ARSENOKOITHS

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Mar 8 06:02:26 EST 2000


At 9:39 PM -0800 3/7/00, Jason Hare wrote:
>You wrote:
><<Actually, I can't see any reason why there
>couldn't
>be a feminine ARSENOKOITA although I'd guess the Doric
>dialect form of
>ARSENOKOITHS would be ARSENOKOITAS for the masculine.
>--
>Carl W. Conrad>>
>_______________________
>Carl,
>
>I am just curious.  Why do we have the lexical form as
>ARSENOKOITHS if there is not an occurrence of this
>anywhere?  Could the lexical form not be ARSENOKOITA
>and it be a feminine word?  Or is there another
>occurrence of this word that has not been produced to
>me yet?

You will have seen Daniel Riaño's brief note by now. The simple fact of the
matter is that I was aiming at humor, a simple fact that went unnoticed in
this thread's long wild goose chase of trivia. No, I don't seriously think
a form ARSENOKOITA is likely to have existed anymore than ALEKTRUAINA,
"roosteress," unless it were to be found in a satire of Lucian or in a
deliberate piece of literary humor comparable to Aristophanes' Clouds. The
lexical form is ARSENOKOITHS simply because that's found in a significant
frequently-read text, namely the GNT.

-- 

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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