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Intro to Linguistics for Koine Greek
Linguistics is commonly referred to as the scientific study of language. It might seem odd to view language as a science. Communication is often viewed as more of an art. However, there are facts about how humans use language, and we can make hypotheses that attempt to account for these facts, which is the essence of the scientific method. For example, a notorious problem within the semantics literature is the meaning of the word any. We have facts about how this word is used by native English speakers. We can say I don’t know any Greek words, but we would not say * I know any Greek words (the * is commonly used in linguistics for a sentence that is deemed ungrammatical by native speakers). This is a fact about how the English language is used by the speech community. From these facts, we might make a hypothesis about the meaning of any, such as it requires negation, and this hypothesis could then be checked against other facts. Does the word any always require negation? More facts, such as the question Do you know any Greek words?, suggests that this is not the case. Just like in any other science, this new data would require a revision of our original hypothesis to account for all the facts, so we might say something like “ any requires a question or negation.” Alternatively, we could describe the distribution of any with some more abstract notion that questions and negative statements have in common, such as a downward monotone environment (no, you do not need to understand what that means, but it is the basic analysis of any in the semantics literature since Ladusaw 1979). In any case, our description should make a prediction about the acceptableness of any in a novel sentence.
This textbook employs linguistics to analyze the Greek of the NT. The text of the NT provides the facts we must consider in our analyses. If we want to figure out what a certain word means in NT Greek, we need to look at all of the occurrences and posit a meaning that covers the various interpretations we find in the text. Our fundamental method, then, is to look at the data, make a hypothesis about the language, and iterate until we have captured all the data with the simplest description possible. Although this can be done in any of the sub-disciplines in linguistics (introduced below), we have privileged semantics in this book, the sub-discipline which concerns meaning. The most basic reason for this is that we assume you want to learn NT Greek in order to understand the NT better. There is some level of meaning that you want to access that a translation will not provide. Our aim is to provide you with tools to analyze Greek, so that you can understand the text more deeply and accurately than you would reading a translation. Within NT studies, this close analysis of the meaning of the text would typically be called exegesis. Semantics is the sub-discipline within linguistics that provides the most useful tools to engage in deep exegesis. While we have privileged semantics, the sounds, forms, and structure of the language are also covered, though even in these sections an attempt has been made to demonstrate how the meaning of the text is affected.
In addition to learning how to analyze Greek, this book also provides tools and tips from the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Like the other linguistic sub-disciplines, SLA is also a science. We can hypothesize about the most effective way to learn a second language, and these hypotheses can be tested in experiments with real individuals. The SLA sections in this book are distinct from the other sections in that they will not help you analyze Greek. Rather, they will help you to utilize Biblingo (or some other language-learning resource) to learn Greek more efficiently. Students are often frustrated with Greek not because Greek is itself difficult, but the methods employed in Greek classrooms are known in SLA to be poor ways of learning a language. These sections have been written to educate you on how to learn languages efficiently and effectively, so that you can be empowered to take control of your own language learning.
What is Phonology?
Phonology is the study of how sounds behave as a system in language. When we do phonology, we will be analyzing how sounds interact with one another. Phonetics, the sister discipline of phonology, describes the physical characteristics of sounds. Sounds may be produced with the mouth more [a] or less open [u], for example (in phonetics, we transcribe sounds in brackets and write them in IPA symbols). There are all sorts of features we can ascribe to human speech sounds and these different sounds will affect each other in a variety of ways as they are manifested in words.
A word like speak begins with the sounds [s] and [p]. The sound [s] in English is special in that it can precede consonants where others would be impossible. It is no coincidence that a word like * tpeak is unattested in English. There are zero words that begin with [tp]. This begs the question: what is the phonetic difference between [s] and [t] that allows the former to immediately precede [p] but not the latter? In other words, how do the characteristics of sounds affect the sound system of a language? These are the kinds of questions phonologists ask. Native speakers of English have internalized these kinds of rules, so that even when new terms are coined, they do not (ordinarily) violate the constraints of English’s sound system. To learn a language, you do not have to consciously learn these rules. Many English speakers have never thought about the fact that we have no words that begin with [tp], and while this crucial fact would certainly enhance their quality of life in innumerable ways, it normally does not impair their ability to use English. However, if your native language was the Aztec language Nahuatl, which does allow [tp] consonant clusters, then it may be helpful for you to know that English disallows this combination. By knowing this rule, you can know for certain that you are never hearing [tp] in English, even if you think you are. To get to the point where you are using the language well, you will need to practice enough to internalize the rules of the sound system, and learning the explicit rule may help you to internalize it. Knowing something about a language’s sound system, then, can contribute to language learning, even if it is not necessary to learn a language.
What is Morphology?
Morphology is the study of meaningful forms in language. A word like speak has a particular form that is distinct from speaks. Whereas speak has one meaningful unit, speaks has two. Both speak and - s carry a meaning. The former refers to a kind of event, and the latter tells you something about who did the speaking. We would never say * I/you speaks in English, but he/she/Mary/the man speaks are fine. Both speak and - s are morphemes – a meaningful unit in language. Morphemes come in all shapes and sizes and with all kinds of meanings. Like a language’s sound system, morphemes are also governed by rules that can be learned and must be internalized by the language learner. In fact, much language learning, especially in the beginning, consists of learning form-meaning correspondences, i.e. learning the morphemes for the meaning that you want to convey or understand in the language.
Even more than phonological rules, explicit morphological rules can aid the language learner. The ultimate goal for morphology is to internalize paradigms to the point where you do not have to think about the form-meaning correspondence. Much of Biblingo’s curriculum is geared towards internalization of morphology, so that you can read the text in the original with ease.
Morphology also aids us in understanding the text. First, you must recognize the forms correctly to match them to their correct meaning. Moreover, words are ordinarily composed of smaller building blocks, and looking more carefully at the contribution of each block can help us to come to a better understanding of complex words. For example, the word justification is a complex word that is built from smaller components. First, there is an adjective just, and to this we add - ify to form the verb justify. This complex verb is then turned into a noun by combining - ation to get justification. The meaning of the new word formed at each stage helps us to understand the final word formed (though, as we will see, it is not always helpful to break apart words like this). Many Greek words can be decomposed in similar ways, and this can aid our understanding of individual words and, ultimately, our analysis of certain passages.
What is Syntax?
Syntax is the study of the structure of morphemes in language. Once we know what discrete forms mean, we need to know how to order them. The morpheme - s always attaches to the end of a verb in English, but a similar morpheme in another language need not be attached to the end. Some languages may have a morpheme that contributes identical information, but it comes at the beginning of the word or even in the middle of the word.
When we look at a single morpheme like - s, the rules may seem easy, but once we start adding more words, things start to get complex. When we add a subject to speak, it normally precedes the verb, as in God speaks. Other verbs that refer to events of speaking behave differently, however. It is very normal to say The word became flesh, says God where the last clause says God has an inverted word order. However, this contrasts with the impossible * Says God, The word became flesh. As a language learner, you need to know that we say God speaks and not * Speaks God and that says has a different possible order from speaks.
Words may also be moved for the sake of conveying different meanings. The clauses It is God who speaks and It is speaking that God does take the same information we see in God speaks but packages that information in different ways. At other times, movement seems to happen without meaning. We would probably be on the wrong path if we were to try to distinguish says God and God says following a quote. Sometimes, proper exegesis is knowing when an extra nuance is not being conveyed.
What is Semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. Expressing meaning is why language is used. We are trying to convey our thoughts to another individual so that they understand what we are thinking. The meaning of a string of sounds becomes conventionalized in speech communities, so that a simple sentence like God speaks is understood by speakers of the language. When learning a new language, we are, in many ways, attempting to join another speech community. We want to acquire the language in such a way that we can understand communication that happens within the community. For a modern language, this means being able to participate in the life of the speech community; for an ancient language like Koine Greek, this means being able to eavesdrop effectively in communicative acts we have written down for us millennia ago.
A simple sentence like God speaks may be understood in a variety of ways depending on the context. As part of a description of God in theology class, it may be used as an example of how God, though powerful, meets us where we are and interacts with humanity. This same utterance, however, might be said mockingly with scare quotes around “ God ” to ridicule the idea that it is God who is speaking. In both cases, the words God speaks mean the same thing, but the two utterances are used to communicate different ideas. The discipline of semantics is normally concerned more narrowly with what we are referring to as the meaning of God speaks, while the related discipline of pragmatics is concerned with how such an utterance might be used within a discourse. In semantics, we are looking at the meaning of an ordered string of morphemes; in pragmatics, we are looking at how that meaning might be used in a particular context. Although it is difficult to separate these two disciplines at times, we will focus more on semantics in this book.
To expand on this description of semantics, we can introduce the discipline the way a standard textbook in semantics introduces it (Heim and Kratzer 1998:1):
To know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth conditions. If I say to you There is a bag of potatoes in my pantry, you may not know whether what I said is true. What you do know, however, is what the world would have to be like for it to be true. There has to be a bag of potatoes in my pantry.
Heim and Kratzer’s description of meaning is couched in terms of truth-conditions. A truth condition is exactly what it sounds like: the condition under which something is true or not. What is not trivial about this description of meaning is the connection between the sentence There is a bag of potatoes in my pantry and the world itself. In order for me to know the truth-conditions for such a sentence, I have to know what kinds of objects in the world are referred to by the words bag, potatoes, and pantry. I also need to know the function of words like there, is, a, of, in, and my. If I know the meaning of all the individual components and how they relate to each other, I can determine the meaning of the whole sentence. This illustration also allows me to determine the meaning of completely novel sentences like There is a bag of hamsters in my pantry. This more unusual sentence is perfectly intelligible to any native speaker of English as long as they know what all the words mean. In other words, we know what the world would have to be like for it to be true, even if that is not what the real world is like.
In semantics, then, we are trying to determine the meaning of all the elements in a sentence and how they combine. This fundamental axiom of semantics is called compositionality. It says that the meaning of a complex expression is equivalent to the meaning of its individual components and how they combine. In our illustration, a complex expression like There is a bag of potatoes in my pantry has the truth-conditions it does because each of the individual words contributes a certain meaning. When I change potatoes to hamsters, the meaning changes because I changed one of the components of the complex expression. In learning Greek, our task is difficult but simple: we need to learn the meaning of all the individual components of the language and how they combine together to form complex expressions. This will allow us to determine the kind of world that the Greek NT is describing.
What is Second Language Acquisition?
SLA is the study of how someone can gain the ability to use a language that is not their native language. If I say I know Chinese, you expect that I can use Chinese to communicate in some way, even if that is only reading texts. It would be very misleading to say I know Chinese if all I knew was how the verbal system functioned. However, I can know something about the verbal system (and, in fact, I do) without knowing the language at all (which I do not). Many NT Greek courses go to great lengths to explain Greek grammar, but do not force students to use the language meaningfully. We might say that Greek-speak is taught and not speaking Greek. As we have said, we do not want to draw a false dichotomy here, and we advocate learning both. SLA, however, only deals with acquiring the ability to use the language and not the ability to talk about the language’s grammar.
Within the world of SLA, there are many different theories about the best way to learn a language. Although language use is required, this may involve speaking, writing, reading, or listening, all of which can also be done in different ways. While we want to optimize using these skills for acquisition, there is a very basic point we can make from this: the more time you can spend using the language, the more proficient you will become. This is the reason why many students in Greek classes all over the world do not learn Greek well enough to use it after the course – they didn’t use the language enough. And although language use is a minimum requirement, we want to go further. This textbook introduces you to SLA techniques, many of which are built into Biblingo, that will help to accelerate your learning. Our SLA sections essentially serve as a guidebook on how to get the most out of Biblingo or any other language learning program. Ultimately, we are using SLA as a tool to help us learn Greek to a greater degree with less effort – and such tools can also help you enjoy the journey as well!
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