Today we are going to change things up by watching a "NT Greek Immersion" video made by Angela Taylor, a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators of South Africa.
Her vision, praise God, is to equip indigenous Bible translators around the world to use the Greek NT in their own Bible translation work.
Of course, you don't want people to have to learn English first, just so they can learn Greek. So her method is very much an immersion-style of language teaching. The only language used is Koine Greek!
Her videos will be equally useful to somebody who speaks only the Kham muang language of Thailand as they will be to those of us who speak only English.
It is early days yet for Angela and her team — she has only made 3 videos so far, the first of which (as I type these words here in July of 2021) was posted only 4 weeks ago. The most recent came out 4 days ago. So this is BRAND new.
But she has a vision of producing several hundred videos, enough to equip a person to read and translate the whole NT in Greek into their own indigenous language.
Another part of Angela's vision — one with which I feel a good deal of kinship with my approach to BETSy — is that her videos will offer "Free Greek. Forever."
I will keep an eye on Angela's work, and will share videos with you from time to time, as more become available.
The video is only 12:20 long. I encourage you to listen to it several times until you can get the vocabulary down pat.
Click here to go to the video now.
Angela uses the same "Erasmian pronunciation" that we use in class.
We have no authentic recording of any Ancient Greek conversation at our disposal. But this does not mean that phoneticians cannot reconstruct with a fair degree of certainty the historical pronunciation of a language spoken in Antiquity.
Some clues have helped experts in their reconstruction:
- general phonetics tendencies,
- spelling errors recorded in ancient inscriptions,
- spelling of Greek loan words in other ancient languages such as Latin, and...
- even descriptions of the Greek phonetics by ancient Greek grammarians themselves.
Phoneticians have reached a firm consensus about the exact pronunciation of Ancient Greek at the different stages of its development. The different articles about this topic in Wikipedia, whether in English, Greek or French, reflect this strong consensus among scholars.
The overall conclusion is that Erasmus, one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance, who spent an enormous amount of effort at reconstructing the sound of Ancient Greek, got it right.
SIL (which originally stood for "Summer Institute of Linguistics") is the technical/linguistic-training arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Particularly in countries closed to traditional missionaries, it is a help to people to work under the SIL umbrella rather than that of Wycliffe. You can discover more at:
If Angela and SIL can follow through on their plan, I have to believe that in 7 or 8 years' time, they will not just have an impact among Wycliffe Bible translators around the world, but will be the catalyst for a revolution in Greek language instruction in Bible schools and seminaries as well.
There are a few Greek words you will hear a lot in the video:
- οὐ (no)
- ναί (yes)
- καλός (good)
- καὶ (and) τι (what) ἐστί (is) τοῦτο (this);
- πού (where) ἐστιν (is) ὁ (the) "whatever...."
- ἐστί can pick up a ν if it is followed by a vowel in the next word, or is at the end of a sentence or clause. So another form of ἐστί is ἐστιν.
We haven't run into these words yet in Acts, but we will. They are all pretty common.
One bit of trivia from the first word Angela teaches: ἵππος (horse). The Greek word for river is ποταμός. Hence, the English word hippopotamus is derived from two Greek words for river-horse.