Monday, June 2, 2008

'gunai' and the limits of corpora

 

Micheal Palmer:

In some cases the limitations of working with ancient texts are recognized, by solutions are not proposed. E. Wendland and E.A. Nida, for example, offer the following statement in their article, 'Lexicography and Bible Translating':

The limited corpus of the New Testament and of other Koine Greek texts makes it impossible to undertake the find-grid distinctions which would be possible if there were more data available and particularly if informants of New Testament Greek were available.

They offer no discussion, however, of how their semantic theory may be adapted to this limitation. In fact, some of their statements might lead the skeptic to conclude that the limitation has been ignored. They state, for example, 'in Greek itself gunai has an associative meaning which is far more favorable than the English term woman.' While this may be a completely valid conclusion, how did they reach it? How can associative meaning be measured given the limited corpus available?

— Micheal Palmer, "How Do We Know a Phrase Is a Phrase?" in Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics, p.155

2 comments:

J. K. Gayle said...

They state, for example, 'in Greek itself gunai has an associative meaning which is far more favorable than the English term woman.' While this may be a completely valid conclusion, how did they reach it?

Wow. That's a lot of who said what when where and to whom.

I do think gunai is a Greek pun on genesis.

Nathan said...

oh, cool!