Why a section on English grammar?

The aim of this textbook is to help you learn Greek, not English. You already know English perfectly well and are already using English grammar all the time. However, many readers will be using English grammar implicitly, without realising it, because many people today learn English without any focus on formal grammar. Whether this matters or not is a moot point and not an argument to be gone into here. However, it can be unfortunate when you start to learn a foreign language, particularly a language like Greek whose structure and grammar are actually very similar to English. Often Greek grammar is best explained by reference to English. For example, Greek sentences have subjects and objects just as English does. If you already understand what a subject and an object is (from English), then all you need to learn about Greek is that the subject is put in the nominative case and the object in the accusative case. This explanation does not work, though, if you have never met the terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ before. In these situations it can be helpful first to understand what ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are in English, and then to learn how they are pressed in Greek. This is why there is a section on English grammar in a Greek textbook.

When I was approached by Cambridge University Press and asked if I would be interested in writing a revision of my late father's The Elements of New Testament Greek, I was grateful for the invitation, but I declined. I am someone who uses Greek in my work, but I have not taught beginners' Greek very much at all. My father's book came out of practical classroom teaching, and any effective revision would have to be done by a teacher.

Dr Jeremy Duff is such a teacher, and a very effective one. When he began teaching Greek at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, what is often an unpopular subject suddenly started to go down very well. Students actually enjoyed Greek! So it occurred to me that Jeremy would be a worthy reviser of the Elements. I was very glad that Cambridge University Press, having been put in touch with Jeremy, agreed that he should be given the task of revising the book.

In fact what has come out is much more than a revision. It is in almost all respects a brand new book, though arising out ofWenham. There is an excellent precedent for such a revision, because my father's work was a similarly radical revision of H.P.V. Nunn's earlier book.

My pleasure in writing this foreword is twofold. First, Jeremy is a friend and a colleague of mine at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford; he is someone who has brought energy and interest to the college, and not just to the teaching of Greek.

THE LETTERS OF THE GREEK ALPHABET

The first task in learning Greek is to learn the alphabet, which consists of twenty-four letters. Many are similar to English ones, and you may already be familiar with some others (for example, pi π and theta θ from mathematics). Learning the alphabet has three parts.

Learning how to write each of the Greek letters

In Greek, just as in English, different people will have different styles of handwriting. Also, printed Greek often looks a little different from handwritten Greek. That is fine – the aim is not to win prizes for the artistic quality of your lettering.What matters is for the different letters to be clearly distinguished from each other. In practice, you will probably copy the style of your teacher.

Learning which sounds the different Greek letters make

Greek has been spoken for over three thousand years, and in many different dialects. This means that there is no single right way to pronounce Greek.What matters is to make each letter have its own distinctive sound. It is also useful if your pronunciation is similar to that of other biblical scholars (and your teacher and classmates) so you can understand each other.

You may wonder why pronouncing the letters is important at all, since your desire is to read Greek, not speak it.

Students are the ones who matter. Students, and more generally all those wishing to learn, are the only reason for teachers and academic books to exist. For ninety years those wishing to learn to read the New Testament in Greek have been ably served by The Elements of New Testament Greek published by Cambridge University Press. First, in the book of that name by H.P.V. Nunn published in 1914, and then in its 1965 replacement by J.W. Wenham. So successful was John Wenham's book that for much of its forty-year history it has been the standard first-year Greek course not only in the UK but across large parts of the English-speaking world. For generations of students, ‘Wenham’ was synonymous with Greek.

Wenham's success was that he cared about students and did everything possible to make learning ‘the elements’ of New Testament Greek as simple and painless as possible. The most striking example of this was his handling of Greek accents. The scholarly tradition behind the use of accents went back many centuries, though not, as Wenham was keen to point out, back to the time of the New Testament itself. Nevertheless Wenham dispensed with accents. Or at least he dispensed with most of them – keeping only the few cases where they were useful to the student in distinguishing between otherwise identical words. Even today many scholars and teachers find this regrettable, if not even scandalous. I have never met a student, though, who shares that opinion.

INTRODUCTION

Latin had only a marginal place in Egypt; it has been estimated that only about I per cent of documents from the Roman period that have survived are in Latin, proportionate to those in Greek. Even in military finds only about 10 per cent of texts are in Latin. Bagnall (1986:5) notes that included in the 76 publication numbers of the texts from Quseiral-Qadim (military documents of early Imperial date from the Red Sea coast, eight km north of the modern town of Quseir) there are three Latin papyri (18–20), three Latin ostraca (44–6) and perhaps one Latin inscription (66). He observes: ‘Latin thus makes up about ten percent of the corpus of Greek and Latin texts. The same ratio is found in the Florida ostraka, and no doubt in both cases we have at least a general reflection of the limited but real role of Latin in the administration of the Roman army in Egypt.’ To talk of the Latin of Egypt would be misleading, because it might imply that there was an established Latin-speaking population such as might have developed over the generations its own regional features in that language. In fact the Latin which has turned up in Egypt represents a considerable diversity. If a Latin text is discovered in Egypt, that does not mean that its author was of Egyptian origin.

INTRODUCTION

In this final chapter I refer briefly to some of the themes scattered throughout the book without attempting to be comprehensive. Other topics, such as accommodation, regional variation determined by language contact, language mixing etc. are discussed particularly in the concluding sections to various chapters, and can be followed up through the index.

IDENTITY

It is often argued in linguistic literature that language is the most important marker of identity that there is (see e.g. Crystal (2000:40)). Even monolinguals living in a monolingual society where they have little or no contact with other languages may be conscious that it is their language which gives them a special identity in the world. The English, for example, constantly express pride in their language, and in doing so they are implicitly presenting the English language as one of the markers of their achievements as a people. Attempts by the French to eliminate ‘Franglais’ from the French language are reported with alacrity in the British press, with the implication that the English language is now doing what the English people have ceased to do, that is colonising foreign territory. The fading of French as an international educated language in the face of English is reported from time to time with satisfaction. Articles in the press regularly speak of the ‘richness’ and ‘subtlety’ of English, usually without acknowledgment that the ‘richness’ of its vocabulary is largely due to its reception of foreign loan-words over a long period.

INTRODUCTION

The imperfect bilinguals or second-language learners who have been identified so far belonged largely to groups resident in areas in which two or more languages were in contact, such as the city of Rome. But language contact with its consequent bilingualism did not only take place in static populations.One environment, for example, in which speakers of different languages mixed together was the army; but language learning in the army is a topic in itself (see above, 5.VII.3).

Another group in any population who come into contact with foreign language speakers are traders purveying goods across language boundaries. In many cultures the trading classes have proved adept at acquiring enough of the foreign languages needed to carry on business, and there is no reason to think that Roman traders and their trading partners will have been any different. Language learning was no doubt a two-way process, in the sense that Latin-speakers wishing to exploit a province would have come into contact with provincial languages, and on the other hand provincial traders moving into Latin-speaking areas or dealing with Latin speakers will have picked up some Latin.

We have already seen one example of this second form of contact. The Greek-speaking Milesian slave-trader Aeschines (see 1.VII.2.3), while trading in the west, was required to write out in his own hand a legalistic document in Latin. It can be deduced from some of his misspellings that he was familiar with the sounds of substandard varieties of the Latin language.

INTRODUCTION

In a previous chapter code-switching was defined, and distinguished from borrowing and interference (I.V). Some testimonia were cited which established that the phenomenon was recognised in antiquity. Code-switching is common both in literary texts and primary material, particularly inscriptions. I turn in this chapter to its determinants.

There is now a variety of opinion about the nature and motivation of code-switching. An old view was that the ‘ideal bilingual switches from one language to the other according to appropriate changes in the speech situation (interlocutors, topics, etc.), but not in an unchanged speech situation, and certainly not within a single sentence’ (Weinreich (1953: 73), my italics). Weinreich goes on to ‘visualize two types of deviation from the norm’ (i.e. the norm whereby the ideal bilingual is resistant to switching). The second of his ‘deviations’ is ‘in the direction of insufficient adherence to one language in a constant speech situation’ (1953:74). He observes that this ‘tendency (abnormal proneness to switching) has been attributed to persons who, in early childhood, were addressed by the same familiar interlocutors indiscriminately in both languages’. Switching is thus acknowledged to exist, but is seen as an aberration, or, as Weinreich puts it (1953:74), a ‘deviant behaviour pattern’. Such claims have now been rejected as a result of study of bilingual communities in which in unchanged speech situations speakers have been observed to switch languages with considerable freedom even within sentence or clause boundaries.

THE COMMUNITY OF NEGOTIATORES AT DELOS

Delos provides an interesting case study of bilingualism in the public domain in a trading community in which Romans and Italians were prominent in the last centuries of the Republic. Trade is an activity in which cross-language communication is essential. Two separate trading or commercial communities, in which Roman linguistic attitudes differed markedly, are the subject of chapters in this book. In the pottery at La Graufesenque there is no sign of Italians learning Gaulish. Gaulish went on being used by Celts, but there are indications that they were also learning Latin. But on Delos the Roman/Italian attitude to the other language was far more deferential. Italians were happy to have themselves presented as Greek-speaking in formal texts, though the situation was complex, as we will see.

Delos was the site of the earliest and largest Roman–Italian commercial community in the Greek world. After 167 the senate expelled the Delians and the island became a free-trade centre under nominal Athenian supervision. Many inscriptions, in Greek, Latin and both languages, distributed for present purposes from the second century BC onwards into the early Imperial period, attest the activities of Latin-speaking, or, one should more accurately say, bilingual, negotiatores, and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between the two languages, the motivations of language choice, if only in public documents (for ‘private’ language use, see the discussion below (VI) of the Myconos curse tablet), and the character of the bilingualism of the traders.