Use of genitive with "to be"?

Grammar questions which are not related to any specific text.
Post Reply
cepson
Posts: 1
Joined: August 8th, 2011, 1:23 am

Use of genitive with "to be"?

Post by cepson »

This may not properly be a question about koine Greek, but I am learning from a primer that teaches (I think) Attic Greek. One of the exercise questions is to translate the following: Διόνυσος τῆς ἀμπέλου εὑρετής ἧν. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to say "Dionysus was the discoverer of wine." But unless I'm mistaken, both "discoverer" and "wine" are in the genitive case. I thought that the subject of "to be" took the nominative form. Is this some idiomatic expression, or am I just wrong?

Thanks for any insight.
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Use of genitive with "to be"?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

cepson wrote:This may not properly be a question about koine Greek, but I am learning from a primer that teaches (I think) Attic Greek.
Well, the same issue crops up in Koine too....
cepson wrote:One of the exercise questions is to translate the following: Διόνυσος τῆς ἀμπέλου εὑρετής ἧν. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to say "Dionysus was the discoverer of wine." But unless I'm mistaken, both "discoverer" and "wine" are in the genitive case. I thought that the subject of "to be" took the nominative form. Is this some idiomatic expression, or am I just wrong?
You're right that the subject of the verb "to be" is in the nominative case and that its complement needs to agree in case. What you're missing is that εὑρετής is in the nominative case. Like many other first declension masculine nouns, it has the -της ending in the nominative singular. Its genitive is εὑρετοῦ.

Stephen
Last edited by Stephen Carlson on August 8th, 2011, 1:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: typo
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jason Hare
Posts: 951
Joined: June 2nd, 2011, 5:28 pm
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Contact:

Re: Use of genitive with "to be"?

Post by Jason Hare »

LSJ
εὑρετ-ής, οῦ, ὁ, an inventor, discoverer, Pl.La.186e, Isoc.2.17, SIG728K3 (Delph., i B.C.), etc.; cf. εὑρέτις.
Jason A. Hare
The Hebrew Café
Tel Aviv, Israel
Post Reply

Return to “Grammar Questions”