Intensive Koine Greek, spoken immersion summer session

The Biblical Language Center, at Qibbutz Tzuba, just west of Jerusalem is offering its second annual, immersion Greek SXOLH this summer 2008.

Two teachers in class teach in Koiné Greek, 90%+ of the time. Outside languages (e.g. English, Hebrew) are restricted to 10% within the classroom. From the beginning students start to play in the language with understanding, like being thrown into a learner-friendly kindergarten. While the class starts at a 'zero' level, officially assuming nothing as the first words and situations are communicated, about half of the students come with one to four years of Greek. Everyone is surprised to be learning together, and those with background discover what Greek can be like when used for communication and as the medium for thought and expression. A sense of humor and ability to laugh at oneself makes for more rapid language learning.

Texts studied include selections from NT gospel parables, Aesop's fables, Acts, NT epistles, Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, LXX, Epictetus, Plutarch, some papyri and inscriptions. Grammar is discussed within the fun and games, of course, though terminology and description is mainly done in ancient Greek (some of the 10% non-Greek time is occasionally used at this point for clarification). Five field trips include 1^st to 6^th century sites at Caesaria, Jerusalem, Bet Shean, Hippos, Paneion, Tsippori, Bet Shearim, et al., where the place is described in ancient Greek, appropriate texts are read, as well as the inscriptions in situ. It turns out that ancient Provincia Ioudaia and Syria are excellent places for studying Greek. Most of the remains from the 1^st century up thru the 6^th century are accompanied by Greek inscriptions. What kinds of texts do students read at these sites? To begin with there are gospel parables and stories at appropriate sites, e.g. Nazareth village synagogue and Luke 4, and NT texts, e.g., Acts 26 overlooking the road to Damascus. At Bet Shean the class can stand in a restored bathhouse and read Epictetus on how to stoically prepare for a visit to a BALANEION, or at the Paneion, Plutarch on "PAN O MEGAS TEQNHKE". Students read and acted out LXX Genesis 22 at Tsippori, where we also read the Greek inscriptions in the synagogue floor and discussed the artwork about the 'binding of Isaac'. There is also a wonderful symposion room at Tsippori with mosaics relating to Dionysios, Heracles, and harvest, (though the setting is too dark for reading an 'extra-credit' 1^st century symposion song).

While students may come with no Greek background, everyone is asked to begin listening to the 1000 pictures in Living Koiné Greek (pictures are described in Koiné Greek without written text [including both sentences and occasional story lines], afterwards transcriptions of the pictures are read). This "opens one's ears" and begins to record the language in a different part of the brain than when discussed in another language. The alphabet is also expected to be learned before arrival and is drilled in Living Koiné Greek, Part One.

A biblical Hebrew immersion learning experience is also available, with two levels. Naturally only one class, Hebrew or Greek, is possible to do at one time because of the intensive nature of the programs. Written tests and examinations are given and a transcript can be issued for 8 Continuing Education Units (1 CEU represents 15 classroom hours and equals 1 semester credit of study). 22 June – 1 August 2008. $3650 for six weeks, room, board,tuition, and field trips.

Dr. Randall Buth, developer of the programs

www.biblicalulpan.org

Arabic and Aspect and Tense

In a discussion on another blog, www.AncientHebrewPoetry.typepad.com , John Hobbins asked me about tense and aspect in Arabic, with an implicit question on its relevance to biblical Hebrew tense-aspect,

"Does [Östen] Dahl represent a consensus point of view when he interprets the classical Arabic verbal system as at root aspectual? Or is there a continuing debate in that field that mirrors the one in ours?"

Well, it depends on what one asks, and whom one asks.

If you are asking "at root", then that is a historical, etymological question.

[[As an aside:

(on the web see Larisa Avram , Generative Linguistics and Child Language Acquistion, an open-access e-book, http://ebooks.unibuc.ro/filologie/avram/ Her chapter on tense-aspect is short and may be very helpful for European Semitists to get beyond their 'either tense or aspect' mentality)

Child development and creole studies would both point to the probability that a verb form in Semitic was 'aspectual' at some proto-language stage, because aspect is theoretically the first paramater to be morphologized within a language. But if that morphology fixes itself at a binary stage, then that morphology will be used for a whole 'TAM' within the theoretical language. [So Bickerton, see below, and to some degree Avram.] By the time we reach Akkadian we already have a ikattab//iktub dichotomy where the [ktub] root looks fairly time oriented to some, or at least is considered the predecessor for the Hebrew vayyiqtol that is considered by most to be fairly time oriented. If ktub had become a temporal root with perfectivity, then we may not know what the proto-Semitic imperfective aspectual root looked like, or in any case it is irrelevant to West Semitic. The ktub root was reinterpreted (or was proto-Semitic following Moscati and evidence of imperatives) as an imperfective aspectual root within binary West Semitic systems, as evidenced in Arabic. We also have a problem of limited data for the the second-fourth millenia BCE, and we have the iconoclastic material of 1m BCE Hebrew where ktub is both temporal past a.k.a. perfective in vayyiqtol and future-imperfective aspectual in yiqtol. But I don't think you wanted to ask "root" questions of this nature. And I'm not sure I want to make final pronouncements on Proto-Semitic.]]

If you are simply asking about tense and aspect, then again, it depends whom you ask.

If you ask the first native Arabists, the answer is that Arabic includes time within itself, as is evidenced by their naming kataba "al-maaDi" and yaktubu "al-mustaqbal."

al maaDi is past, al mustqbal is future.

In the 19^th century this was turned on its head by Europeanean Arabists, as evidenced by Wright, §77a (p. 51)

"A Semitic Perfect or Imperfect has, in and of itself, no reference to the temporal relations of the speaker (thinker or writer). … The Arab grammarians themselves have not, however, succeeded in keeping this important point distinctly in view, but have given an undue importance to the idea of time, in connection with the verbal forms, by their division of it into the past (al-maaDi), the present (al-Haal or al-HaaDir), and the future (al-mustaqbal), the first of which they assign to the Perfect and the other two to the Imperfect."

However, the famous Indoeuropeanist, Jerzy Kurylowicz, Studies in Semitic Grammar and Metrics, 1972, was unimpressed with the basic claim to 'aspectuality' in Semitic. He had a good grasp about what aspect was about, controlling more than one Slavic language. (book is currently in boxes, I don't have access. http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/top3mset/803958)

Why the discrepancy between mother-tongue speakers and among linguists? The Arabic yaktubu can be used very much like the biblical Hebrew participle. For marking imperfectivity in the past one finds kana yaktubu in parallel to First Temple biblical Hebrew haya kotev. The prefix form in Arabic was used to mark imperfectivity. But it was also sensitive to time and expressive of time.

As mentioned above, Arabic was a binary verbal system, basically dividing a past//non-past on the time axis, a perfective//imperfective on the aspect axis, and having a fairly complex modal axis including a subjunctive prefix verb with 'a', a short prefix perfective jussive/pasts, and a suffix verb for many conditionals, and prefix verbs with a rhetorical -n-.

Now binary verb systems are notorious for being multi-dimensional. In fact Derek Bickerton, a linguist famous for creole studies, claimed that most linguists working in the field of verbal syntax were too often irresponsible and arbitrary in their definitions of tense, aspect and mood. The 'meaning' of a verb depended more on how many slices of the pie were involved and on internal oppositions, rather than on specific 'time', 'aspect', and 'mood' features. A binary verb system is thus inherently prone to produce 'tense-aspects', something that is neither a pure aspect nor a pure tense. See the chapter cited above on the web book, for an overview of how tense-aspect fusion can be handled in a neutral manner.

This proto-typical binary tense-aspect-mood dichotomy is what we see in Arabic and explains why mother-tongue Arabs used time in their definitions over a millenium ago, and why some linguists like Dahl might want to put Arabic in their 'aspect' category. So yes, Arabic is problematic and boils down to definitions and whether or not 'tense' and 'aspect' are kept semantically clear, whether 'tense-aspect' is allowed in the definitions, or whether 'aspects' are redefined in order to mark time, too.

While noting the similarity to the biblical Hebrew tense-aspect-mood dichotomy in yiqtol~qatal, it is also helpful to note the differences. Hebrew marked "imperfectivity and past" by using haya + participle. Imperfectivity alone could be signalled by both yiqtol and veqatal, as the classic passage in Gen 29:1-3 shows. Arabic was using yaktubu for the participle uses and did not have a sequential system.

Especially important for your other question about Hebrew participles is to note that Arabic can use yaktubu for actual present tenses while biblical Hebrew already incorporated the participle.

Finally, I wouldn't want to imply that native nomenclature is always correct. Arabic explanations of the "lam yaktub" structure he did not write wander all over the board, because it is an isolated historical relic from the same system that produced the bH vayyiqtol. But to throw out their perception that time is included in their basic verb would be equivalent to throwing out English complaints when some says, "Look, the English future is really a volitional, since it uses 'will'." That mistakes etymology for semantics. English has a future, and it marks it with the volitional lexeme 'will', not the strangest thing in the world. For that matter, someone could claim that the modern Greek is "really" a volitional in drag, since it uses a remnant from θελειν 'wish, want' in order to mark the modern future perfective θα γραψω 'I will write' and the modern Greek future imperfective θα γραφω 'I will be writing'.

All of this goes to suggest that Arabic includes time inside of its binary TenseAspectMood, and that etymology is not always a good indicator of semantics. I would say the same of biblical Hebrew.

Teaching a "dead" vs a "live" language

[Excerpts from an email exchange between Randall Buth and others on whether a "dead" language, Greek in the discussion below, can ever be taught as a "live" language.]

> I think that what is happening is that there is a clear distinction between
> learning, reading and speaking a language that is NOT DEAD and learning, reading
> and speaking a language that IS DEAD.

This is a commonly heard idea that is used to justify an ancient language program that does not produce an ability to fluently think in a language. Things are so far out of sync with reality that many practioners do not even recognize the situation. (Solution for recognizing the problem: take a NEW text of reasonable clarity or difficulty, have it recorded in any pronunciation you like at a reasonable conversational speed, and listen to it. If you can follow the text at that speed, then you can think in that language, at least at some minimal level. If not, then you are still on a major, uphill, learning track, and will have the delightful experience of many a surprise catching up on you.)

Somewhat over a decade ago I made an observation that changed the way in which I thought about this "dead language" question. Inside of a language classroom, all languages are equally 'dead', in the sense that the audience does not speak the target language. In too many cases, even the teachers do not speak the target language, and I'm talking about modern languages here. (You will find that not every high school or elementary school language teacher can speak the language, and in most cases the teachers are not mother-tongue speakers of the language.)

> Let's think about Spanish, French, English, etc., all living languages.
> Ancient Hebrew, Koine Greek, Classical Greek, Latin, etc., are all dead
> languages. It is much easier to learn, read and speak a LIVING language. That is
> what "immersion" is all about. That is NOT to say that the attempt to
> "immersion" cannot be done, but classes in Greek, Hebrew and Latin
> can only approximate the process.

Yes, let's think about Spanish, French, and English.

1. The first question to ask, is "Can they be learned in a classroom?"
This is not a trivial question and the question has been raised in second language acquisition literature on more than one occasion. "Can a language be learned in a classroom?" The answer is not a resounding 'yes', but more of a whimpering 'yes'.
It is possible, IF..., IF..., IF....

2. A second question to ask is "Can a language be learned from second-language users, non-mother-tongue speakers?" Again, while everyone agrees that exposure to mother-tongue speakers is a definite plus, the answer is that second-language users can teach effective language acquisition programs.

3. A third question then becomes, "Can an ancient language be learned in a classroom?"
Again the answer becomes, Yes, IF ..., IF ...., lF ... .

4. A fourth question then becomes, "Why don't programs promote or do this very thing?" Here the answers are too painful to put in words. At the end of the day the result is that the 'dead language issue' is simply an excuse to perpetrate the status quo. For languages with less than an attested 10,000 -- 15,000 word vocabulary a person might make a legitimate case that the task is not practically possible. But Greek is not such a language. (Nor is Hebrew such a language if Qumran and the Mishnah are included. But Hebrew raises special considerations tangential to this discussion.)

5. A fifth question, unrelated to the 'dead language issue', is the appropriate training for persons with limited goals of one or two years of study. I might argue that the training should be the most efficient possible, one that allows the student to meet their limited goals, and preferably, one that would allow unhindered progress to more complete goals for those who want to go on.

6. My thesis, then, is that the 'dead language issue' is a dead question, a non-issue in terms of theory. Stated as a positive: All languages may become ALIVE in a properly run classroom.

7. PS - an aside: non-mother-tongue speakers WILL make mistakes in production, even mother-tongue speakers make mistakes, (though fewer and often corrected correctly). Somehow, the human race survives. There are occasionally people who claim that not learning a language to a fluent level is preferable in order to never hear a mistake made. Such an attitude will probably hinder any language learning and invariably leads to 'unreal' language imaginings. I see this a lot in the field of biblical Hebrew where professors 'generate' what they claim is 'pure' biblical Hebrew, untainted by fluent use of any Hebrew dialect, and they are chagrined to find out that their 'tower of Pisa' is leaning. They produce "grammatically correct" utterances of common material but their production doesn't occur in the Hebrew Bible or match what is there. They are happily operating within a system that no ancient speaker followed. Poor Samuel and Isaiah, who hadn't had the benefit of Gesenius (a famous 19th century grammarian).

[As a postscript to this email exchange, note the discussion on this very issue in John Hobbins' blog, especially the comments he quotes from Paula Saffire's paper.]

Psalm 16:2: טוֹבָתִי בַּל עָלֶיךָ

This is a translation question from a student for Dr. Buth:

Dear Dr. Buth,

Last night i was reading Psalm 16 and struggled with some difficult
verses. I would like to seek your opinion on verse two:

אָמַרְתְּ לַיהוָה

אֲדֹנָי אָתָּה

טוֹבָתִי, בַּל-עָלֶיךָ

A straightforward reading seems strange and doesn't make sense: my welfare is not upon you.

BDB interprets this as a rhetorical question: is not my welfare dependent upon you? This sounds nice semantically, but i'm not sure if it is acceptable grammatically. According to my limited knowledge of BH, normally such a question would be preceded by an interrogative ה, or הלא Because my knowledge is so limited, I need to consult your expert opinion. Can this phrase be properly understood as "is not my welfare dependent upon you?"

According to HALOT, here the word בַּל may mean something else: Surely, indeed. However, such an interpretation seems dubious to me, because there is hardly another place in the Bible where בַּל has this other, opposite meaning. Indeed, the word appears several other times in the same Psalm 16, all with the normal
meaning of "not."

Even-Shoshan also defines this instance as אין in his concordance.

NJPS ignores the masoretic accents, redivides the verse as:

"You are my welfare/ benefactor

There is none above You."

To me, this makes perfect sense, though it is not according to the masoretic division.

The Aramaic targums and Septuagint probably have other ideas, as do the various English translations.

I was just wondering, if we follow the Masoretic text and accents as they are, and understand the word בַּל in its regular, accepted negative meaning, could it be that the preposition על here means something else? For example, could it mean something like "besides" or "apart from"?

Thank you.

Response from Dr. Buth:

You are asking the right questions. You should also start seeking some Hebrew-Hebrew resources. E.g. Amos Haxam, da`at miqra, tehilim 1, p 68, says (translating)

"I do not seek favor from any being besides you'."
and footnotes: "another version: you are the one good thing that I have, and I have nothing good except you."

In both cases Haxam has interpreted BAL-`ALEXA as 'none except for'. This is the only BAL-`AL in the Bible, so it is a kind of hapax.

Kaddari, milon ha-`ivrit ha-miqrait, p. 104 "perhaps: '(you are) my good thing, and there is none above you'." He then cites Cassuto and a Ugaritic text with an apparent parallel to an equivalent phrase אין אשר על. there is none that is above--.

I like this last interpretation. the word TOVATI 'my good thing' is a stand alone predicate, a second predicate after 'you are my Lord,'...my good thing, there is none over you. For verses 3-5, which are also very tricky, see Amos Haxam.