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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