From: dalmatia@eburg.com
Date: Sat Mar 21 1998 - 11:15:19 EST
Mari Broman Olsen wrote:
>
> PHONEMES:
> >From the linguistic perspective: phonemes may be used to change
> meaning, in that words (or morphemes) are made up of phonemes, and
> when you change the phonemes you change the word or morpheme. But it
> is not quite right to say phonemes carry meaning.
Mari ~
This is a topic that I would like to see expanded upon. When I went
to translate PROWRISEN in Romans 8:30 from this perspective
[phonemes], a lot of fun things started happening. The basic root,
hOR, surrounded by sounds, seems to maintain its integrity through a
lot of differing surroundings! 'See', in the very physical, limited
sense, runs through them all. When I looked at 'preselect' as the
literal translation word for PROORIZW, I was stunned to find that the
English, in this word, 'does' exactly what the Greek seems to do by
way of its particle [phoneme] construction. PRO gives it 'before',
just as in English [pre], hOR gives it 'see', just as in English
[se(e)-lect], and IZ gives it 'ize', just as in English [(s)-elect].
So the Greek PRO-hOR-IZ-(W), literally 'before-see-ize', is exactly
parallel to the English pre-see-elect of preselect!! And this
provides a foundation for translational words like preordain, etc.,
for PROORIZW.
In like manner, then, I went to the word hORION ~ See-if-being ~ The
lex gives it as boundary, which then, in the livingness of the Greek,
becomes '(That which has) being if (it is) seen', and since everything
we see has a boundary .... [The boundaries of physical seeing issues
lurk here...]
hORAW becomes 'see-at' in virtue of the phoneme A, hence to 'stare
at', or does it?
The point of all this, of course, is that particle construction around
roots would seem to be a valuable way of approaching and learning
Greek, where a student can 'step in' to the root, surrounded by
particle phonemes, and 'make sense' out of the surroundings in a
living, active way, rather than being dragged through endless tables
of memorization. [There are times when I wonder if the very letters
of the Greek alphabet have particle meanings... If so, and they could
be determined, what a wonderful way to actually LEARN the alphabet!!]
I would like to hear your thoughts on the plusses and minuses of this
approach, and do you know of anyone who has done it and written about
it? Being a Rip-van-Winkle, rope-a-dope and lex-bound first time
reader of the GNT, I am aware, through 'erroric' experience, that
pitfalls can loom beyond the range of my myopic vision. The flip
side, however, is that the slower I go, the further I seem to get...
[arguably] :) :) :)
Thank you ~
George Blaisdell
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:15 EDT