Locative -DE in NT Greek

clayton stirling bartholomew c.s.bartholomew at worldnet.att.net
Wed Oct 4 14:45:04 EDT 2000


Working in Homer's Iliad I have come across the locative -DE suffix which
made me stop and think about the locative -He suffix in Hebrew which has
parallels in Ugaritic (See Waltke/O'Conner, Syntax, #10.5).

I decided to look for remnants of the locative -DE in NT Greek and found one
or two possible candidates. hWDE and EVQANDE are defined in L&N: "a position
relatively near the speaker, writer, or viewpoint person ‹ Œhere.¹"

Also hODE looks like it might have some secondary semantic features that
might connect it with the locative -DE, again L&N define hODE  "a reference
to an entity regarded as relatively present in terms of the discourse
setting, whether preceding or following." This notion of being " relatively
present" is both temporal and local.  LEH gives the following glosses for
hODE in the LXX "this  (demonstrative pron.), here"  and LS (abridged) ". .
. to designate the nearer  as opp. to the more remote . . .  ."

I am speculating that in Homer and Biblical Hebrew the locative -DE and -He
are old language features well established and on the decline. The -He
locative is attested in other ANE languages such as Ugaritic but I have no
idea where the -DE locative came from.


--  
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062





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