Locative -DE in NT Greek

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Oct 4 15:22:44 EDT 2000


At 11:45 AM -0700 10/4/00, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>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 - 'here.'"
>
>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.

I've always thought of -DE as a directional suffix like Eng. "-ward(s)"  in
"to-ward(s)" or "home-ward"--so Greek OIKADE = "homewards", AQHNAZE =
AQHNAS-DE = "to Athens" or "Athens-ward,' etc.; similarly the directional
(ablatival) suffix -QEN in OIKOQEN = "from home" or ENQEN, which can be
either spatial or temporal in the sense, "from there" or "from that point
in time, thereafter." So AQHNHQEN = "from Athens." ENQEN and hOQEN ("from
which place") do appear in the NT; I had thought OIKADE was there too, but
a search doesn't disclose it. I think these directional suffixes were far
more common in earlier stages of the history of Greek--certainly there are
lots of them in Homer--and that they are relatively rare survivors in the
Koine.


-- 

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 



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