#GREEK QUESTION MARK REDDIT FULL#
Discussions like that of Decker are a significant improvement, but future teaching grammars, whether beginning or intermediate, need to give clause structure full status within their pages. Syntax as categorization for translation rather than syntax as structureīoth of these are to the detriment of actual education about syntax.I would venture a guess that the reason for the problematic state of Greek grammar on this issue results from an overemphasis on: This is what a good introductory discussion ought to look like. Yes/No questions and Content questions are given full attention together in their larger context of non-declarative speech acts and illocutionary force. Tom Payne’s Understanding English Grammar has a substantial discussion of English questions in chapter 15: Pragmatic grounding and pragmatically marked constructions, particularly section 15.4 on non-declarative speech acts. Their best attempts pale in comparison to how questions are discussed in pedagogical grammars of English. These accounts of pedagogical Greek syntax are inadequate. Even if there is an actual mention of the syntactic position of question words, it is still ad hoc, separated from all the other places where question formation might be mentioned, such as under mood or negation. Still, these small successes are still failures: There is no actual general summary of question formation in Ancient Greek in either of these grammars (or in any of the others). The Greek of the NT uses several different interrogative pronouns. Similarly, Porter’s Idioms of the Greek New Testament says: The situation is a step better in a more recent grammar like Decker’s, Reading Koine Greek: An Introduction and Integrated Workbook, which states:Īn interrogative pronoun, which is usually at the beginning of the clause, always has an acute accent on the front of the word and will have a question mark at the end of the clause. Wallace, for example, only provides discussion of the types of questions involved, but nothing about the syntactic structure of questions as a type of clause. But this reality is disconcerting for the other volumes. And Bell’s Compendious Grammar does very little more than survey morphology the section on syntax is more interested in other issues (well, that and it was published in 1820). Moule’s Idiom Book was never intended to be a comprehensive volume nor was Zerwick’s Biblical Greek. Some of this is relatively understandable. Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. William Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek 3rd Edition.Bell’s A Compendious Grammar of the Greek Tongue
Moulton’s Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek 3rd Edition Robertson’s A Short Grammar of the Greek New Testament, for Students Familiar with the Elements of Greek James Swetnam’s An Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek.Young’s Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach Ray Summers and Thomas Sawyer’s Essentials of New Testament Greek.William Hersey Davis’ Beginner’s Grammar of the Greek New Testament.Benjamin Chapman’s New Testament Greek Notebook.Easley’s User-Friendly Greek: A Common Sense Approach to the Greek New Testament Gresham Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners Moule’s Idiom Book of New Testament Greek Groton’s From Alpha to Omega: A Beginning Course in Classical Greek, 3rd edition. Of the 24 grammars I checked, some old and some new, 16 of them said nothing about τίς being used at the beginning of questions (i.e. If your sentence begins with one of these, it’s a safe bet it’s a question. They’re also the one that I was able to think of without going to a dictionary. There are a few more, of course, but these ones are pretty common. Here are some good question words to look for: If the sentence in question begins with a question word, it’s a question.
#GREEK QUESTION MARK REDDIT HOW TO#
But there is likely no actual centralized discussion of how to form questions in Greek.Įven worse, your grammar probably misses the simplest, most important, and most obvious way of determining the whether or not a sentence is question. The best-case scenario is that you find some information sporadically scattered across multiple topics like mood, the function of οὐ & μη. Consider, for example, how rare guidance or comment is made in NT grammars for how to determine whether a sentence is a question. Introductory Greek grammars do a very poor job for topics that would otherwise be extremely prominent in the teaching grammars of modern languages. Stanley Porter’s recent article in BAGL “Where Have All the Greek Grammarians Gone? And Why Should Anyone Care?” has some idiosyncrasies, certainly, but his general point that Greek grammars are stuck in the past isn’t wrong.
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