Awhile back I posted a four-part series on the advantages of Unicode for typing out Biblical Greek and Hebrew. I am linking these posts here so those interested have a one-stop shop for the whole series.
These posts provide a detailed but understandable explanation of what Unicode is, how to set up Greek and Hebrew Unicode keyboards, and what Fonts work best for each language. Enjoy.
I found this post interesting. It argues that in an age of Wikipedia and Google memorization is unimportant.
According to Tapscott, the existence of Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education. “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Tapscott told the Times. “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.
Even if we make an exception for language learning (vocabulary in particular), I think this perspective needs to be nuanced.
Also from the article:
Today’s students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has
them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the
net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This “continuous partial attention” and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?A new book on the subject, “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” states that our exposure to the net is impacting the way our brains form neural pathways. Wiring up our brains like this makes us adept at filtering information, making snap decisions, and fielding the incoming digital debris, but sustained concentration, reading body language, and making offline friends are skills that are fading away.
Your thoughts?
At a dog-friendly beach in Holland
Some ideas are easily represented in any language, but more often than not translation requires sensitivity to a wide variety of often competing influences.
I just listened to a nice little story on NPR about the “Art of Translation.”
Bea Basso, who came from Italy to the United States in 2000 to study and work in theater, has done a lot of translating from Italian to English. She says that the choice of a single word can determine the arc of an entire work.
“There is no such thing as a literal translation, by nature of choosing one word or another, you influence the next step,” she says.
Listen to the whole story.
Because no two languages are alike, and since the cultural differences surrounding a language are often more than meets the eye, translation is more an art than a science. Translation always involves something lost and also something gained–some of the original is gone, but there is also often additional meaning in the translation that was not there in the text being translated. For proof, type in some text here. The results can be comic.
This is true of all translation, but with Greek (or Hebrew, or any other “dead” language) the matter is complicated by the fact that the original culture is no longer there for us to study. Translation suddenly intersects with historical research, sociology, theology, and a wealth of other disciplines, which is one reason it is so important for pastors to learn Greek.
The folks over at BibleWorks have announced the release of the eighth iteration of their software product. The announcement includes an extensive list of upgrades and new features. Read the whole announcement. Here are some highlights:
New Features
The biggest advances appear to be in the area of searching and analysis (rather than text handling or diagramming, though there are a few additions here as well). They have added a new phrase matching tool, as well as some other search improvements:
Over lunch in mid-2007, we asked ourselves, “How could we find all verses which are similar to each other?” Out of this discussion came the Phrase Matching Tool and Related Verses Tool. The new Phrase Matching Tool takes your current verse and finds all verses containing similar phrases. The new Related Verses Tool finds all verses using some of the same words from the current verse.
They are also adding in an “External Resource Manager” that lats you organize and collect your massive storehouse of documents, PDFs, and images into Bibleworks’s main interface. Personally I use Zotero for this, but some might like this feature.
New Databases
Two additional modern grammars are now available in the suite: Waltke/O’Connor for Hebrew and Wallace for Greek. The complete Early Church Fathers is also available (only the Apostolic Fathers are available in BW 7).More importantly, Bibleworks will finally include the Greek Text of the OT Pseudepigrapha (BW 7 included the Apocrypha, but not the Pseudepigrapha), which is a much needed addition. The Targum of the Psalms will also be added, though only in English.
Thoughts
There are a couple of features that would motivate me to upgrade from BibleWorks 7, and only one of them appears to be included: the OT Pseudopigrapha. I would really like to see Bibleworks include a robust semantic diagramming module (Logos has one). And I wish BDAG was bundled with the rest of the suite (though that is Chicago’s fault). BibleWorks also needs to seriously improve it’s map functionality (the map module is excessively sluggish on my computer, and my computer is rarely excessively sluggish). The most serious need in my opinion is full-fledged Unicode support. They claimed this would be available in Bibleworks 7, and while oen can certainly export text in Unicode, it is not native built it. ASCII is dead as a doornail. There should be no ASCII text visible in BibleWorks, especially since it attempts to handle so many languages.
I am optimistic, but need a couple of more features explained before I am ready to purchase. Stay tuned for updates!
Purchase
Bibleworks 8 can be purchased by visiting the Bibleworks site. Special upgrade prices are available for those with Bibleworks 6 or Bibleworks 7. Bibleworks will not ship out until mid-December, however, so you still have some time.
John Piper reminds us fiction junkies that it’s OK to read stories, even children’s stories. Quoting C. S. Lewis:
I was therefore writing “for children” only in the sense that I excluded what I thought they would not like or understand; not in the sense of writing what I intended to be below adult attention. I may of course have been deceived, but the principle at least saves one from being patronizing. I never wrote down to anyone; and whether the opinion condemns or acquits my own work, it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
And here is one from Douglas Wilson:
In C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we are given a good example of a boy who has been brought up poorly. Eustace Scrubb had stumbled into a dragon’s lair, but he did not know what kind of place it was. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”
It is a standing rebuke for us that there are many Christians who have an open sympathy for the ‘true’ books which Eustace read–full of true facts about governments and drains and exports–and who are suspicious of great works of imagination, like the Narnia stories, or The Lord of the Rings, or Treasure Island, because they are ‘fictional,’ and therefore suspected of lying. The Bible requires us to be truthful above all things, they tell us, and so we should not tell our sons about dragon-fighting. Our sons need to be strong on drains and weak on dragons. The irony here is that the Bible, the source of all truth, says a lot about dragons and giants, and very little about drains and exports….
The Bible cannot be read rightly without creating a deep impulse to tell stories which carry the scriptural truth about the kind of war we are in down through the ages.
Wilson, Douglas. Future Men, 2001, 101.
Of course we must have balanced diets (though note that fiction has been excluded in the list below):
This is really dangerous, and the way to counteract it is to prescribe balanced reading for yourself. What I mean is this. Read theology, as I say, but always balance it, not only with Church history but with biographies and the more devotional type of reading. Let me explain why this is so important. Your are preparing yourself, remember, and the danger for the intellectual type of man, if he is only reading theology or philosophy, is to become puffed up. He persuades himself that he has a perfect system; there is no problem, there is no difficulty.
Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. Preaching & Preachers. Zondervan, 1972. p. 178
And finally, on a more technical level, and with application to Biblical Hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur:
It is in the age when our language has become more precise, more univocal, more technical, in a word, more suited to those integral formalizations which are called precisely symbolic logic, it is in this very age of discourse that we want to recharge our language, that we want to start again from the fullness of language. That also is a gift of our ‘modernity,’ for we moderns are the heirs of philology, of exegesis, of the phenomenology of religion, of the psychoanalysis of language. The same epoch holds in reserve both the possibility of emptying language by radically formalizing it and the possibility of filling it anew by reminding itself of the fullest meanings…. Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.
Ricoeur, P. The Symbolism of Evil. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. p. 380
Where should you get started? There are a whole host of recommendations I would love to offer (perhaps people can post their recommendations in the comments), but Justin Taylor recently recommended Gilead, which I picked up today at our local library.
Here are some of the books mentioned in this post.
The “How to Type in Greek” series of posts is designed to help you set-up your computer to type Ancient (Polytonic) Greek using a Unicode Font. Be sure to check out Part I (on Unicode), II (on setting up Windows), and III (on recommended Fonts).
Introduction
This post is designed to show Linux users how to set-up a Polytonic Greek keyboard, with particular attention to Ubuntu. The goal is that our keyboard will function identically regardless of Desktop Environment or application—QT and GTK should each work flawlessly, and both KOffice and OpenOffice.org (as well as any other native Linux applications) should generate identical Greek characters. Once your keyboard is setup you will be able to dynamically switch between Greek and English in any application.
Before getting started you may want to read two previous posts in this series. (1) This post explains the advantages of Unicode and its usefulness (and necessity) for typing in Greek. (2) Once you have your keyboard setup, you will need to read through this post to find an open-source Greek font that implements all the necessary bells and whistles for typing in Ancient Greek (all the fonts listed are compatible with Linux).
A Guide by Vern Poythress
The most important resource for Polytonic Greek in Linux is this guide by Vern Poythress of Westminster Seminary. This is an excellent guide, complete with links and special files that will help you get the perfect setup. The only difficulty is that it is not distribution specific. In general this is a good thing, but I ran into problems with Ubuntu due to their default input method under 8.04, and the setup is much easier in 8.10. If you have problems with the steps below, follow Poythress’s guide.
Ubuntu 8.10
Polytonic Greek works out of the box in Ubuntu 8.10, much to my surprise (see the comments to this post; thanks Simos). To get it working, right click on your panel and add the keyboard indicator. Next, right click on your new keyboard indicator and choose “Keyboard preferences.” 
This will bring up a dialog. Choose the layouts tab, then the Plus button. You choose your layout by Country then by Variant. You want “Greece” and the “Polytonic.”
That’s it. Everything should be working, though you may want to follow Poythress’s guide to tweak your keyboard layout a bit. If your would prefer to use SCIM, which is a different Input Method particularly useful for complex characters (and which might solve problems with compatibility issues), follow the guide below on Ubuntu 8.04.
Ubuntu 8.04: How to Set Up SCIM
Ubuntu, and several other GNOME-heavy distributions (like Fedora), do not use SCIM by default, which is the preferred input method for complex characters (accents and the like). You will therefore have to set it up manually, which is not difficult. Here are the steps I used for Ubuntu:
The latest versions of Ubuntu provide a pretty simple way of doing this. You just need to set a couple of language options. 
You need to allow for complex character creation. System –> Administration –> Language Support. Check the box for “Enable support to Enter Complex Characters.” This tells X.org that you want to use SCIM, rather than the default input method. You do NOT need to install anything else, so ignore any notices that tells you otherwise, and don’t select any languages. You are only concerned about characters and keyboards. Now you will need to restart.
When GNOME boots up again, there will be a little keyboard icon in your taskbar. Right-click on this icon and select SCIM Setup. Go to “Global Setup.” You should see a list of various Input Methods. You need “Other – English/European” . Check that box, Apply, then close out of the dialog. You may need to restart again, but it shouldn’t be necessary. 
You will now be able to use the keyboard icon to select the preferred Input Method. I have English/European set as default, but you can always move between different methods if you like. Just click on the Keyboard icon, and select what you want to use. Whenever you type in Greek you will need to be using “English/European” in order to get all the accents.
Moving to SCIM as the defult input manager may result in a couple of problems
(1) You may loose some shortcut features in Nautilus as a result of certain SCIM implementations. Nautilus allows you to type to select folders and files, and with SCIM this might no longer work. There is an easy fix, however. At the command line, type: im-switch -c . Select scim-immodule. Restart your x-server and you should be good to go.
(2) Regardless of distribution, you will need to install extra software if you use Virtualization technology, such as VirtualBox or VMWare.
For Ubuntu (or other Debian-based distributions) search for and install scim-bridge-client-qt and scim-bridge-client-qt4 in Synaptic, or just type the following in a Terminal:
sudo apt-get install scim-bridge-client-qt scim-bridge-client-qt4
All Distrubutions: Setting up your Keyboard
Now that you have SCIM set up and everything else working, you can install your Greek keyboard. Right click on the gnome panel and select “Add to Panel.” Select “Keyboard Indicator” and close out of the dialog. 
Right click on your new panel item (which probably says something like “USA”) and select the “Preferences” option. Click the “Layout” tab, then add a new layout. You need to add the “Greece” keyboard and the “Polytonic” variant. You can now switch to the Greek Keyboard layout by clicking on this panel dialog, or you can set a keyboard shortcut for alternating between keyboard layouts (I have keyboard-switching set to the Caps Lock key).
These steps provide you with all the necessary fundamentals for enabling Polytonic Greek in Ubuntu (or other distributions). But this is Linux, so the customization options are endless. You can, for example, remap certain keys so that they are more intuitive (such as the breathing marks). For this, and other hand tricks, follow Poythress’s guide, start with the section on “Adding Keymaps.” You can skip the section about the “Compose” file, which is unnecesary once you have SCIM working.
Enjoy all the polytonic goodness!
Good translations require a good understanding of how languages work. This requires more than just knowing a list of words and grammatical structures; it requires an understanding of why an author chooses this structure instead of that one. It requires an understanding of linguistic context, of the rules of discourse, of conventions of speech and genre. The tools and techniques by which exegetes can study these factors is called Discourse Analysis.
For a great introduction to Discourse Analysis, as well as other topics in linguistics and their impact on biblical studies, check out 
Cotterell’s Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation. Young’s Intermediate New Testament Greek also includes a wonderful introduction to Discourse Analysis, and includes several different methods for diagramming.
But the purpose of this post is to point out some software by Logos. First, there is a semantic/discourse diagramming feature bundled into Scholar’s Library (which looks very nice; Bibleworks includes grammatical diagramming, but not discourse diagrams). Check that out here. Additionally, they are now offering a complete discourse analysis of the New Testament. Check out the announcement, complete with screenshots and a video, here.
I have had past experience with Mounce’s Flashworks software, a free Windows and Mac program designed to help you learn Greek, but it has gotten a serious upgrade since the last time I checked. Here’s the description on Mounce’s Website:
FlashWorks is a vocabulary drilling program. Each word is tagged for difficulty, type (noun, verb, etc.), chapter, and frequency in the Biblical text. You can then ask for any cross section you wish, such as “all verbs occurring more than 30 times in the New Testament that occur in chapters 16 through 24 in the text and which I have tagged with a difficulty rating of three through five” (five being the most difficult for you). FlashWorks remembers words as you get them right and/or wrong and can automatically set the difficulty rating.
The download is a paltry 6mb, which is a good thing. Databases for the language (i.e., the actual vocab) are downloaded separately (though Greek is included). This, again, is a good thing; it allows the program to be modular, which means the same basic program can be used to learn any language. Databases are currently available for Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and Spanish. And you can always create your own.
You will need to download and install special fonts for Greek and Hebrew (links are available on the site), although it appears that Greek is included in the install. The software uses TekniaGreek and TekniaHebrew, which points up one big disadvantage to FlashWorks and the Teknia fonts: they are not Unicode fonts. If you don’t know what this means, or don’t know why unicode is important, check out my previous introduction to Unicode. The lack of unicode support is why I did not include the Teknia fonts in my list of Great Greek Fonts.
Installers are available for Windows and Mac, and it works beautifully in Wine on Linux (on Ubuntu). And did I mention it is free?
I do have a few qualms. The interface is terribly ugly, and the whole thing could use a usability overhall. Making your own word lists could be easier. I would love to be able to select/tag words in order to create a chapter-specific Machen vocab list, for example, but as it is that would be too time consuming. But it gets the job done, and that’s the important thing with Greek: memorize the vocab, then you can move on to more important matters!
Check out this interview with Kenneth Berding, “author” of Sing and Learn New Testament Greek. The interview deals with this recently released audio CD, which puts the fundamentals of Greek Grammar to music. (I tell my students that, as a general rule, the more active you are in the memorization process, the better, so this sounds like a good idea to me).
A more general interview with Ken Berding, in two parts, can be found here and here. These deal more with the methodology by which we learn languages, and they also get into Berding’s take on why learning Greek is important for pastors.
Bibleworks, Accordance, Logos, and other Bible software (my only experience is with Bibleworks) offer unmatched functionality and ease-of-use, but are relatively expensive and are tied to certain operating systems. There are alternatives, two of which offer a similar suite of basic features.
The Resurgence Greek Project
The Resurgence Greek Project (RGP) is a quick, easy to use, and full-featured source for reading the NT. RGP offers simple searching, flash card generation, vocab lists, and other handy features. It provides the morphology and definition of words on rollover (which is very convenient). The major disadvantage is that it does not use the USB/NA Greek text. Instead, it uses Tischendorf’s 8th edition by default, and provides options for using Codex Sinaiticus, both of which are in the public domain. This is not a major problem, and it is understandable given the free nature of the service, and Perseus does provide some (pretty basic) text-critical analysis.
The text is Unicode, so you should have no problem in copying and pasting.
The RGP’s search features are pretty limited, but you can search for words by inflected form or by lexical form, and it also provides you with some statistical analysis.
Another great feature is the extensive flashcard modules. In addition to standard vocabulary lists, the RGP has the ability to create a vocabulary list based upon any selection of text. You can generate vocab cards for the book of James, for example, or all words in Romans that occur 15 times or less. This is a really great feature for studying.
The major disadvantage is the lack of other Greek texts, particularly those relevant to NT backgrounds. Also, the only available lexicons are Liddell Scott and Thayer’s, and while Liddell Scott is fine (if a little inconvenient, see below), Thayer’s has too many deficiencies to be reliable.
The Perseus Project
The Perseus Project is much more ambitious. It provides the entire NT (find that here), but in addition includes almost every Ancient Greek work available to us, from Euripedes, to Josephus’s Antiquities, to the early church fathers, and all in either Greek or English (and some other languages). You can browse their collection of Ancient Greek texts here, and they have other collections available as well.
Like Zhubert.com, the Perseus Project provides morphological analysis and definition, though this information is not displayed by rollover. Instead, a pop-up window provides the information whenever you click on the word. Also, the default lexicon is the Liddell Scout (Middle Liddell), which is a great lexicon, but not tailored to NT use like BDAG. You can find NT/Koine definitions in Middle Liddell, of course, but they are sometimes buried.
The search features are quite impressive. You can search by inflected form or by lemma, but the real advantage here is the ability to see how a word is used in other Greek texts. Since Perseus includes so many Greek works, you can search across a wide range of boundaries. (This can be a disadvantage, however, if not united with a little linguistic common since; Herodotus’s λογος is not the same as that of the NT).
The other major advantage to the Perseus Project is that it is completely Open Source. You can download the whole project, from the software to the texts (they are all in the public domain), and run it from your own computer (get the software here, and the texts here). Doing so will set you back a Gig or two, but it might be worth it, because one major disadvantage of their web site is its general slugishness (demand seems to consistently outweigh their bandwidth).
Conclusions
For basic reading of the NT in Greek I heartily recommend The Resurgence Greek Project. Its the easiest to use, has the most features relevant to seminary students, and is quick and responsive. If you want more extensive search features, or would like to read other Greek texts (such as those by the Church Fathers, or Greek 2nd Temple Literature), then check out the Perseus Project.