Greek Particles (1990)

I've been learning Biblical Greek, and that was my impression too: The particles he list don't sound at all like the random "uh" and "ah" that he's translating them into.

That said, I do think there's a point that a lot of things end up getting translated in the wrong "register" and lose some of the meaning. One message John the Baptist sends to Jesus is rendered in my translation, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect another?" But in the Greek there's no "should", and the whole sentence is a lot shorter. To me it has much more of a "get off your but and do something" implication; more like, "Hey, are you the one, or are we looking for someone else?"

Same in another place, where where Jesus says something my translation renders, "Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: [About his upcoming death]" The Greek is a bit more colorful: "Take these words of mine and put them into your ears:" Has much more a sense of exasperation.

Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm).

Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).

> A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler

It's satirical.

Don't keep us hanging, what might the Neanderthals have said?

Oh, but English does have a sarcasm marker! It's just not a word, instead it's typically marked by using non-standard pronunciation like creaky voice or lengthening vowels. The problem is of course that this stuff doesn't have an orthography, thus the use of stuff like /s online.

Is it really a sarcasm marker? I've always thought it's equivalent to že in Slavic languages (both probably from the same PIE *g(h)e), and in those languages, it can be used sarcastically, but its main meaning is 'in fact', 'as for X'. For example in Russian: on že glup = 'he is, in fact, a fool' or 'as for him, he's a fool - didn't you know?' Similarly, dictionaries translate the Greek ge as 'in fact, indeed.' If you mentally replace most instances of Ancient Greek ge with the Slavic že in Greek texts, it all starts making a lot of sense (if you're a speaker of a Slavic language).

P.S. There's also a limiting sense in the dictionary, with the example given:

    Greek: ho de ge (+ participle)
    Russian: tot že (kto)
    English: but the one (who)

(The article is satire. Particles are an ill-defined class, they may have "meaning" or change the meaning of something, like "up" in "look up!", or they may say something about the speaker's attitude towards the statement or they may be required syntactically e.g. when posing a question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle#Modern_me... )

I assume you’re joking, but θεωρίᾱ does mean a “looking at” or “a beholding” or “contemplation” from the verb θεωρέω, “to look at” or “observe.” Aristotle liked to use it for speculation or “theorizing” in the mental sense, but apparently that was due to Pythagoras’s influence.

Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”

The Speculative Granmarian is the premier journal of satirical linguistics, so that’s probably intentional. =)