Polis Koine - New Testament Greek

Sign and translation: from Ancient Greek to the Origins of Writing: An Interview with Christophe Rico

What were the circumstances that led you to work at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem and as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

Back in 1990 I was selected for teaching in France because of the results of an official competitive examination. It was a chair in Linguistics (agrégation de grammaire). Whoever gets this chair has to begin teaching at a Lycée (the French high school). After that experience, if that person has defended a PhD Thesis he can start teaching at the university.

Therefore, since 1990 I have been a civil official of the Ministry for Education in France. In 1992 I was about to defend a Thesis about the semantics of nominal suffixes in Homeric Greek at the Sorbonne, but I needed some time in order to finish that research; so I asked for a one year leave of absence. I knew a few people in Jerusalem and I had always been very interested in the Near East. Back in 1980, when I was studying Classics at the University of Provence I had to choose a modern language course, and I chose Hebrew, so it was just by mere chance that I had already studied a bit of the language. It was in that year, 1992, that I had the opportunity to take a whole sabbatical year in Israel to study Hebrew in depth and finish my doctorate thesis.

While I was there I got interested in teaching at one of the universities of Israel. I visited the Classics departments at the Universities of Tel Aviv, Hebrew of Jerusalem and at Bar Ilan and heard about the École Biblique and how they were looking there for a Greek Lecturer. I had to find a way in which the French state would be able to pay a civil official for working at a private institution like the École Biblique. At that time the French Consulate was very keen to strengthen the Francophone character of the École Biblique. For that reason I was appointed as Professeur agregé at the University of Strasbourg, which had an agreement with the École Biblique that allowed both institutions to exchange their professors. That is how I was assigned indefinitely to this École in Jerusalem. Later, the French Embassy at Tel Aviv invited me to teach at the French department of Hebrew University and I was very happy to accept that. That is what took me to Jerusalem and since then it has been a wonderful experience, since it is a city unique in its kind.

What is the importance given to the Classical Studies at the École Biblique? What other institutions in Israel deal with Classical Studies?

The École Biblique is an institution devoted to the study of the Biblical world and the Ancient Near East. Classical Studies do overlap with those fields. When I started teaching at the École Biblique my field was both Classical and Homeric Greek. However, archaeologists, scholars and students at the École Biblique were more interested in Koine Greek, that is to say, the language spoken through the Hellenistic period and the first centuries of the Christian era. The Greek inscriptions found in Israel, Palestine and the Near East belong to that period. On the other hand, the students were also interested in the language of the Septuagint –the first translation of the Bible, a Greek translation that was made in ancient times -, the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church.

As the focus was rather in post-classical language, I started to get involved with Koine Greek. In all universities of Israel, as nearly everywhere else in the world, what is taught is Classical Greek. Sometimes, it is possible to teach New Testament Greek for those who are interested in Biblical studies. But it is utterly unusual and specific to the École Biblique to teach Koine Greek as such.

Along with your published work you have developed a great amount of pedagogical work as well. What is the best way for a student to be able to read fluently a Greek text –say, for example, Plutarch- without needing to translate it and without using any dictionary?

I was recently told a story that illustrates the difficulties involved in the study of Greek language. By the end of the 19^th century there was a French scholar called François Gouin. This gentleman was a professor in Latin and he used to teach in the traditional way: declensions and conjugation tables, endless vocabulary lists together with translation exercises of difficult literary texts.

François Gouin decided to travel to Germany in order to study German. At that time there was no formal teaching of foreign languages. Convinced of the quality of his teaching methods, Gouin shut himself up indoors and worked on assimilating the whole German grammar. Having accomplished his mission in only ten days, he went to the university. He entered a class and realized that he did not understand anything that was being said and that all his efforts had been in vain.

He thought that all he had to do was to study harder and locked himself in his room, once more, for another ten days. This time he tried to memorize a German-French dictionary. When he had learned the entire dictionary by heart he returned to the university but he found that he was once again unable to understand a single German sentence. He went back to his room and spent weeks translating several works by Goethe. After this huge effort, he went back to class but was again disappointed with the results.

He was running out of time and began to convince himself that his experience had been a complete failure, when he met some French workers who in just a few months had managed to have a smattering of German. As for him, buried in his books, he had not even been able of holding the simplest conversation in the language of Goethe. On his return to France he noticed that his three-year-old nephew, unable to speak just a few months earlier, was by now very fluent in the use of language. Gouin was very surprised to see that the boy had learned French in a few months whereas he had not even managed to have a smattering of German. Later on, during an outing to a mill, he realized that his nephew, while wandering around, was asking questions all the time about the flour-grinding process. After a few days, being just three years old, Gouin’s nephew had built a small wooden mill and managed to play with it telling all the names of the devices involved in flour production.

From this experience Gouin drew a clear conclusion: he had to modify completely his way of teaching languages. It was essential to teach a language as a child learns it: gradually and episodically, building phrases according to the plot. These ideas, which he turned later into a book, inspired a German friend of him and so it came that the Berlitz Academies spread throughout the world.

Any Hellenist has experienced at least once in his or her career the same kind of frustration as Francoise Gouin had in Germany. Having learned Greek for seven years –two at high school and five at the university- I have known the same humiliation as Gouin when I realized that, by the end of my studies, I was not even able to read a classical work without the help of a dictionary or a translation.

Ever since I have been in Jerusalem I have been teaching Greek. At first I taught according to the traditional methods: grammar, exercises and translation. Little by little I came to notice that a different method had to be used. When I came to Israel, I was really surprised to notice that people learned Hebrew in only six months at the so-called ulpans, the intensive courses of full immersion into the language. True, after six months they were not able to speak really fluently but at least they had some command of the language and they managed themselves in every-day life. And those who continued with these ulpans for a whole year ended up reading the newspaper and watching television in Hebrew. I had the opportunity of attending an ulpan and I was surprised by the difference between the command of Hebrew that I had before, even though I had been studying it in France for three years, and the command I got after only two months of intensive study. I was starting to be able to read the papers and watch television. This experience gave me the idea to use a similar method for teaching Greek. I am not the only one applying this method. Randall Buth, in Jerusalem, has been writing a book according to these principles and has already organized a Greek ulpan. I have been teaching Greek since 2001 exclusively in Greek.

At first I noticed that I had greater doubts with the most common Greek words. As in any other language, in spoken Greek the first thing that one should learn is the imperatives. But when teaching Greek one usually does not begin with them. What I needed to say at class were those same imperatives, especially the aorists which are more frequent in use, even though they are usually taught a long time after the beginning of a Greek course -in fact only after the present imperative. So, what I had to do was to assimilate the language slowly so that I could teach it properly. I started building up my lexicon and looked in the different concordances in Plutarch, the Septuagint or the New Testament words, and collected phrases and idioms that were really in use in Koine Greek during the last centuries of Antiquity.

Greek is generally taught in a uniform way, regardless of the periods involved, mixing up indistinctively texts from Homer and from the Archaic, Classical and Post-Classical Greek regardless of the century and the dialect involved. In the end you get to a complete failure: a student can barely translate a text with his dictionary and after many years he is still unable to read directly a text from Plutarch in the original language as he would read a text in English.

I had to imagine exercises taking into account that each of my students had a different mother tongue. A Russian student was unable to understand the Greek articles: his problem came from the fact that the Russian language has no articles. In consequence, I had to design a method that would take into account the needs that came from dealing with students that spoke different languages. Right now I am finishing the first volume of a book based on that method (Polis. Le grec ancien présenté comme une langue vivante). It corresponds to the first year of Greek. It will be published by Editions du Cerf in France, probably by 2008. I hope it will soon be translated into other languages, and of course into Spanish.

Some years ago you gave a course in which you ventured on the characteristics of the “Semitic” and “Greek” mentalities from the linguistic perspective. What general tendencies would you single out with respect to the links between mentality and language in ancient societies?

It is through language, at least to some extent, that we gain admittance to our culture. In any given language, one faces a series of words in which specific relationships between signifieds (signifiés) emerge and develop. These signifieds interact within a sentence and within a context that are virtually unrepeatable. That is why, when translating, one cannot consider words as labels, for which an equivalent could be found in any other language just by turning them around. Once I took a translating machine and I wrote in English: “I am very keen to see you”. The machine translated it into French as follows: “Je suis très aiguisé de vous voir” (“I am very sharp to see you”). In English keen means both “sharp” and “eager”. The machine, even though it works according to a certain code, does not understand the context or the real sense of the sentence.

Thus, language reflects a particular culture. In the field of relationships between Semitic mentality and Greek mentality it has been considered for a long time that Hellenism has had a decisive influence in the making of the New Testament. Nowadays we tend rather to stress the importance of the Semitic background and the Semitic cultural influence, both in the Old and New Testaments. I think that an example can illustrate the relationships between these two worlds. The word that means “truth” in Greek is aletheia. It is composed of the privative prefix a- which means “absence of”, followed by the stem –leth- meaning “to go unnoticed”, “to be unseen”. Etymologically aletheia stands for “that which is not unseen”. That is why the symbol of truth for Greeks is the sun or the light. The sun throws a light on what is true, on what appears clearly to our minds, on what we grasp logically and neatly.

In the Semitic world the notion of truth takes us to a very different semantic field. In Hebrew “truth” is spelled ’emet. This word derives from a root that conveys the idea of something solid, strong, something on which I can rely or upon which I can stand. “Truth” is that which I can trust. In that context the symbol of truth is no longer the sun or the light, but the rock. This approach to the notion of truth is based on loyalty and fidelity, on a personal relationship instead of a logical one. It is for that reason that the notion of truth as embedded in the Semitic world has tremendous actuality; because every single one of us needs something to rely on, someone we can trust, something that we can rest our lives upon without falling it apart. This is the concept we find in the Bible; that is why in the Bible the symbol of truth is the rock. And this is why the rock is, at the same time, a symbol of God.

Regarding the “theory of the linguistic sign”, what impact do you think it has on the field of translation?

Plato was interested in language and his thought revolved about the word logos, a difficult word to translate in English. Logos means something like “an utterance”, that which someone says at a particular moment and has a unitary meaning. The notion of sign that Plato analysed was based, first and foremost, in the general meaning of the sentence. Thus Plato arrives at the elements of any sentence starting from the logos. First we have the whole, the logos, and the whole utterance. From there he distinguishes between onoma and rhema, that is to say noun and verb, the elements of the sentence.

Aristotle, on the other hand, seems to have had a very different idea about the signs of language, because he starts directly from the elements of the sentence instead of starting from the logos. In other words, Aristotle begins with the noun, the verb, and the parts of a sentence. Since Aristotle and throughout history, the theory of sign has almost always focused on the isolated word, the separate and unique word, and almost never on the phrase, the sentence or the utterance.

The Stoics distinguished, within the sign, between the elements that are heard (the acoustic element of the sign: what we might call nowadays the “signifier” of the word), the concept and the referent. If we take, for example, the name Dion, we first must distinguish its signifier (the sounds involved in the word Dion) from its meaning (that what the word means, that to which we are referred by the sounds). These two components must in turn be distinguished from the referent, Dion himself, the person we have designated with such a name. These three elements have been the base for the debates on the sign during the Late Antiquity and the Middle Age. They have even, in some way, been the model for the debates on the sign until the times of Ferdinand de Saussure.

When Saussure published his Cours de linguistique générale in 1916 a revolution took place in the world of the theory of sign. Just like Aristotle, the linguist from Geneva based his reflexion on the isolated word. In fact, he gives the example of the word boeuf (ox). But he mainly deals with the word as an element of a language, of a code, and not as an utterance. He does not deal either with the referent of the word. It is not that he denies its existence, but he puts it aside as a methodological principle. In doing so he disregards the external world, the extra-linguistic reality, to focus on the sign of language, on the code in itself. Within the sign, he distinguishes between “signifier” and “signified”; in his view they are both like two faces of the same coin: the signifier’s value equals that of the signified and vice versa. They are two interchangeable elements, two realities that, in some way, are equivalent. This theory of the sign amounted to a revolution because up until then one could only differentiate an acoustic element from the idea it conveys and from the referent.

Regarding the concept or idea that each word conveys, most of the scholars that came before Saussure understood meaning as something intrinsically connected with a particular language or tongue, something that could not be separated or thought of without the mediation of a language. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, distinguished between the meaning of a word as it is embedded in a specific language and the simple idea before it has been worded or phrased into a specific language. Thus, most of the scholars had a tripartite theory of sign, while others, like St. Thomas Aquinas, defended a tetra partite theory of the sign. Saussure, instead, has a bipartite theory (consisting of signifier and signified): he does not impose a hierarchy between the elements of the sign and leads to the idea that the signified does not play a more important role than the signifier, but rather they are on the same level.

This theoretical paradigm has had a profound influence in the current theory of sign. Nonetheless, when we contemplate how our minds work when we make a translation we see that Saussure’s theory finds its limitations very soon. Why? A small example might help us to explain it. If I want to translate mukhádda, which means “pillow”, from Arabic to French I will use the word oreiller. In Arabic mukhádda is derived from khadd, meaning “cheek”. Mukhádda has a signifier (phonemes or sounds that we hear in the word) and also a signified (its meaning, determined by the relationships it establishes with other Arabic words). If we relate mukhádda with “cheek”, we reach the conclusion that a pillow, in Arabic at least, is that which we lay underneath our cheek. On the other hand, if we translate the word into oreiller, we can’t keep the signified of the word mukhádda because there is no word in French that means “pillow” and has anything to do with “cheek”. Oreiller is in fact that which we lay underneath our ears (oreille). To keep the semantic nuance included in Arabic we would have to use a periphrasis. When translating, thus, we perceive an element which is distinct from both the signified and the signifier; we hear a signifier and grasp, through its signified, a certain idea. Once we have grasped this idea we become able to translate.

Anyways, a theory of sign based on the isolated word seems, in my opinion, insufficient. Translating experiences show that one first hears a sentence, as a whole or in part, but at any rate something which conveys a full sense or meaning. Once it has been heard, one can translate that syntagma at once. That is what happens with simultaneous translations: one cannot translate if one has not heard at least part of the sentence. If we were to translate from French to English we would have to organize each sentence in a completely different way from its original in order to give a faithful account of what the speaker said. Experience in translating leads us to reformulate the theory of sign following the primeval intuition Plato gave us. We must start reflecting upon the sentence and not upon the isolated word.

Secondly, we must introduce into the sign theory the distinction between signified and concept. A concept is an idea that transcends any given language, the idea that has not been worded as yet and which St. Thomas Aquinas was keen to define in his De Veritate. This scholar was one of the few in the Middle Age who, in order to define the sign, reached the concept, that is to say, the idea which has not been put into words, neither spoken nor thought.

On the other hand, Saussure’s theory -which distinguishes between signifier and signified- sheds some light on the theory of sign. Within the boundaries of one given language, signifieds establish relationships which we must take into account when translation takes place.

A theory of sign that reflects the dynamics of meaning as it manifests itself during the act of translation should be tetra partite. There should be a distinction between signifier, signified, concept and referent. One cannot avoid the referent because one cannot speak without saying or at least communicating something, without referring to something else, without designating that which exists outside the word itself.

What are the consequences of the semantics of Koinè Greek for the study of philological questions that are examined by scholars in the field of Philosophy or Bible interpretation?

We must be aware not to fall into the trap of working with ancient texts with a superficial knowledge of their original language. From a scientific point of view that would be impossible. Some people believe that from the moment a text is translated, there is no need to check the original text. We have already seen the difficulties involved in the interpretation of such a common word in philosophy as logos. When we investigate the word logos in Plato as well as in Aristotle, we realise that it sometimes designates what we can call a syntagma, an expression. “Nice horse”, for example, is a logos, something that is not quite a sentence but rather a syntagma. Aristotle used to call logos these sequences of words. For Aristotle, a definition can also be a logos: “biped animal” or “rational animal” as a definition of man. That is why both Plato and Aristotle thought that logos was also an utterance, that is to say, a sentence provided with a meaning that someone can pronounce. Finally, in his Poetics Aristotle went so far as to call the Iliad as a whole a logos, because it is a complete literary work, a single utterance as such.

In English, we do not have a word that shows the semantic richness of logos. In Philosophy, it is essential to investigate the meaning of words in order to be able to understand the ancient texts as well as the philosophical debates that take place at a specific point of History.

When translating Greek, we come across another difficulty with the exact meaning of suffixes. In Greek language there is a great amount of nominal suffixes; the suffix -sis can be distinguished from the suffix –ma as well as from the suffix –mos. The word teichisis for instance appears repeatedly in Thucydides in his Peloponnesian War. It refers to the fact of fortifying or building a wall as such, regardless of its implementation.

Teichisma, instead, designates the fortifications already built, the wall in itself and teichismós, finally, refers to the action of fortifying throughout the development of that action. These shades of meaning demand from us further studying. Given the fact that Ancient, Classic and Koine Greek are nowadays dead languages, it is necessary to compile a lot of texts and identify the contexts for establishing the meaning of a word or a particular suffix.

Along the Biblical field, where important issues are at stake, the study of semantics is essential. It is always possible to improve an already existent translation. True, English Bible translations are generally accurate and perfectly valid as a whole. But one can always improve a translation if we take into account the richness of meaning embedded in the original text. For example, in the Fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, it is said that when Jesus arrives to the well at Sychar he is kekopiakôs from walking. In Saint Hieronymus’ Vulgate -a version of extraordinary fidelity-, the word kekopiakôs was translated to Latin as fatigatus. Usually all modern translations, English, French or Spanish, grasp the idea of “weariness” conveyed by the original term. But kekopiakôs is a perfect participle of the verb kopiáô. This use of the verb is absolutely unusual in Greek: it appears but a few times in the New Testament as in the Septuaginta. Even in the semantic field of weariness, it is indeed a very specific word. When using fatigatus, Hieronymus chose the Latin word that not only means “tired” (fatigado, fatigué), but also “exhausted”.

It may seem an insignificant detail, but it has its importance in order to understand the whole passage. At the beginning of that chapter, Jesus is “exhausted from the road”. At the end of the passage we find Jesus talking to his disciples, telling them that one sows and another reaps and that he has sent them to reap something they had not sowed, because others kekopiákasin (“have exhausted themselves”): the disciples entered in the pains of their predecessors, in the fruit of their “weariness” and “exhaustion”.

From what we just said we can see the relationship between the beginning and the end of the chapter. We can even go further and ask ourselves: who are those that have “exhausted” themselves? Who were the first ones to sow? First of all Jesus himself because he is the one who appears “exhausted” at the beginning of the passage from walking through Samaria. In this way semantics leads us hand in hand to hermeneutics and guides us through a deeper understanding of the texts.

What is the cultural heritage from the Greco-Latin world in the Western world?

Western civilization has always been based on two pillars: the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Latin pillars. Both pillars have exerted a deep influence during all of European history. No doubt, these pillars have shaped Western civilization. It can be said that since Antiquity the Western elites have been living on the Latin language. During Late Antiquity and the Middle Age cultivated people were used to talk and write essentially in Latin.

Since the 16th century, Latin ceased to exist as a living language, even among cultivated people but people continued writing and reading it. Until very recently, in many European countries the curriculum of secondary education used to give Latin a very important place alongside Greek. In France, for instance, during the generation that preceded me, when children went to school they could choose between Humanities and Sciences. If they chose Humanities, by the age of twelve they started studying four hours of Latin every week and another four of Greek almost until they had finished high school. This is why when beginning Classical Studies at the university they did not have to study Latin or Greek: they studied classical literature.

Many works of Philosophy, up until the mid 20^th century, used to quote passages in Latin without translating them, and this was not preposterous because it was obvious that the cultivated reader could read it easily. However, it would be impossible today to act in such a way. The same was true for the Greek language in the scholarly field. In relatively specialized works, it was possible to quote texts or phrases in Greek without needing to translate them.

Amongst those works, throughout the 20th century, there had been two huge cultural enterprises. One of them was the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the largest Greek dictionary extant today. It is printed in in folio size and has nine volumes of 2000 pages each: about twenty-thousands in total. I am not aware of any Greek dictionary as extensive as this one, but nobody uses it, not even scholars, because words are translated into Latin. Back in the 20th century, it went without saying that any cultivated person should be able to use this instrument, but nowadays that would be simply impossible.

If we take the collection of the Fathers of the Church, the works of those who wrote in Greek were translated into Latin during the mid 20th century in the Migne collection. Nowadays, from that 161-volume in folio translation, only approximately fifty per cent has been translated into different vernacular tongues from Europe. When a scholar does not find the appropriate translation of a text in his own language or in a modern language he knows, he does not dare quoting the text, even if it is a scholarly article.

The fact that classical languages are not part of high school programs any more -at least in Europe; I am unaware of the American situation-, the fact that Greek and Latin are not an important issue entails, undoubtedly, serious consequences because it means that we are being cut off from our cultural past. One day I asked in a graduate class of around twenty-five people: “who among you has read the Iliad or the Odyssey at least once by translation? Only one student raised his hand. Culturally, we are too far away from the Greco-Latin world and as a consequence that allows a huge ignorance of our cultural sources. We cannot understand our culture, we cannot really know who we are, if we do not know where we come from and if we do not have any knowledge of classical languages. Easy English words such as consciousness, concept and substance, beyond their Latin origin, arose from literal translations from the Greek words suneidesis, sullepsis and hypostasis. Our vocabulary, our philosophical concepts, our abstract terms have been shaped by Latin and Greek: the debt we have to the Greco-Latin world is huge.

It is not about longing for a situation that will never return. I do not think that the people in charge of making school programs in Europe will ever bring us back to the influence Latin and Greek had forty years ago. I am not even sure this would be the right thing to do. However, I really think it is urgent to make possible for anyone who wants to become a scholar in classical languages to reach a command in Greek and Latin comparable to the level of the generation that preceded us. Otherwise, we will end up giving birth to a new barbaric culture where nobody is able to guarantee the meaning of the ancient texts that forged our cultural destiny.

What contribution does the new Bible project (“La Bible en ses traditions”) launched by the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem make to the study of Greek language?

Back in the 1950s, the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem managed a project called the Jerusalem Bible, which was the bestseller Bible for a very long time in many European languages. Now, the École Biblique is launching a new project which is a new edition of the Bible. It will be a Bible for a specialized audience, a study Bible. For each pericope – for each passage of the Bible – there will be two translations whenever two texts are extant. For example, in the case of the Old Testament, sometimes small variations exist between the Septuagint – probably written in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries B.C. - and the Massoretic Text –the Hebrew text as vocalized by the Massorets at the beginning of the Middle Age-. Sometimes there are small variations between the two texts and whenever these variations could awaken a semantic interest, two different translations will be offered to the reader, making it possible to compare both texts.

On the other hand, an effort has been made in order to rationalize the commentaries. It is possible to recognize three different levels in the notes: first, the comments that refer to the text; secondly the notes that make a reference to the context; and, finally, the witnesses of the reception of the text.

In the text section one will find the commentaries on the different manuscripts, if they seem relevant, as well as remarks on grammar, vocabulary, semantics, figures and a comparison between different ancient versions. When it comes to context, every ancient text that might shed a light on the sense of the passage will be included. Archaeological facts that tell us about the daily life of the peoples mentioned in the Bible or living close to them are mentioned as long as they help us to understand the text. With respect to the reception level, the main ancient commentaries from Rabbinic and Christian traditions (the Fathers of the Church) are quoted. Thus, we give an enormous emphasis to Christian Patristic. It is a Bible that intends at the same time to have scientific value and to be a Catholic Bible.

In this field, the study of Greek language is essential because some of the problems involved in the text require that the semantics of a few words be tuned up. Going back to Chapter four of the Gospel of John, Jesus at one point says to his disciples “theasasthe tas chôras”. This sentence is usually translated as “look at the fields”, and the text continues saying: “they are already white for harvest”. The word chôra caught my attention in that context because Saint Hieronymus translates it by “regiones”. What is the relationship between “the field” and the Latin word “regiones”? Investigating a little more one might find that chôra has several meanings. It can mean “a region” or “a country” (French pays); it can designate “the country” (French campagne) in a generic sense (as opposed to the city, for example), but never refer to a concrete field (French champ). Unfortunately too many English translations have “look at the fields” or “see the fields”. But the Greeks had a proper word for a field: agros. This makes it quite clear that we are dealing with a double meaning that helps us to understand the pericope. Jesus is saying “behold the countryside” (contemplez la campagne) but he is also saying “behold the earth” (contemplez la terre). In a passage where he speaks about the mission of Church to spread the Gospel this double meaning is important: “behold the country, behold the earth, it is already white for harvest”. In this passage we find a difference between Judaism and Christianity: Judaism is the religion of a people whereas Christianity is intended to the whole world.

Why did you choose the subject of “How Writing came about and how the Alphabet developed: an interdisciplinary perspective” for the Graduate Seminar that you gave at the Argentine Catholic University?

The point that attracted me in this subject was the relationship between the beginning of writing, its development towards the alphabet and the linguistic perspective. As a linguist, it is through linguistics that I got interested by other subjects such as the theory of sign, the theory of translation, some philological problems related to the Bible and ancient Greek teaching. At the end of the day linguistics leads me to certain questions concerning the cognitive stages that mankind goes through when it goes from pictogram –the graphic symbolization that transmits a message which is not directly linked to a specific tongue- to the first ideographic systems where each sign is linked to a signified –according to Saussure’s definitions-. Linguistics allows us to ask ourselves how one can get to a syllabary –a system where every sign refers to a syllable- and finally to an Alphabet –where each sign refers to a phoneme, that is to say, the smallest sound provided with a distinctive value in a specific language-.

The development of writing has many times been considered from the epigraphic or historical point of view but seldom from the linguistic point of view. In that sense I believe that in order to be able to understand that development we would have to consider two complementary perspectives: the psychological and the linguistic ones. In the first place, we should try to catch a glimpse of what happens inside the mind of children when they learn to write, and to define the different strategies children use when they read as they develop their writing skills. I have based the idea for this course in an experience I had several years ago with kindergarten kids who were learning how to write. It called my attention how most of them used to make pictograms on their first written productions. After a while, some of them turned to ideograms, that is to say, to give a meaning to each letter. Some gave a syllabic value to each sign –a syllabogram- before they would give a phonematic value to each letter. They wrote, at first, with consonants or vowels only. One can observe in the experience I just mentioned how, by uniting the psychological and the linguistic perspective by means of psycholinguistics –a discipline connected with linguistics-, one can shed a new light on the history of writing and the alphabet.

Finally I would like to thank UCA, the History Department and Roxana Flammini who directs the CEHAO at UCA, for inviting me to give these courses in Buenos Aires. I must say that I have found myself with students that showed a great amount of interest and that I have learned a lot in these last few days with the exchange I had with students and professors. It has been quite a rewarding experience. In fact I have been able to teach Linguistics and attend a class by Professor Josep Cervelló Autuori, from the University of Barcelona, a Spanish Egyptologist who was visiting Buenos Aires, along with Antonio Loprieno and John Baines, to give a Graduate Seminar at the IHAO institute of the University of Buenos Aires. At the same time, I found that there is a great interest on behalf of UCA to promote scholarly publications such as the Antiguo Oriente, which attracts attention from more and more scholars throughout the world. I hope this hard work and insistence will keep growing when the reaping is at hand ■