Friday, February 8, 2013

οι γάτες οι όμορφες μου γκρι γούνα έχουν!

Once upon a time...
There was a show called THIS WEEK IN HERESY. 4 of its 10 episodes featured a rather outspoken seminary student named Philip Tanner who took viewers through places in the Christian New Testament that appear to be doctrinal justifications for anti-gay theology -- but which mean something totally different when we look at them in their original language: the generation of Greek spoken widely across the "civilized" world during the Hellenistic Era. The Greek spoken during this era is called Koiné, Hellenistic Greek, Ελληνιστική Κοινή, or simply Κοινή. The common tongue.

As a side note... I always find it fascinating how when fantasy or sci-fi stories invoke a Common Language, we tend to have such a hard time accepting such an entity. And yet... in our own global history we have unmistakable proof that yes, indeed, Κοινή was just such a language. But I digress.

As my colleagues from 4M Ministries & I continue to grow into our shared and yet distinct ministerial calls, we are restructuring and expanding the vision. It is an exciting time, albeit a tad scary as well. And as part of our expansion, we are now starting individual blogs. This, then, is the first entry in the Greek Geek's individual blog.

I want to take a minute to speak about grammar, spelling, and diacritical marks on this blog. In order to properly render this blog, your browser will need to be able to recognize the standard Greek character set. I am not an expert on Unicode standards, so I unfortunately cannot provide technical help on such things. I can tell you that my authoring environment is a MacBook Pro running Lion (OS X v10.7.5) and using Firefox. One thing I do know, however, is that the Polytonic Greek character set is less widely supported than "standard" Greek. For purposes of this blog, then, I will avoid Polytonic characters unless absolutely necessary. For those of you who have some knowledge of Greek, then, you are likely to encounter what will seem like a mish-mash with modern Greek spelling but Κοινή linguistic features. So, to be clear: yes I know that I am mixing different "generations" of the Hellenic language strata. And that's that about that, cool?

I think I'll stop now. Comments, suggestions, etc., are always appreciated.

Για Θεού είναι η δόξα και η εξουσία στους αιώνες των αιώνων. Αμήν.

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