Trivial (but interesting?) grammatical question
Daniel Riaño
danielrr at retemail.es
Wed Feb 9 05:44:01 EST 2000
Randy Leedy wrote:
>The question is how to view the grammatical function of a nominative
>substantive with a first- or second-person verb. For example, I Cor
>10:17 has a clause hOI GAR PANTES EK TOU hENOS ARTOU METECOMEN.
>He is adamant that hOI PANTES must be taken as an appositive to the
>understood subject of METECOMEN. I have no great objection to doing
>so, but I can't help the feeling that this view imposes an English
>construct on the Greek.
...
>I wonder how grammarians of languages
>like Spanish, which inflects verb forms with personal endings that
>make explicit subject pronouns frequently unnecessary, would view a
>construction like this in their own language. For example, if one were
>to put an English sentence such as "We teachers enjoy snow days, too"
>into a language that does not require an explicit 1st-person pronoun,
>would "teachers" tend to be viewed as subject or as appositive?
FWIW, in Spanish (the use of the article being quite different) the
construction is the same: "todos participamos de un (solo) pan", with
"todos" like OI( PA/NTES as the subject. (In the alternative construction
PA/NTES H(MEI=S - H(MEI=S PA/NTES and the alternative translation "todos
nosotros" PA/NTES / todos stand as an adj. IMO). The usual translation
into Spanish of "We teachers enjoy snow days, too" would be "Los profesores
también disfrutamos de los días de nieve", without apposition. You can, of
course, translate it into "Nosotros los profesores también..." making "los
profesores" a real apposition of the first person plural personal pronoun,
but such construction is emphatic, as it is in Greek. To armour
argumentation with bibliographic heavy artillery, you can quote the +5,000
pages volume of Bosque, Ignacio y Demonte, Violeta. 1999. Gramática
descriptiva de la lengua española. 3 vols, Coleccio'n Nebrija y Bello.
Madrid: Real Academa Española § 19.1, 19.2.3, § 16 :-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
Madrid, España
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