Adverbials in the Acc Neut Sing

Maurice Taraschi mtaraschi at cadets.com
Sat Oct 3 19:53:39 EDT 1998




clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:

> While I was pondering the function of TI in Acts 15:10 I began to speculate
> about why a number of adjectives and pronouns in the accusative neuter
> singular function as adverbs in their context.
>
> Is there some history behind this phenomenon?  Do Sanskrit and other languages
> of this family show a similar pattern?
>
> Is this adverbial function considered part of the functional domain of the
> accusative? If so how do we account for it being primarily manifest in the
> Neuter?

Clayton,                Adverbs in I.E. were for the most part cases of nouns,
adjectives and pronouns.  The cases most frequently used for these purposes were the
Accusative, the Ablative and the Locative.  Any student of Greek or Latin will come
to recognize this in time, and eventually it just becomes "old hat".  Did other cases
do this too?  Yes!  In fact there are even Nominative adverbs.  As to why there are
so many Neuter examples: I.E., and then Greek and Latin, used the Neuter (and this is
purely my conjecture) so as to distance it from any reality as an adjective that is
might otherwise possess.




More information about the B-Greek mailing list