From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Thu Dec 13 2001 - 13:08:32 EST
on 12/13/01 5:58 AM, Dave Sherrill wrote:
> One of the
> problems that has plagued me is a lack of exposure to the technical
> vocabulary of language studies. Finally there is a small booklet that
> addresses this. I've only skimmed through it briefly, but what I've seen
> will definitely make it worthwhile for other auto-didacts on the list. It's
> called the "Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek" by
> Matthew S. DeMoss.
Dave,
Books like this are helpful. Some works include their own glossaries (e.g.
S.E. Porter's Idioms of NT Greek).
A few days ago I picked up an older book, "A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms",
Richard A. Lanham, U of Calif. 1968. This little book looks like a winner.
Technical commentaries on NT frequently use Latin terms from classical
rhetoric which leave a lot of people in the dark. The meaning of some of
these terms has changed in the last 35 years as classical rhetoric has
suffered encroachment from linguistics, semiotics and so forth.
On Linguistics, there is the now somewhat dated "Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language" David Crystal, CUP 1987. The problem with linguistic terminology
is that a brief explanation of a term like Tagmeme isn't going to do you
much good. You really need to have read a synopsis of Pike's system to
understand the meaning of the term. Sometimes even a synopsis doesn't get
you there and you have to actually read some more detailed exposition of the
language model to make sense of the terminology.
Discourse Analysis (DA) is laden with lots of specialized terminology
borrowed from various schools of linguistics (Prague Circle, Early & Late
Chomsky, Functionalism, Systemic-Functionalism, Structuralism, and many
others). Practitionars of Discourse Analysis tend to be highly eclectic,
borrowing ideas from several different language models and linguistics
systems. A glossary of DA terms can be found in some text books like
Levinsohn, Stephen Discourse Features of New Testament Greek,2nd Ed.
SIL2000. However, don't expect these glossaries to solve all your problems.
They will not.
One of the problems with handy little dictionaries and glossaries is that
the ideas behind the words are highly complex and subtle and bear no
relationship to anything in the current knowledge base of the
non-specialist. For this reason one needs to be willing to do some extra
reading if one wants to get into fields like Discourse Analysis. A little
dabbling will not get you there.
Terminology is here to stay. Those who complain about linguistic terminology
are blissfully unaware of their own technical language which makes their
posts difficult and sometimes impossible to understand.
Clay
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:14 EDT