Thanks, Iain, for the bit about Parousia, Jesus' Second Coming, and the
recovery of Being. Good stuff!
If there's one language Jesus (or rather, Paul) should have spoken, it's
German. I anticipate the Second Coming every time I wade through a German
sentence with fifteen dependent clauses waiting for that damn main verb to
finally pop up at the end of the sentence and tell me, after the fact,
what the whole thing was about.
Regarding any 'special connection' between German and Greek--
As far as evolutionary relationship goes, Greek and German are *not* close
cousins within the Indo-European family of languages. Quite the opposite.
Greek, Armenian, and the Indo-Iranian group (e.g., Persian, Sanskrit) all
derive from a common dialect of proto-Indo-European and are thus more
closely related to each other than to any of the language groups of the
'western' branch such as Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Italic (Latin and its
derivatives), Celtic, etc. Greek is more closely related to Indian Hindi
and Rajasthani or modern Persian than it is to German, English, or any
Romance language.
It's also ironic that Greek seems to be one of the least 'pure'
Indo-European languages, at least in terms of borrowing from
non-Indo-European langauges. Greek (ancient and modern) has an unusually
large number of words which can not be traced back to proto-Indo-European.
It appears that the proto-Greeks were more likely than other
Indo-Europeans to adopt the vocabulary of the indigenous peoples they met
or conquered before finally reaching Greece.
But, while German and Greek are only distant relatives on the
Indo-European family tree, they share some common features.
Proto-Indo-European was *highly* inflected: Grammatical relationships and
the syntactic function of words in the sentence were indicated primarily
by variations in the endings of the words. Greek, German, and Latin have
all maintained this emphasis to some extent, while others (such as
English) have not, replacing inflection with word order as the prime means
of determining grammatical relationships between words in a sentence. If
anyone were to claim that German and Greek had some 'special connection',
it would have to lie here (though it's hardly a special one).
Mont Allen
Department of Religion
Syracuse University
-------------------------------------------------------
"Pythagoras was asked by a young man what was the
significance of the fact that he had, while asleep,
conversed with his dead father. Pythagoras said that
'it signifed nothing, for neither is anything signified
by your talking to me.'"
(Iamblichus, *Life of Pythagoras*)
-------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, chris rickey wrote:
>
> > I find Heidegger's conviction that Greek and German are the most
> >philosophical of languages one of the places where love of one's own
> >leads him to simply assert something as true-he offers no argument to
> >support this assertion in An Introduction to Metaphysics. His assertion
> >has whatever plausibility it can appeal to because of the existence of
> >Greek and German philosophy.
>
> In defense of Heidegger, the belief that there is a special connection
> between Greek and German is fairly widespread in Germany. My roommate
> there, certainly no Nazi nor even a particular enthusiast of things German,
> quite unselfconsciously asserted the same thing (he even claimed that the
> Germans pronounced Greek like the ancients did, like anyone would know).
> This leads me to believe that it is a general cultural assumption among
> educated Germans, sort of like Americans belief in their unique destiny
> (for good or bad).
>
> I don't know enough about linguistics to know the veracity of this claim.
> Nor do I know whether German is better able than any romance language to
> express Greek grammar, which underlies his attempts to recover the Greek
> understanding of being as presencing. Of course, that presumes they
> thought of being in this manner...
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> I just can't stop
> When my spark gets hot
>
>
>
>
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>
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