the principles and methods of scientific study of language. While several textbooks deal with the application of modern linguistics to the study of New Testa- ment Greek, there is little written on the history of language study and how that history influences the study of Greek today. The present essay is a brief synopsis of this subject, appraising the historical factors that have led to the present state of New Testament Greek studies and calling attention to issues that both scholars and students will face in the years
WHERE IT ALL STARTED: THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Although there is evidence of language study from an earlier oldest extant work of a linguistic nature is the admirable Sanskrit grammar of the Indian (fifth century was the ancient Greeks who initiated the formal study of language. That the history of grammar can be traced back to the writings of the early Greeks should come as no surprise, for
it is a common pattern in the history of Western culture. 379
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Somewhat less well known is the fact that the earliest works on grammar came not from grammarians but from philosophers who speculated upon a number of subjects, among them the nature of language. Living in an age in which problems were attacked by thinking them through instead of gathering data in a laboratory, the Greeks did not examine their language with the objectivity of a scientist. Instead, they thought about language, and in the course of philosophizing on the
they made several at times also
observations.
Plato and the Physis-Nomos Controversy
One of the earliest philosophical questions about language is still with us today: how do words in particular, and language in general, acquire meaning? Plato (429-347 B.C.) one of his dialogues, the to this question. This dialogue, sometimes called Plato's dullest, is actually fascinating because it contains several important insights about language. In
Cratylus much of the dialogue is carried on by Socrates, who is
asked to settle a dispute between Hermogenes and Cratylus. Cratylus believes that the name of a thing is a consequence of the nature of the thing named, and thus that language has meaning "naturally" "by nature"), whereas Hermogenes denies this assumption and holds that names stand for things only through agreement among speakers, that is, through "convention" "by law [of In the view of Cratylus, the phonetic composition of a thing named should reflect the composition of the thing itself so that words can be examined as being true or false in themselves. In view, any word is the correct word so long as there is general agreement among its users about its meaning. Exactly how Plato himself felt about the controversy is not clear, although he has Socrates champion both sides of the
argument with equal vigor. Socrates discusses two sorts of
words in the dialogue, those that are compound, and those that are simple, noting that one must use a different method to analyze the two types. A compound word should be examined
by first dividing it into its constituent parts. Taking the name of
the Greek god Poseidon as an example, Socrates suggests that its constituents could be ("for the feet," dative plural of
"foot") and ("chain"), since the one who first used
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the name might have contemplated that walking through the water would have been difficult for Poseidon. He notes further that the name is not simply a combination of these two parts, since some of the letters have been added or dropped for the sake of euphony (beauty of sound).
In the case of simple words Socrates says we must ask what the single letters imitate. One can classify letters into consonants, vowels, and semivowels (diphthongs) and then examine their qualities, much like an would examine the colors on a pallet. A letter like r seems apt to express motion, since the tongue moves rapidly when pronouncing it; it would therefore be an appropriate sound to use in a word like rhoein ("to flow"). On the other hand, s, x, and are pronounced with a great expenditure of breath, and so are well used in ("to shake"), xeon ("seething"), and ("shiver- ing"). The / sound, because of its gliding movements, is aptly used in ("slippery") and olisthanei ("he slips"). Then Socrates cites contrary examples, such as the oddity of finding a in the word for "hardness" which is complicated when it is discovered that this word in the dialect is suggesting an inexplicable equivalence of s and r. Socrates concludes that since some names are more accurately descriptive than others, the one who depends on names to learn about the nature of their referents is risking receiving unreliable information. Thus Socrates is portrayed by Plato as taking a middle ground in this popular nature versus convention controversy.
Although the controversy seems pointless today, a remnant of the controversy can still be seen. Descend- ants of the "naturalist" school still argue for the dependence of grammatical distinctions on real distinctions in the human mind, while supporters of the "conventionalist" school deny a resemblance between symbol (word) and referent (object), except in scattered cases of onomatopoeia (words such as buzz or crack). We should emphasize that the Greeks studied only their own language. To them, all foreigners were barbaroi, people who did not talk but merely "babbled." Thus, not having evidence of words with the same meaning but com- pletely different pronunciations in other languages, it was relatively easy for the naturalists to maintain their position. But today, with the linguistic descriptions of many languages
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majority of words found in all languages. In nearly every case, the conventional view that the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary provides the most valid and accurate position.
A number of other concepts of language that are important in modern grammatical study can also be found in Plato. As we have seen, his discussion of phonology included the breaking of sounds into vowels, and semivowels. He also distinguished different dialects of Greek, letters from their names, native Greek words from those borrowed from other languages, and a sound sequence as either a word or a combination of depending on the accent.
Plato also seems to have been the first person to distin- guish between larger constituents that today are called nouns and verbs. In his Plato defines language as a combination of and rhemata. The expressions
(plural of and rhemata (plural of rhema) correspond to expressions used in both ordinary language and the vocabulary of grammar and logic. In ordinary language onoma can mean "name," but in the vocabulary of grammar it can mean "noun," "nominal," or "subject," and in logic it corresponds to "logical subject." In ordinary language rhema can mean "phrase" or "saying"; in grammar it may mean "verb," "verbal," or "predicate," and in logic it corresponds to "logical predicate." These definitions come very close to our understanding of
"subject" and "predicate" in traditional grammar. The onoma
and rhema were, in Plato's usage, the basic members of a logos, which can mean "nature," "plan," "argument," "clause,"
"sentence," and "proposition." But Plato did not distinguish the vocabulary of ordinary language, grammar, and logic, so that the translation of logos as "sentence" must be viewed with caution.
Plato would hardly have considered himself a linguist. Yet through his writings we catch a first glimpse of the foundations
of linguistics and also the first formulations of problems that have been discussed by linguists ever since. Although his
studies were destined to be modified and corrected, they remain a helpful revelation of some of the speculation out of which our thinking today on the question of grammar grew.
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Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), like his predecessor Plato, was a grammarian only in the sense that philosophers of the time considered language to be a valid object of philosophical inquiry. He wrote no single essay on language, but referred to the structure of language in a number of works. In Aristotle's
Poetics, On Interpretation, and Rhetoric we have the first gram-
matical sketch of the Greek language known to us. This sketch is mainly an attempt to systematize the observations made on language by Plato and other philosophers. But it had far- reaching consequences. In the centuries following, and espe- cially during the Middle Ages preceding the Renaissance, the works of Aristotle came to be considered second only to the Bible as the final authority on all topics.
Aristotle's Poetics, although a treatise on dramatic criticism, includes an analysis of grammar blended with a description of the "virtues" and "barbarisms" of various literary works. Aristotle discussed types of letters, the division of sounds into consonants, vowels, and semivowels, and such categories as gender, number, case, and sentence. These categories repre- sented a major step forward in the of grammar, although it is questionable how much of it is due to Aristotle's original observations.
Another important work of Aristotle was On Interpretation, which he wrote as an introduction to and background for his system of logic. It is also the clearest formulation of his general theory of language. In it Aristotle defined noun and verb, and discussed noun cases and verb tenses as well as types of sentences. Aristotle defined the word as the minimal unit of language, incapable of being divided into smaller parts, a concept that modern morphologists have revealed to be inade-
quate. He also stated that words, in and of themselves, are not significant but must be used in combination with other words. Although this is related to the modern concept of structural meaning and the need for completeness, it ignores the fact that some utterances are composed of single words only: "John" (in answer to "What's your
The most interesting work of Aristotle for our purposes is the Rhetoric. In most other works Aristotle took a conventional- ist view of language, emphasizing the role of custom and convention in language usage, but in the Rhetoric he tried to
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correct and improve usage. In describing correctness, Aristotle distinguished the same units as Plato did but added another word class that Plato had discussed (without naming) in On
Interpretation: the (ho To Aristotle, con- junctions were all words that are not nouns or verbs. They differ from the latter in that they have no independent meaning but are simply used to tie sentences together. This division of words into those that do and those that do not have lexical (dictionary) meaning represents an early attempt to divide all words into two groups that are known today as structure and
content classes.
The Stoics
After Plato and Aristotle, the first real advances in gram- mar were made by the Stoics, a group of philosophers and
logicians who flourished from about the beginning of the fourth
century B.C. until the rule of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius 161-180). Known today for their poker-faced attitude toward life, the Stoics were in fact the first real
grammarians, producing the earliest purely linguistic mono-
graphs we know about in the Greek world. Unfortunately, not a single work of theirs is extant, and what we do have preserved are scattered quotations by other authors, mostly opponents of the Stoic school. But in spite of the scanty material and the problems connected with interpreting it, there is no doubt that the Stoic contribution to the development of
linguistics was significant and in many areas of fundamental
importance.
The Stoics sought to improve on Aristotle's definitions and to add still more to the general knowledge about Greek grammar. They expanded Aristotle's three classes to four (noun, verb, conjunction, article). Within the category of conjunction, the Stoics seem to have differentiated between prepositions and conjunctions, and in the article category between pronouns and articles. The Stoics were also the first to study number and agreement in nouns and verbs, to study the case in the noun, and to discuss voice, mood, and tense in the verb. They distinguished five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. The Stoic theory of tenses was fairly elaborate, based for the most part on the principle of opposition. The present and imperfect were "opposed" to the
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perfect and pluperfect; these four tenses were opposed to the and the and the in particular was opposed to the perfect and pluperfect. The present and imperfect were
called the perfect and pluperfect and
the aorist and future indeterminates.
We are not particularly concerned here with a complete list of Stoic contributions to Greek grammar. It is sufficient to call attention to the Stoic practice of dividing their data into as many distinguishable parts as they could and of assigning a technical term to each division. Much of their terminology has become a basic part of our linguistic heritage. For instance,
Aristotle did not use (and probably did not know about) specific names for different cases. It was the Stoics who gave them the names they have kept to the present day. The Stoics seem further to have established the definite name for the neuter gender of nouns, namely oudeteron, "neither [masculine nor Aristotle had simply called it "in the middle."
But the Stoics are probably best known for their contribu- tion in an entirely different area of grammar. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics held that there was, in the remote history of the
Greek language, a natural, necessary connection between the sounds of the language and the things for which the sounds stand, although they could see that the present forms of their language did not fully justify their claim. They therefore undertook to search for the original forms, the "roots" or of current expressions, thus initiating the study called
The Alexandrians and the Analogy-Anomaly Controversy
After the Stoics, the center of grammatical thought in the West shifted to the Alexandrian school, founded by Alexander the Great at Alexandria, then the capital of Egypt. The famous library of this school started from the personal collection of Aristotle, teacher of Alexander. Many scholars settled in Alexandria and conducted research in varied fields, including mathematics (Euclid), physics (Archimedes), and astronomy (Ptolemy). From this school also came two of the most famous and influential books in the world: the Elements of Euclid and the Grammar of Dionysius Thrax. It was during the Alexandrian
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period that grammar finally gained status as an independent discipline.
An important debate among the Alexandrians concerned
the problem of how language is related to question that had been discussed, in less sophisticated in the older controversy. Some scholars held that language should be analogous to logic, and that it should be consistent in construction and free from illogical usages such as inconsistent verb endings or irregular noun forms. Examples of consistent patterns in English are the plural forms created by adding s to the singular form, as in books, maps, characteristics, and effects. Other Greek philosophers believed that language was full of anomaly, or irregularity in form. They were less concerned with consistency than with how language was actually spoken. In English, words that do not conform to the general pattern for plural formation include men, sheep, and
children. Those who stressed the regularity of language were
known as analogists, while those who emphasized the presence of irregularity were called The analogists felt their duty was to "correct" inconsistencies in language and to make them conform to a logical pattern, whereas the anomalists saw their function as that of students and recorders of language. In one respect, the Greek interest in regularity and irregularity was extremely fortunate for the study of Greek, since the analogists of Alexandria expended a great deal of effort to construct or lists of regularities in the forms of Greek, thereby establishing a form of grammatical description that survives today. However, because they concentrated on the final, single letter of forms, they were unable to show the complete regularities of noun declensions and verb conjuga- tions, so that their lists were always subject to the attacks of the anomalists. As an example of what the analogists considered an
exception, we can give the parallel declension of two Greek "shield," and logos, "word":
Gen. Dat. aspis aspidi aspida logos logon
Since the nominative of these forms ends in the same letter, s, the analogists thought that they should be the "same" form
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and, therefore, be declined alike. Because of their misguided preference for the nominative case, they were unable to show the regularity of aspis (stem Later on it became obvious that the best selection of the stem of aspis is one of its other cases, whereas it makes little difference for logos.
The controversy was never completely
resolved in the ancient world. Today the debate can be seen in the differing approaches of those who would teach correct usage (prescriptive grammar) and those who feel that grammar is a matter of studying language analytically to see how it functions (descriptive grammar).
Dionysius Thrax
Alexandrian scholarship lasted for centuries in the gram- matical field, beginning with the work of Philadel- (284-257 B.C.) and culminating in the work of Apollonius 180). The most influential and well-known Alexandrian grammarian was Dionysius Thrax, whose Grammar
(100 B.C.) became the standard textbook on Greek grammar for the next 1800 years. Although it made no original contributions,
it was the most comprehensive treatment of the Greek language
to date, classifying and codifying the grammatical thinking of
the time. It was largely through Dionysius that the Greek grammar of Plato and Aristotle was transmitted to later generations of students.
The entire text of Thrax's treatise consists of only twenty- five brief paragraphs dealing with what linguists today would call the phonology and morphology of the language. In the section of phonology Thrax discusses "letters," a
terminological confusion that does not explicitly distinguish
between the sounds and the symbols used to represent them. The textbook also discusses such topics as a definition of
grammar, accenting, punctuation, syllables, parts of speech, and declension and conjugation. Thrax listed the article and the
participle among the eight parts of speech, omitting the adjective and interjection. Otherwise, his classifications are similar to those used in modern grammar texts, except that
many of his definitions have become revised.
Originally written in Greek, Thrax's volume was translated
into Latin as the Arts by Remmius Palaemon in the