Review of Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek: A Survey of Basic Concepts and Applications by David Alan Black (Grand Rapids: Baker Books) Second Edition, 1995

Chapter 1 : Introducing Linguistics: The Landscape and the Quest 

Why Study Linguistics? The most important reason is to help us understand “the meaning of the New Testament.” (3).

 What is a Linguist? “The linguisit’s work is understanding and describing the nature of language.”

 What is Linguistics? “Linguistics is the science that attempts to understand language from the point of view of its ‘inner workings’---what linguists call internal structure.” (5).

How Do Linguists Go About Their Work? They use two approaches. First, there is descriptive linguistics. The grammar of a language is the chief concern of descriptive linguistic.

Historical Linguistics 

Using the tools of descriptive linguistics, they analyze languages on the basis of grammar and trace the historical development of their sound systems, vocabularies, and writing systems.

How Does Linguistics Differ from Traditional Grammar?
It is scientific.

It is descriptive.

It emphasizes the spoken language.

 Chapter 2: Phonology: The Sounds of Greek

Linguistics, is concerned primarily with the spoken word. Phonology deals with speech sounds.

Contraction brings words together. The combination of some vowels contracted form diphthongs. Elision omits a final short vowel before an initial vowel, like δι αυτου. Crasis is the contraction of the final and initial of successive words so that the two words are written as one, τουνομα  (το ονομα). The moveable consonant, added to the end of a word when the following word begins with a vowel, such as σι (ν).

Chapter 3: Morphology: The Anatomy of Greek Words

Phonemes combine to make morphemes. A morpheme is the minimum unit of speech conveying a specific meaning in a language (53). Dog is a morpheme. The plural marker -s is also a morpheme.

A root must be distinguished from a stem to which an affix can be added. In the verb undress, dress is the root to which un- is prefixed. It is also the stem. In undressing, dress is still the root, but undress is the stem with the suffix -ing.

Greek makes a great deal of use of derivational affixes to make new words from existing roost.

Chapter 4: Syntax: The Architecture of the Greek Sentence

Structure words (articles, prepositions, and conjunctions) are the mortar of language, and content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) are the bricks that provide the substance of a sentence (98).

In a highly inflected language like Greek, word order plays a somewhat secondary role...Inflected languages are more rigidly bound by their morphological structures (99).

Immediate Constituent Analysis

Linguists apply the principle of immediate constituent analysis determining the interrelationships of the components of a sentence (100).

Greek Sentence Patterns

Definition of a sentence: “The basic sentence is the simple declaration, having as its immediate constituents a subject and a predicate” (102).

Most Greek sentences could be representative by a comparatively small number of patterns or kernel sentences. Familiarity with these syntactic relationships distinguishes the efficient Greek student from the first year Greek student. If structure words (articles, prepositions, and conjunctions) are the mortar of language, content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) are the brick that provides the substance of a sentence.

Verb modifiers are two types: Adverbs and various kinds of word groups such as prepositional phrases, noun phrases without prepositions, subordinate verb clauses, participial clauses, and infinitive clauses.

The “teaching of Greek syntax is going through a major transition”(114). We have been studying Greek grammar from a structuralist point of view. There is also transformational-generative grammar (TG). All sentences that are not kernel sentences are defined as transformations, that is, variations, expansions, extensions, or permutations of kernel sentences (114).

Chapter 5: Semantics: Determining Meaning

It is a basic principle of semantics that one cannot progress from the form of a word to its meaning (121). James Barr in his landmark The Semantics of Biblical Language in 1961 called this the fallacy of etymologizing. A notorious example is εκκλησια.

 Meaning is then extracted from the passage in which the word is found (122).

Word and Concept

The fault with Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the NT is treating individual words as if they were concepts that contain the various theological meanings assigned to them (123). Eugene Nida and J. P. Louw is a better approach that treats NT words according to some ninety semantic domains which are based on synchronic (contextual) data, rather than the diachronic (historical) data supplied by most lexicons.

General and Secondary Meanings

Another semantic analysis assumption is that words often have a general or central meaning and a number of secondary or transferred meanings (124). Also, there is no general or central meaning of a word that combines all the meanings for which the word is used. To ignore this principle is called by Barr illegitimate totality transfer (125). An example Barr gives is making εκκλησια mean the Body of Christ in every passage such as Acts 7:38.

Chapter 6: Historical and Comparative Linguistics: The Biography of Greek

Black gives the history of the Indo-European Family of Languages which includes Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, and Germanic. He also gives the history of the Greek language covering the early Greek period (2000-900 B.C.), Classical Greek (900-330), Koine Greek (330-A.D.330), Byzantine Greek (330-1453), and Modern Greek (1453-Present).

Chapter 7: Discourse Analysis: Getting the Big Picture

Black calls discourse analysis texlinguistics which relates the parts of a discourse to the whole i.e., the paragraphs, sections, and entire texts. He applies discourse analysis to the book of Philippians.