Ta onómata (names) and the dative case

Grammar questions which are not related to any specific text.
David Lim
Posts: 901
Joined: June 6th, 2011, 6:55 am

Re: ὄνομα is used with καλεῖν not διδόναι, isn't it?

Post by David Lim »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
David Lim wrote:This is literally something like "What is the name for (given to) you?" and "Legion is the name for (given to) me".
Is the verb "to give" used with ὄνομα? The usual verb seems to be καλεῖν as in
Matthew 1:21 wrote:καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν·
The construction is Verb + 2 accusatives.

Do you have any example where an ὄνομα has been given (διδόναι)?

[Δαυίδ: You might like to access some schoarly opinion about the meaning / significance of ὄνομα in Philipians 2:9 before you give a quick answer using that verse.]
Stephen, as Carl pointed out, what I meant by my "literal" isn't quite what you might have expected; I gave an English rendering that is both semantically and grammatically as close as possible to the original meaning, in other words I mentally convert the original to some language-independent thought before converting that to English. So when I say "give", I literally mean the English "give". When I want to say the Greek "διδοναι" I will say just that. I also put "given to" in brackets because it is usually used in English in place of the more direct rendering of "for". Of course, "καλειν" is one of the usual verbs used when explicitly stating the act of calling someone by some name. Sorry if my meaning was obscure.

As for Phlp 2:9, suffice to say that "ονομα" can refer to either the name given to someone or something, or some form of authority that is often represented in some way by the name, and hence Phlp 2:9 refers to granting of authority, and is unrelated to this topic.
δαυιδ λιμ
George F Somsel
Posts: 172
Joined: May 9th, 2011, 10:11 am

Re: Ta onómata (names) and the dative case

Post by George F Somsel »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
What case do you think that Ἰακώβ is here in this sentence? To do that, we would have to construct some hypothetical grammar after λέγω around the word Ἰακώβ. •Would you like to try that?
•Can you think of a paraphrase(s) for "ὁ δὲ εἶπεν Ἰακωβ."?
Ἰακωβ is indeclinable, i.e., it always appears in this form so there is no way to specifically state from the form itself what its case might be. I would contend, however, that it must be nominative. Carl has noted that there might be considered to be an ellipsis of the copulative verb ἐστίν. The dative (or genitive) seems confined to the pronoun referencing the person. The case would be nominative since the sentence would thus be τὸ ὀνομά σου/μου [ἐστιν] Ἰακωβ. It would thus be ὀνομά = Ἰακωβ, a nominative to agree with ὀνομά.
george
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Penn Tomassetti
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Joined: December 19th, 2013, 10:08 pm

Re: Ta onómata (names) and the dative case

Post by Penn Tomassetti »

Thank you all for sharing so much useful information! I appreciate it.

It is an interesting question to me, since there seem to be two almost equivalent ways to talk about one's name and the challenge is discovering what the differences are between them. The dative "of possession," if you want to call it that, definitely seems to be idiomatic, but the history behind that is what the mystery is all about. It would be logical if it did originate out of a sense of "given-ness," though I suppose it is possible that it could have originated some other way.
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