Finally. It's here in my grubby little hands. Matthew Brook O'Donnell's Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament. I've been waiting months for this book. I'm so stoked that it is in print.

When you do what I do for a living — munge Greek text — a title like this simply begs to be read. So now I get to read it. Here's the first paragraph of the blurb at Sheffield Phoenix Press:

The burgeoning field of corpus linguistics studies aspects of a language that are susceptible to computer processing once a sizable electronic corpus of the language has been assembled. In this groundbreaking work, O’Donnell takes the unusual step of applying the techniques of corpus linguistics to Hellenistic Greek and especially the Greek of the New Testament, and in three areas shows, with a multitude of worked examples, how it could sharpen our appreciation of the language.

I may or may not comment further on it on this blog. I'll say that if you're into linguistics generally, and into the Greek of the New Testament specifically, then you may want to consider the book even if you're not into analysis of linguistic corpora. True, there is some technical stuff in the book (how awesome to see a book in Biblical Studies with XML on the page!) but there is also good thinking about different approaches and data analysis that could come in handy even if one isn't into such things.

If you're generally interested in stuff like this, you should check out the OpenText.org project too. Matthew Brook O'Donnell is the project's Director of Research and Development. They are doing some seriously cool stuff. Also note that Logos Bible Software (my employer) will be publishing an edition of the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament; this has been mentioned in some detail by yours truly in the Syntax section of the Logos Bible Software Blog.

I should also state that because of Logos' involvement with the OpenText.org material, I've had the pleasure of working with Matt and others from the OpenText.org project. The experience of working with them on implementing the OpenText.org material has been one of the highlights of my year. I've learned much as a result and look forward to learning more in working through Matt's book and continuing to work on the OpenText.org material.

Update (2005-12-13): Thanks, Wayne (Better Bibles Blog) for the encouragement and for posting a notice to the B-Greek list. B-Greekers, if you happen to come here and check it out, you may be interested in other posts I've written in the Greek category. There are a bunch of posts in that category, so it may take time for the page to generate.