What should we do with Greek questions? [duplicate]

Question

(The moderator team has drafted this question and two answers together, with help from SE staff.)

There was a meta discussion about allowing Greek on the site some time ago, but the conclusion was somewhat unclear. It was a fruitful first discussion, but it would be good to have an actual policy towards Greek.

We have had two purely Greek questions so far:

• Ancient Greek English to Greek translation — closed and deleted due to other problems, but some users (above 2000 reputation?) can still see it
• Why is the Greek definite article τη duplicated in this sentence?

What should be our policy towards Greek questions? If you answer, please give a "full policy". If you have partial ideas, leave them as comments instead, either under this question or under the answers.

I think all agree that questions related to Greek are on-topic as long as they have a connection to Latin, too. But that would be a very incomplete policy, since it does not say what to do with Greek questions without Latin connection.

If you suggest allowing Greek questions, please give a one-line description of what is allowed to be included in our on-topic help page and our tour.

One option is to wait for more Greek questions to come in and judge each one separately. After some amount of judging we will have a policy which we can write down. Some people will act according to what they perceive to be the present policy (which is good!), which makes it difficult for the policy to change due to precedent. Therefore it is better to form an opinion with a public discussion at a general level. Some details can and will have to be left open, but not all.

We have drafted two possible policies, but you can also suggest new ones. Notice that the policy need not be final; we can change our mind if things turn out differently than anticipated.

The name of the site is not going to change from "Latin Language Stack Exchange". If Greek is allowed, it will have to be a side topic of some kind.

Update, November 6, 2016. The current scores strongly favor accepting Greek, so I have accepted the top answer. The policy suggested there is our preliminary policy, but we can change our mind later. The two pro-Greek answers are almost tied. As always, the most important method of steering our scope is voting at the main site. I hope Greek questions will not disturb those who are against them.

Like all policies, this one is not carved in stone. Discussion is welcome, either here, in a new meta question or in chat.

Answer 1

This answer is based on my other answer proposing we allow Greek questions up to the end of classical antiquity, but is for option #2 of that answer, i.e. excluding New Testament Greek. It proposes that:

We allow all Greek questions up to the end of classical antiquity, but exclude New Testament Greek.

Please upvote if you're in favor of that specific option. If you prefer option #1 (include New Testament Greek), please upvote my answer above proposing that option.

Answer 2

I'd like to propose a modification of Joonas's answer limiting Greek to the pre-Koine period, namely: we allow Greek questions but draw the temporal line at a later date, namely the end of classical antiquity as commonly understood. To put an inevitably somewhat arbitrary precise date on it, the boundary line would be the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Here is my reasoning:

First, as Joonas points out in his answer, the Greek- and Latin-speaking communities of antiquity were closely culturally intertwined, in fact living in the same polity for several centuries. But this is all the more true after 300BC: the period of greatest interaction between Greeks and Romans was under the Roman Empire. If cultural affinity is our main reason for including Greek, it doesn't make sense to exclude the very period in which that affinity was closest.

Second, most Greek literature of the Roman period (with an important exception discussed below) is, in large part, deliberately very close in language to Classical Attic. Many of the authors of the period wrote in a consciously Atticizing style, avoiding any usages that were not found in canonical Attic authors. Linguistically, there isn't a significant amount of difference between a second-century CE writer like Lucian and a fourth-century BC writer like Plato.

An objection to this line of reasoning is that many later Greek works, too, are written in an Atticizing style, well into the late Byzantine period -- why not include those? This is true, but I think it's unlikely to come up in practice. Hardly anyone reads Anna Comnena and the chances of our getting such questions are slim. In fact, even my proposed expansion of Joonas's time period will probably not make much practical difference -- we're likely to get at least ten questions about Homer or Plato for every one about Lucian or Plutarch.

The exception, however, is Christian writers and especially the New Testament. These are indeed quite non-classical in their language, and are understandably of interest to lots of people on SE, so the question is what to do with them. I see two options:

1. Allow questions about Christian Greek texts. This would be the simplest option, but we might get quite a lot of such questions -- it's hard to know in advance how many. Whether this would be a problem or not depends on your point of view, of course.
2. Specifically disallow New Testament questions. As Joonas mentions, there is already a Biblical Hermeneutics SE site and a Christianity SE site, and we could decide that such questions belong there rather than here. The scope of the site would then be "Greek up to the end of antiquity but not the New Testament", which I think meets Joonas's "can be stated on one line and understood correctly by newcomers" test.

I'm going to split this answer into two separate answers so that people who are in favor of one of the two options can specifically vote on that. So: this answer is for option #1. It proposes that:

We allow all Greek questions up to the end of classical antiquity, including New Testament Greek.

Please upvote if you're in favor of that specific option. If you prefer option #2, please upvote my other answer proposing that option.

Answer 3

This site is for Latin, and all questions should be related to Latin. Therefore questions about Greek alone are off-topic.

Sufficient amount of connection to Latin is debatable. Instead of giving a detailed set of rules, we should simply require all questions to have a genuine connection to Latin. What it means will have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

There is one exception, though: Small Italic languages related to Latin: Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan. (And maybe some others?) These languages are very small, and they are very rarely (if ever) studied without a strong connection to Latin. They are also closely related to Latin. Greek, on the other hand, can be studied separately, it is far less related, and it is a large language.

If we were to accept Greek, we would have to limit it anyway. Modern Greek could totally overwhelm us, so it has to be restricted. But can we really, really draw the line? Can any line be sufficiently clear and enforceable? What about questions mainly about modern Greek but connected to Ancient Greek? And if we were to accept Greek as content, it would make a confusing policy to disallow asking questions in Greek.

Allowing Greek would open a can of worms. We want to keep things simple.

Answer 4

Ancient Greek is related to Latin, both culturally and linguistically. Moreover, the communities studying the two languages today are closely related. The two languages interacted significantly in ancient times and continue to do so now. Therefore we would benefit from having them on the same site.

Ancient Greek has so far proven to be too small to support its own SE site: earlier proposals have failed to reach the threshold. There is a Greek proposal at Area 51, but it includes Greek of all eras and it is not clear if it will be successful. And even if it is, older Greek might not get a prominent position.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of including Greek here is deciding what kind of Greek is allowed. We suggest that we limit ourselves to pre-Koine Greek only. That is, Greek before roughly 300 BC is fine, but later forms are not. This limit should be easy enough to recognize and enforce.

The description of the tag greek should be changed accordingly. The help pages should include this line:

Questions about Ancient Greek are also allowed, but only older than Koine Greek (before about 300 BC).

Why that particular line? A few reasons:

• As described above, Ancient Greek and Latin are culturally and linguistically related.
• Koine Greek represents a step in the evolution of Greek in which the link between Greek and Latin is significantly diminished.
• Many Koine Greek questions are associated with the Bible or Christianity, so many are already on topic on the Christianity and Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange sites.
• Including Koine and especially Modern Greek might lead to a significant influx of questions completely unrelated to Latin, diluting our focus and increasing confusion of new users.

It's important to note that this could be considered something of a "trial run." If in the future we find that allowing questions on Ancient Greek are causing problems on the site, we can modify our practice and stop allowing them (while preserving the existing Ancient Greek questions).

In the meantime, however, we here suggest treating Greek as a "side language," like Oscan or Umbrian. Questions should still be asked and answered in English or Latin. We expect that questions related to Ancient Greek will be relatively few compared to those about Latin, and those who have no interest in Ancient Greek would be able to ignore greek in order to not be bothered by such questions, if desired. Thus those who prefer "Latin only" thus should not be significantly affected by this change.

A minority (or even more?) will enjoy Greek questions greatly, and the majority will not be disturbed.