Re: Help with Greek was Re: Babel Text in Obrenje

At 1:52 pm -0600 11/3/02, Peter Clark wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>On Monday 11 March 2002 12:25 pm, John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
>> >         Here are some questions I have:
>> >         1. What "flavor" of Greek is the LXX? I assume that, since it is
>> > a translation, it would be translated into Classical Greek, being more
>> > literary, as opposed to Koine Greek.
>>
>> Not at all.  Don't be deceived by the flavor of the KJV:
Indeed, not.  I fear the KJV has given the Anglophone world a very
distorted view of what the scriptures are really like in their original
languages.

>>back in 1611,
>> it was a fairly modern translation, with even some resemblance to
>> Basic English (only about 8000 distinct words, IIRC).
Well, if by 'fairly modern' you mean about a century or so out of date.
Fairly modern, certainly, compared with now.  But the translators of the
KJV deliberately eschewed a contemporary form and harked back to Tudor
English in order to give their translation a sense of 'timelessness'.  It
was also quite clearly an exercise in producing a literary translation.

>        So you're saying that the LXX is written in Koine? I was just
>assuming, that
>similar to what you said, Classical Attic would have been used, as it was
>considered prestigious. (The situation with KJV never occured to me--rather,
>I was considering that since the LXX was a formal translation, the language
>used would have been whatever was considered prestigious.)
Not at all - it was translated so that the Jewish population of Alexandria,
to whom Hebrew was no longer a living language, surviving only for
liturgical purposes (rather like Latin in the pre-Vatican II Catholic
Church), could understand their scriptures.  To translate it into a
Classical idiom of two centuries earlier (in another land) would have
defeated the purpose.

It was essentially an early form of 'literary Koine' with very heavy
Semitic influence.  The language of the LXX would probably have had no
influence outside of Hellenophone Jewery had it not exerted such an
influence on New Testament Greek and thence on early Christaian writers.

>> >         2. Is Byzantine Greek (let's say the Greek that was spoken in
>> > Constantinople from the third to the tenth century) Koine Greek?
>>
>> Spoken yes, written no.
>        So the written language (official documents, but probably not personal
>letters) was Classical Attic?
Not really.  The language had departed too far from the Classical norm.
The written language of Byzantium is really the result of Koine development
with strong and definitely artificial Atticizing archaisms.  It is
'literary mongrel'.

>Do you know of any examples from other
>languages that borrowed from Greek at that time, whether they borrowed the
>written or spoken form?
Latin - both.  Terms entering though the written medium use 'correct',
written forms; slang terms picked up by soldiers, merchants etc use spoken
forms.  So the Greek /kolaphos/ "a blow" comes into the literary language
as "colaphus" but into the spoken language as *colopus as is shown by
Petronius' derived verb 'percolopare' and, of course, in the modern Italian
'colpo' and French 'coup'.

Most attested Greek borrowings get transcribed in literary texts.  But an
interesting example of a spoken borrowing which stuck and, indeed, survives
till the present day in our English word 'mass' (= lump of matter etc).  It
is derived from the ancient Greek _maza_ = "barley cake".  The
pronunciation of ancient zeta is one of those matters that scholars like to
argue about (it has been argued more than once on this list); in the Koine
it had become [zz], this we have [mazza] which had become colloquially used
simple to mean 'lump', 'mass' - we find that use, e.g. in the LXX.  It
entered spoken Latin as _massa_, the early Romans having no /z/, with the
meaning 'lump [of matter]' - and the rest, as they say, is history  :)

Ray.


=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================

Replies