Peculiar Word Order
Moon-Ryul Jung
moon at saint.soongsil.ac.kr
Sat Apr 24 05:52:19 EDT 1999
Dear B-Greekers,
Recently I encountered two sentences whose word order I could not
understand. Lk 7:40: ECW SOI TI EIPEIN ( I have something to tell you]
Heb 2:8b: NUN DE OUPW ORAMEN AUTWi TA PANTA hUPOTETAGMENA
(We are not yet seeing everything having been subjected to him]
Logically speaking, I thought the object of ECW is TI and the object of
ORAMEN is TA PANTA. But the verbs and the objects are separated by
datives SOI and AUTWi, respectively. I wondered why they did not
write as ECW TI EIPEIN SOI. Similarly why not
NUN DE OUPW ORAMEN TA PANTA hUPOTETAGMENA AUTWi?
Does ECW SOI TI EIPEIN intend to convey a similar thing as
"I have something to tell YOU", where YOU is stressed?
When the sentence in question is SOI TI EIPEIN, I can understand it.
But when it is embedded as an object of a verb, I do not understand
what is going on in ECW SOI TI EIPEIN.
I guess I am missing something about Greek word order.
Respectfully
Moon-Ryul Jung
Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science
Soongsil University
Seoul, Korea
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