Proclitics, Enclitics and TIS
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 22 13:36:09 EDT 1998
At 11:46 AM -0700 7/21/98, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>In Acts 13:15 we have EI TIS ESTIV. The editors of the received text (NA27)
>have placed the accents
>
>EI/ TI/S ESTIN
>
>But Ropes and Alford have
>
>EI/ TIS E/STIN
>
>Now EI is a proclitic and TIS is enclitic and ESTIN appears to behave like an
>enclitic, so the accent on the enclitic TIS falls back on the proclitic EI and
>the accent on ESTIN falls back on the the enclitic TIS. The result of all this
>is to create a bit of hard reading for those who are accustom to the absolute
>assurance that TIS and TI/S can always be distinguished by the accent.
>
>I suspect the difference between Alford/Ropes and NA27 is an editorial
>decision regarding readability, is this true or is there something more
>significant going on here?
I don't know why Ropes and Alford have edited as they have, but the
standard rule regarding enclitics is that, in any string of two or more
enclitics (or of a proclitic and one or more enclitics) every word except
the last is accented. The Alford/Ropes formulation is, I believe, simply
wrong. If someone can show me a different rule bearing on this, I'll be
happy to retract that judgment.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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