Biblical Greek - Lesson 4

Dr. Bill Mounce
Biblical Greek
nt201-04
Punctuation and Syllabification
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] In chapter four, we're going to look at issues of punctuation and slab ification. In terms of punctuation. The period and the comma are the same in Greek as they are in English, but in Greek the raised dot is the semicolon. And what looks to be an English semicolon is the Greek question mark. So there's period. Comma. Semicolon. Question mark. You already know about the diagnosis, but there's two other critical marks you need to know. The first one is the apostrophe or what is probably more properly called an elision mark is that sometimes words lose a final short vowel. So there are times in which a par goes to up the al-Muqrin is dropped out and is replaced with the illusion mark. In the vocabulary sections. When I give you the words that tend to drop out that final vowel, I will give both forms. The other day. I critical. You need to know our accents. Now there's some debate in among Greek teachers about how much you need to know about accents and when they're going to be there and so forth and so on. I take a bit of a minimal approach. Basically, all you really need to do is to place a stress on the syllable that has the accent. The acute is a mark that goes up over the epsilon. It originally indicated a rise in pitch, I tell, but we just say I tell now the graph is the downward mark over the alma cron and it used to indicate a drop in pitch. But we just say they are snow and a circumflex, as you might guess originally indicated a rise and then a drop in pitch. Hogg knows, but we just say Hogg knows. Now there are quite a few rules for celeb ification if you're the kind of person that likes rules.

[00:02:03] But my advice is simply, if you're an English speaker, just go with your instinct and you'll probably get it right. Greek saliva flies very much like English does, but the first two rules are the most important that there's one vowel or different per syllable. So if you say, okay, Carmen, you can count, there's an alpha ETA, Macron Alpha Epsilon. So, you know, there are five syllables. That's the most important rule. Okay. Common. The second most important rule is that when you have a single concern, in other words, not two concerns that are real, but a single consonant is going to go with the following vowel so the role does not go with the omega. It goes with the alpha. The kappa goes with the following alpha. The mute goes with the following epsilon or rockman hat or rock in. Probably the most important thing you can do is to practice reading. And there are several of these exercises that you get to through chapter four in the online class. And just listen to me read and you'll pick it up pretty quickly. In chapter four, we're going to start learning vocabulary. And I know some people have some fear about vocabulary, but let me just say a couple of things about it. First of all, the definitions I give you are what are technically called glosses. In other words, they're just approximations. I get really annoyed when I look at an English Bible and the translation is of the Greek word other fast and they'll say literally, brother. Well, no brother is one of the glosses. It's one of the meetings of other faiths. And sometimes it does mean brother. I have two brothers, David and Mike. So, you know, that may be what it is.

[00:04:01] But other of us also mean someone that you're very close to. My best friend is Ed, and I'll call him my brother because he is very, very close to me. Or sometimes other father simply refers to members of your faith community. And then you have to decide whether you understand those members of your faith community as brothers or perhaps as brothers and sisters. What I'm saying is that the meanings I'm giving you, the glosses that I'm giving you, are just very approximations of what the Greek word means. Please don't look at a word like other face and say, Well, literally means brother or cosmos literally means world. No, that's not true at all. All Greek words, in fact, all words in any language will have a range of meaning or what is called a semantic range. And you need the context to give you the specific meaning in a specific context. If you haven't already downloaded flash works, please do so. Flash Works is a really good piece of software that will really help you through vocabulary and you can actually go under to your preferences and you can find two and you say, I only want to work with words from chapter four. I only want to work with words from a certain frequency or there's other all kinds of ways to dissect the database. So please make use of that now by way of encouragement. In this chapter you're going to learn 26 words, but that means, you know, 11% of all word occurrences in the New Testament. In other words, with just these 26 words, you know, one out of every ten words that you're going to come across in the Bible, when we're done with the textbook, then you will have learned 319 words, which is 80%, which means eight out of every ten words you see in the New Testament, in the Greek New Testament, you will know.

[00:05:59] So most for sure, language textbooks. Have you learned a lot more than 319 words? So I'm not asking that much of you. So be sure you know your vocabulary really, really well.