Nice. I believe that language is learned by people having no idea what they are saying, who expect to be understood.
Wes Wood wrote:?ιπτο?μεν μ?λυβονc.
c) “throwing lead” = “shooting guns”
In view of that belief, let me say that I read you to mean that you and your brother were holding lumps of lead that you hurled some short distance from yourselves.
Seriuosly though, the
??πτω family lacks the idea of
targeting and
distance that many of the
-βολ?ω family seem to have. (I'm sorry, but my friend's computer is a bit old and diesn't seem to support unicode, but you should be able to follow never-the-less).
The reason for that has to do with the structure of the Greek vocabulary. The bolew doesn't necessarily have the ideas of targeting and distance, but we readily imply that from the way it describes an action. In this case there are perspective synonyms, like there were in that animation that I posted a few weeks ago for walk, if you saw it. Having two distinct words is one way that Greek expresses this structure in its lexicon. Another way what we would call abstraction and concreteness (but for Greek that is not confined to nouns). klhros "lot" has two meanings, the concrete idea of divination device, and then the abstract idea of the office obtained by lot. There is a difference in meaning in the same word based on the degree of abstraction and concreteness. Also, a word like apostellw, as you know, either refers to the commisioning or to the commisioning and sending - who they wer made, and what they were to do. As you have probably noticed, the order of ideas in Greek is something like Plato's ideas and forms theory. If you look at the klhros examples for example, when it means the physical divination devices, it is at the end of the paragraph or sentence, and when it means the abstract idea is meant, then it occurs at the beginning of the sentence or thought. In general, the word order goes from most abstract to the most specific.
If you use a very specific word (small focus word) like riptw, it usually has some sort of build up (contextualisation) before it is introduced. In English, we tend to add lots of elements to the sentence to give its meaning some context.
If you look at the other words consisting of -bolew or the nominal -bolos, many of them refer to the use of projectile weapons, such as ekhbolos. Your sentence sounds like you and your brother were hurling a lump of lead. While Modern Greek doesn't clearly retain the wide-narrow context / concrete-abstract axis (axis as in co-ordinates) in the structure of its lexicon, it could be worth noting that in Modern Greek, the word for shoot is pyrobolw "project (throw) fire".
In terms of word order, as you no doubt realise, there are three levels of ordering. There is the elemental / component level, with conventional placements of pronouns and enclitics, there is the vagueness to specificity ordering of sentences / phrases according to the authours perception and there is the transition from abstract to concrete in paragraphs or sentences. As an authour you have freedom of word order to move towards the most specific thing you want to say within first the abstract statements and then the concrete ones, while observing the micro rules.