Refresher Greek Course

I have completed teaching the first week of a 2-week refresher Greek course. I am team-teaching this intensive review of basic Koine Greek morphology and grammar with one other person. We meet from 8am until noon every day, and the mid-course evaluations were overall very positive. We have 12 participants—all Bible translators, translation trainers, and translation consultants—who have not had formal Greek training for anywhere from 7 years ago to 34 years ago. Although we entered this course with a bit of fear and trepidation, knowing that the participants must have a broad range of experience and ability in Greek, we soon learned that everyone felt rusty and were looking forward to whatever they could get out of the course.
We have mostly been using Bill Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek, and we have been following his “Track 2″ for the most part in order to get into verbs sooner. Here is what we covered in the first week…

• Day 1: Introductions, syllabus, Greek alphabet, 1st & 2nd declension nouns, articles, nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative case
• Day 2: Prepositions, present indicative forms of εἰμί, adjectives, 1st & 2nd person personal pronouns, introduction to verbs, present active indicative
• Day 3: Contract verbs, present middle/passive indicative, imperfect indicative
• Day 4 (only met from 10:30 until noon): 3rd declension nouns
• Day 5: forms and uses of αὐτός, demonstratives, relative pronouns, first aorist active, introduction to participles, present participles

We had laid out a tentative schedule that would allow us to get through Mounces entire introductory grammar in 2 weeks, but we affirmed that we would slow down if the pace was too quick. At the end of the first week, we are actually 3 chapters ahead of schedule. This may allow us to get into a few more discourse topics and the use of computer tools during this second and last week of the course.

Online: Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek (JLIABG)

I learned from Rick Brannon at ricoblog that the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek has published its first online issue:

Runge, Steven E. 2008. “Relative Saliency and Information Structure in Mark’s Parable of the Sower.” JLIABG 1:1-16.

From the Institute’s website:

“The Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek (JLIABG) is a fully refereed on-line journal specializing in widely disseminating the latest advances in linguistic study of ancient and biblical Greek. Under the senior editorship of Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, the journal looks to publish significant work that advances knowledge of ancient Greek through the utilization of modern linguistic methods.”

You can subscribe here to an RSS feed of the journal or sign up to receive email notices of journal updates.

According to the Institute’s page on Areas of Research Under Investigation in the LIABG, their research interests correspond very closely to several areas that I have been investigating in the Greek text of James (i.e. discourse function of conjunctions, paragraphs as discourse units, and the discourse function of vocatives). From their website…

The following list provides an indication of some the open questions for research that are currently being investigated or are of interest to the members of the Institute.

• developing a discourse grammar of conjunctions
• the identification and classification of the paragraph as a unit in Greek discourse
• discontinuous constituents in Greek syntax
• the quantitative and qualitative analysis of register
• the morphology, grammar and discourse function of the vocative case
• a Systemic-Functional analysis of voice in Greek

Greek Course Goes On Without Me

I came down with a bad cold on Tuesday, the day before the Greek course started. I survived the first three days of the course, teaching for most of 6 hours each day. I thought the weekend would give me a chance to rest up and get over it, but it steadily got worse on Saturday, and by Sunday it was clear I had a sinus infection.

So I contacted the three mentors who are helping with the course and asked if they could cover for me on Monday. I saw the doctor and started taking meds. She said I could go back on Tuesday if I was up to it. I’m so thankful for these assistants and all they’re doing to help the course run smoothly.

One of the biggest reasons I don’t want to be out for more than this one day is that 5 new students arrived late to the course over the weekend. They had to travel all night by boat and all day by vehicle to get to the course. It’s going to be tough for them to catch up after missing the first three days of an intensive course, but we’ll help them be successful.