At SBL in the Applied Linguistics section I will be giving a lecture on the advantages of speaking Greek, for those who spend a significant part of their time working with ancient Greek literature of the post Alexander period. The lecture will be twenty minutes and primarily in English. Five and one-half minutes will be [...]
I read an interesting article this weekend by Alexander Andrason, “The Panchronic YIQTOL: Functionally Consistent and Cognitively Plausible.” 62 pages. It is rather top-heavy with metalanguage from Cognitive Linguistics so I will try to summarize and interact with the main points, plusses and minuses, in language that gets halfway back to common English, including some [...]
Wayne Steffen, editor-in-chief of Pacific Magazine, wrote an article for the March 2010 volume about my Biblical Hebrew course here at Fresno Pacific University. It has recently been put on FPU's website. He begins his article by describing language learning by immersion: "REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE A BABY? Probably not, so here’s what happened: [...]
On day two of BLC's "With Jesus in the Galilee" we went to the historical site of Cana. Most people think of an Arab village just outside Nazareth, Kfar Cana, as the location of where the miracle took place. However, Kfar Cana was "introduced" in the Byzantine period so as to allow pilgrims walking from [...]
At a guest house in the modern town of Migdal, overlooking ancient Migdal on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, about twenty individuals have come together for ten days of intensive Koine Greek. We are attempting to do something that has rarely, if ever, been done in modern times: speak only Koine Greek from [...]
Matthew 2:15 “I called my son out of Egypt” is often read at Christmas time. It is sometimes puzzling because it comes from Hoshea 11:1 where it refers to the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. However, it reflects an important spiritual principle that relates to the coming Passover season. In the passover [...]
Yesterday, 27 Jan 2010, the Hebrew Language Academy confirmed that alternative 1st and 2nd person suffix tense (‘past’) forms of pi``el lamed-yud roots will be officially acceptable in modern Hebrew. גִלֵּיתִי will be acceptable, and apparently even גִלֵּיתָ. The reason for the confirmation and acceptance is that forms with both [i] and [e] occur in [...]