Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Jonathan Robie
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Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I was reading Matthew 5:23 a few days ago and was surprised that it said this:
Matt 5:23 wrote:κἀκεῖ μνησθῇς ὅτι ὁ ἀδελφός σου ἔχει τί κατὰ σοῦ.
I've circled the word with the surprising accent:
ti.png
ti.png (463.75 KiB) Viewed 10770 times
So I sent this to Dirk as a typo, and here is his response (shared with permission):
Dirk Jongkind wrote:The accent is intentional. Turns out that the 'grammatical rule' we have been taught of accented τις is interrogative and unaccented indefinite is rather unknown to the manuscripts. After all, what do you do when you want to accent the indefinite (and the option is there in this particular case)? Pete Williams has spent many an hour trawling through image pages to see where one is warranted.
So what do you think? Where did this rule come from, and is THGNT right in discarding it? If it's time to change the way we teach this, what exactly should we teach? Is this something that other people have noted and discussed about the THGNT?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

I am going to repost this on the Textkit forum, if you don't mind -- there are couple of guys over there who are really into accents and particularly might know the history question. In the meantime, wow. Every grammar, every lexicon, every textbook has the indefinite use as enclitic, not just NT materials, but classics as well. Burden of proof is clearly on the one making the claim.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Barry Hofstetter
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Joined: May 6th, 2011, 1:48 pm

Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Here are the responses so far on Textkit:

http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... 23&t=68029

The poster MWH, by the way, is a retired classicist who has done a fair amount of papryological work in Homer. Their responses exactly accord with my sense of it as well.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Peter Williams saw this thread and sent me this email with permission to post it.
Peter Williams wrote:Dear Jonathan,

I love the question. That’s the beauty of being involved in an edition which follows manuscripts rather than relatively recent artificial rules. We took screenshots of manuscripts, so I’m happy to share them from our files. Please feel free to share them with the list as well as my comments below.

Pete

The matter of accented indefinite τίς is dealt with on pp. 514-515 of our Introduction. From a historic point of view τίς, τί (as well as the unaccented forms) are Indo-European cognates of Latin quis, quid and with English who, what. They all begin with the same consonant which has developed differently in the different languages. They all come in a stressed and unstressed variety depending on context. Question forms are stressed, but they’re not the only forms which may receive stress. A great many cases of indefinite τίς are accented with acute in manuscripts of the ninth to fifteenth centuries and we have sought to base all enclitic choices in THGNT on multiple manuscript attestation. Early editions retain accented indefinite forms (e.g. Erasmus 1516 at Matthew 11:27) or use the grave accent which occasionally appeared in manuscripts (e.g. Erasmus 1516 at Matthew 5:23). Over time printers and teachers preferred to make things simpler for readers and to create an absolute grammatical distinction between accented and unaccented forms, so that the former weren’t allowed except for questions. That’s why Stephanus 1550 has dropped the accent in Matthew 11:27, though he sometimes allows grave, e.g. John 13:29. So what THGNT is doing is restoring us to the situation of appreciating the rhythm of the Greek which would have been appreciated until the sixteenth century (and quite a bit later as the grave form continued to be popular until the nineteenth century). We are not making an innovation, but simply helping people remember what has been forgotten.
Note: I am adding dates for the manuscripts for perspective.

GA 03 (4th Century):
GA_03_1239_0523.png
GA_03_1239_0523.png (156.44 KiB) Viewed 10739 times
GA 788 (11th Century):
GA_788_0011a_0523.png
GA_788_0011a_0523.png (323.06 KiB) Viewed 10739 times
GA 560 (11th Century):
GA_560_0039a_0523.png
GA_560_0039a_0523.png (510.5 KiB) Viewed 10739 times
GA 757 (13th Century):
GA_757_0027a_0523.png
GA_757_0027a_0523.png (497.78 KiB) Viewed 10739 times
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Here's the last thing Pete gave me so far to argue for accenting the pronoun this way - the introduction to the text. (I am presenting the argument for their position and trying to be open minded, I am not yet convinced.)
In matters of accentuation, we note that the study of accentuation actually attested in the manuscripts is in its infancy, and due to the size of the task involved in our review of all New Testament accents, the editors have often not consulted more than a handful of accented manuscripts for a particular passage or lexeme. Accented manuscripts may be inconsistent, and the system of accentuation varied in small ways over time. We have not therefore felt it either necessary or possible to follow witnesses in every detail, and we cannot be sure that we have selected the best manuscripts to consider. We freely admit that our choice of manuscripts has been influenced by which images were easiest to access online. The accents, nevertheless, are repositories of historical information, some of which considerably precedes the age in which the accents were written. It is right, therefore that editors should seek to present these to readers as far as possible.
I'm skipping over a section on accents in OT names (there is a similar and interesting discussion of breathing for such names before this paragraph). Here's the part that is immediately relevant to this thread:
Likewise in the use of enclitics manuscripts do not always agree, but there are occasions when they appear to unite against modern editions. Often modern editions have tended to treat words as enclitic when mediaeval scribes, who presumably had a more native grasp of the rhythm of the language, did not. Our edition takes its lead on such matters of prosody from the manuscripts and we hope that our efforts in this direction, though imperfect, will contribute to a better appreciate of the language of the New Testament as the living language it once was. For example, in John 13:29 we print ἵνα τί δῷ with 560 771 788 1424 2907 even though τί is indefinite. In following these manuscripts we are thus seeking to counter the tendency that has arisen in some modern teaching of Greek to treat τίς as indefinite, while ignoring the accented form of the indefinite.
One last thing to look at is Peter's argument in this blog entry:

On the disappearance of accented indefinite τις

I think that's their argument and the evidence they present. Is there better evidence for the traditional view?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
PeterJohnWilliams
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by PeterJohnWilliams »

We also have to ask whether the 'traditional view' is really that traditional. I cannot see that the idea that the indefinite must always be enclitic is supported by any authorities before the modern era, and I doubt that one could find many genuine grammatical authorities in the modern era who would claim that.
Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

PeterJohnWilliams wrote: January 23rd, 2018, 9:18 pm We also have to ask whether the 'traditional view' is really that traditional. I cannot see that the idea that the indefinite must always be enclitic is supported by any authorities before the modern era, and I doubt that one could find many genuine grammatical authorities in the modern era who would claim that.
I think part of the problem is that that the support for an accented indefinite τις appears to come only from medieval biblical manuscripts, that the evidence is far from universal or even consistent, and that the ancient grammarians writing before the medieval period clearly understood the indefinite to be enclitic. The rules for accents are not late and artificial, but date all the way back to the third and second centuries BCE (usually credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium, c.257-c.185 BCE).
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: January 23rd, 2018, 9:49 am So what do you think? Where did this rule come from, and is THGNT right in discarding it? If it's time to change the way we teach this, what exactly should we teach? Is this something that other people have noted and discussed about the THGNT?
It's an editorial convention, along with most of our accenting rules. There is generally broad agreement now on editing Greek texts, some of which I disprefer (e.g., I would prefer a single lunate sigma <ϲ> to <σ> / <ς>: some turn-of-the-twentieth-century German editions did that, but no more!). Yet until THGNT, I've seen almost no interest in questioning our received editorial conventions for quite a while.

Until the discussion that I hope the THGNT starts shakes out, I would say that it is extremely premature to teach anything but the standard conventions. It is time to research and reassess them, and I hope that the THGNT is able to spark scholarly interest in it.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
PeterJohnWilliams
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by PeterJohnWilliams »

If anyone is going to claim that the grammarians did not allow indefinite accented τίς they need to provide an ancient source. I can't see anything in Arcadius' epitome of Herodian (book 18), which btw survives in two manuscripts probably postdating Erasmus!

Our view is very simple: Greek was not exempted from general linguistic processes which mean that the Proto-Indo-European indefinites beginning with *kʷ could receive varying degrees of stress within a sentence.
RandallButh
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Re: Matthew 5:23 in TGNT - say what?

Post by RandallButh »

I would like to add a perspective that partially supports what Peter and the Tyndale House GNT is doing.

The whole enclitic and accent system has been artificially regularized and imposed on our written NT. For example, the genitives αὐτοῦ αὐτῆς αὐτοῦ are required to have an accent in the regularized system. However, as a reader becomes sensitive to word order they will begin to perceive that a word like αὐτοῦ is often moved forward and behind a dominating (not a grammatical head word but a clause-level main word) exactly like enclitics. If an enclitic were to move to the same place we might recognize it as reinforcing the item to which it is enclitic. We don't usually recognize this with αὐτοῦ because it is not enclitic "by definition." My claim is that that definition is artificial and does not recognize how the language was being used.
A second example of this phenomenon of an artificially imposed accent system is the βαρύτονος grave accent. Basically, the grave accent marks a potential, suppressed, acute accent. That works fine in many contexts where a word final acute accent is suppressed (written as grave and not pronounced) in order to allow a longer string of words to flow together as a phonological phrase. However, that artificial rule was almost certainly not applied in speech to words that were fronted and placed immediately before a verb to mark a/the salient point of information in the clause/phrase. Such a fronted, focal item almost certainly involved an ever-so-slight pause and would have retained its acute accent in real speech. This has been discussed in this forum in the past but it is rarely or not-at-all discussed in most Greek teaching so let me use the closest contextual example as an illustration.
Matt. 5:25 ἴσθι εὐνοῶν τῷ ἀντιδίκῳ σου ταχύ, ἕως ὅτου εἶ μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ, μήποτέ σε παραδῷ ὁ ἀντίδικος τῷ κριτῇ καὶ ὁ κριτὴς τῷ ὑπηρέτῃ καὶ εἰς φυλακὴν βληθήσῃ·
In Matt 5.25 the σε is placed in front of the verb and can and should be read as a marked Focus. It is without an accent and humorously (I speak to Greek grammarians) treated as an enclitic to μήποτε. In real speech I have no doubt that it was fully accented, probably with an ever-so-slight pause and increase in volume and/or pitch. However, as an enclitic this does not fully illustrate the point discussed above about grave accents hiding the real pronunciation.
Later in 5.25 we see καὶ εἰς φυλακὴν βληθήσῃ. The phrase εἰς φυλακὴν has been fronted as marked, salient information, in order words, as a Focus structure. The editors have marked φυλακὴν with a grave according to the regularization rules. However, as a marked Focus it was almost certainly intended to be read and spoken as καὶ εἰς φυλακήν βληθήσῃ, with full accentuation on the syllable κήν.

What is my point in all of this? That the accent rules were an artificial application to written texts that did not truly reflect the pragmatics of actual speech. I have no doubt that they represent default speech patterns in Greek from the ancient period (classic and second sophistic). But real speech undoubtedly differed from plain-Jane, milk-toast communication. (Apologies to all the extraordinary Jane's in the world.) When the word order patterns in Greek are understood, and when the natural Focal patterns of many many languages are considered, then it is highly probable that perceptive readers of Greek texts read Focal words with grave accents as if they had a focal acute accent. And words like αὐτοῦ, when used as an enclitic to reinforce a main word/phrase, would be pronounced as if they did not have an accent.

My take home assumption/rule-of-thumb: τίς and τις were not accented as simple acute and "enclitic" according to lexeme but were pronounced according to their function in the sentence and in many cases "anyone" had a normal accent, while an enclitic phrase like ἄνθρωπός τις would not. Of course, in many contexts "anyone" may have had no accent, just like an acute is suppressed and marked by a grave as a "potential accent" in case of slowing down. And the rule was/became to write "anyone" without any accent as if it was always an enclitic, even though it wasn't. On the other hand, τίς ῾who?' always carried its accent, and resisted a grave accent, as a special category as an inherently Focal item.
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