Some musings on dialect(s)

What sort of Greek should you learn? What dialect does this textbook teach? What if I want to do X? or Y?

All such questions preoccupy a certain segment of learners, and a certain segment of teachers too. In this post I share a few reflections on the issue of dialects in learning, and in reading, ancient Greek.

I first learnt 'Biblical Greek', by which was meant a fairly narrow version of Koine based on the New Testament corpus. I then broadened out, with some forays into classical classes and texts, and into patristics. Over time that broadening became very broad indeed. For the last 10 years I have taught primarily from Athenaze and my own spoken and written Greek has been influenced by that, so that I have a mixture of Attic and Koine elements in the way I use Greek.

At the same time I have also become more sensitised to dialect variations. I will often comment in class about whether a word or a feature is more Attic, or more Koine. Because I think this kind of sensitivity is part of what you need to move across Greek texts from diverse writers and places and periods.

The person who trains predominantly from a classical textbook and Attic perspective often acquires the kind of prescriptivist dogmatism that looks down upon Koine as a degenerate form of the language. No different, really, from the classist and often racist attitudes that maintain that a certain sociolect is 'superior'. At times, I see this in myself when I prefer certain linguistic features (using ποῖ rather than ποῦ for 'where to?').

The person who trains exclusively in NT Greek has a different problem: they have trained on a fairly limited corpus and dialect, and they often struggle to read broader Greek. This is one reason I do teach a broader Greek. How can you assess features of the New Testament, when you have no knowledge of Greek outside it with which you could possible compare it to?

I have also come to agree with our friend Henry Quillen and his opinion that Atticising in Koine texts is almost always a deliberate choice and a register feature. Which means you need to be sensitised to those choices and learn to feel them for what they are.

In my LGPSI writing project I am trying to do a few things, and time will tell whether I succeed. I begin with a fairly intentional Koine base. But over time I introduce some synonyms, some word choices, some syntax features that are more consistent with a higher register Koine. There are classicising features. As the story develops you will meet speakers, and the narration will reflect this as well, who use more Attic features, and indeed full-blown Atticism. That may be somewhat anachronistic, but I believe it will be pedagogically useful. Down the road, and without giving too much away, some characters and plotlines will verge into Ionic and 'Homeric' Greek as well. Again, anachronistic, but intentional and pedagogical to equip you as a learner to read across dialects, across periods, and enjoy the breadth of Ancient Greek.

In the last few months I have had the pleasure of reading both some Basil the Great, and Anna Komnena, both incredibly well-educated writers of Greek, obviously familiar with the vast repository of Greek literature, and not afraid to plunder the depths of all those writers to decorate their own. I take them not as examples necessarily to imitate, but exemplars to point out the need for us to become aware of our dialect biases (both in judgement and 'norms' and usage) and sensitised to such features, in order to read Greek texts broadly, and with a sense of where and why authorial choices matter.