Posted on by Joelendil · 2 Comments

It’s All Koiné to Me

Linguistics and New Testament Greek: Key Issues in the Current Debate by [David Alan Black, Benjamin L. Merkle]

Title: Linguistics and New Testament Greek:
Key Issues in the Current Debate
Editors: David Alan Black & Benjamin L. Merkle
Genre: Linguistics / Biblical Studies
Pages: 288
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Future Publication Date: 11/2/2020 – Thank you to the editors and publisher for a free eARC through NetGalley. This is no way affects the content of the review.

When I was in seminary (10+ years ago), my favorite professor/mentor was Dr. Rod Decker who taught most of the Koiné Greek classes. He kept us up to date on the latest goings on in the world of New Testament Greek linguistics, because getting the most out of learning the biblical languages takes more than memorizing vocabulary and verb conjugations. This collection of scholarly essays provides that kind of help for the intermediate Koiné Greek student (or pastor who is trying to keep current).

This book does require some knowledge of the subject matter and academic jargon. For example, expect sentences like, “This, Barber rightly argues, encapsulates the basic polarity between the active and middle voices, and it does so in categories that manifestly entail a difference in transitivity.” These essays come from presentations at a conference, so their overall tone is slightly more conversational that normal for an academic work, but they are still fairly dry overall.

Most of the chapters relate to one of three topics: linguistic theories, verbal tense/aspect, and the best way to teach/learn New Testament Greek. The authors are not all in agreement on some of the issues (e.g. the aspect of the perfect/pluperfect tense), so you get to see some scholarly interaction in those cases. I thoroughly enjoyed dipping back into the academic world, and picked up at least a few things that should prove helpful in my personal study. I would highly recommend this book to those with some knowledge of Koiné.

Posted on by Joelendil

“…the difference between man and man”

Title: Figures of Speech:
Six Histories of Language & Identity in the Age of Revolutions
Author: Tim Cassedy
Genre: History/Linguistics
Pages: 296
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Future Release Date: 1/3/19 (Thank you to the author and publisher for a free eARC via NetGalley. This in no way affects the content of this review)

In the 18th and 19th centuries, intellectuals commonly believed that language “made the difference between man and man.” That is, certain characteristics of a language (phonemes, orthography, vocabulary, etc.) shaped its speakers’ way of thinking and could allow others to draw valid generalizations about them. Tim Cassedy examines the lives of six individuals who tried to use language as a means of shaping identity (individual, national, or international). He seeks to show that the conclusions drawn from this line of thinking usually did little more than confirm existing biases.

The stories themselves will hold your attention if you have an interest in language, but there is some redundancy in their telling. For me, there was occasionally the feeling of “I think maybe he’s reading too much into this,” but that’s pretty much par for the course in academic books …and he’s the expert so maybe it’s just me. Overall, the book provided me with new historical information and kept my interest.

Unfortunately, the advanced reader copy that I was provided was very poorly formatted and included occasional “words” or “phrases” of gibberish that were clearly placeholders for something else in the finished version. This made parts of the book hard to review. I suspect that some of the charts, illustrations, typefaces, and comments that were nearly unreadable in the ARC will be helpful in the original and probably bump this up from a 3.5 to a 4 star read.