Genitive with subject or predicate

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Feb 4 16:48:09 EST 2000


At 3:53 PM -0500 2/4/00, Mike Sangrey wrote:
>In Romans 7:1
>     hOTI hO NOMOS KURIEUEI TOU ANQRWPOU EF' hOSON XRONON ZH;
>
>The fairly straight forward translation would be something like:
>    "that the law reigns over a person for as long as he lives"
>
>However, I'd like someone to help me understand how one arrives at
>this.  Specifically, does TOU ANQRWPOU limit KURIEUEI or NOMOS?  And,
>how would you go about determining which is the better route to the
>translation?  Is it just word order in this case?  Is it always word
>order?  I'm not trying to pick a nit, just trying to take an easy text
>so I can understand the more difficult ones.
>
>Really complete answers will gain applause. :-)

I think this one is pretty clear-cut: verbs of governing or commanding,
like ARCW and KURIEUW take a genitive complement or "object" (if you prefer
that term). Moreover, there's no way that TOU ANQRWPOU could construe with
hO NOMOS without a repeated article preceding TOU ANQRWPOU, and for my
part, I'd say that even with it, it would be pretty strange word order to
have hO NOMOS KURIEUEI hO TOU ANQRWPOU. I think rather that ANQRWPOU here
immediately follows KURIEUEI because it is in fact the direct complement of
KURIEUEI.

And if that's not complete enough for you, I guess you could always ask
another question about it. Some people do, you know ...


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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