From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Dec 07 1999 - 21:20:10 EST
List members;
I find it highly ironic that we bash Dana & Mantey for being out of
date since it is an old work and then turn around and recommend Wallace
which is in linguistic terms pre-Saussure. Dana & Mantey is out of
date. So is Isaac Newton. So what. Wallace was published in the '90s and
in a lot of ways it (the book) is using a language model which is at
least as old or older than Dana & Mantey.
The problem with evaluating a grammar based on how it handles Granville
Sharp, Apollonius' Canon or Verb aspect is that all of these issues are
essentially minutia. Using these issues as a litmus test for a grammar
is like voting for a presidential candidate because you like the color
of his necktie. I frankly don't give a hoot (supply your favorite
expletive here) how a grammar handles Granville Sharp or the
Apollonius' Canon. Don't even care much about verb aspect for that
matter since it is at this point a "moot" question anyway.
We had this whole "language model" squabble back in '97 and I don't want
to recover all of that ground but it does seem a little superficial to
consider Wallace a leading edge work just because he has read Stanley
Porter's work on verb aspect. That issue alone does not make a grammar
linguistically up to date.
The sad state of affairs in NT grammars is that we have no
linguistically up to date intermediate or advanced grammars. The ones we
do have will do us fine for teaching however. Most seminarians probably
could not digest a linguistically sophisticated intermediate or advanced
grammar.
Anyway, I am sure this will make some people mad I will probably go into
hiding for the next few days and not read any e-mail.
Cheers,
Clay
-- Clayton Stirling Bartholomew Three Tree Point P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062---------- >From: "Dale M. Wheeler" <dalemw@teleport.com> >To: Biblical Greek <b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu> >Subject: Re: Syntax Grammars >Date: Tue, Dec 7, 1999, 5:37 PM >
> Some bgreekers have suggested Dana&Mantey as a possible syntax book to > learn from...allow me to add a caveat to that recommendation. > > D&M has LOTS of really good information and discussions in it, but there > are some that are just plain wrong and others that are seriously > misleading; and as a beginner in this subject area, you wouldn't know where > the landmines were. > > In the former category, D&M's discussion of the Granville Sharp > construction (p 147) is just wrong, since they say nothing about the nouns > needing to be singular, personal, and non-proper. Also, their discussion of > the absence of the article is flawed in many places because they use > references which involve Apollonius' Canon constructions (which they don't > even mention), and thus try to derive some special meaning from the > article's absence, when its simply missing for symmetry (eg., p 149, > discussion of 1Thes 4:15). > > In the "misleading" category, their treatment of the tenses/aspects of the > Greek verb, esp. the Aorist, is the reason that two generations of > preachers have insisted that the aorist communicates "point, once for all > action", when it clearly does not. Their discussions of tenses in general > are seriously out of date, and their discussion of the imperative can lead > one to totally erroneous conclusions. > > IMHO, D&M is an interesting curiosity in the history of Greek grammars, but > is not to be recommended to students, esp. (if I read your question > correctly) ones who are trying to pick up Greek syntax on their own. If > you want a quick overview, Brooks and Winbery is a good syntax; if you are > looking to go indepth, then Wallace is your man...again, IMHO.
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