1st John 1.2 Grammar

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Oct 14 06:10:22 EDT 2000


At 8:21 PM -0400 10/13/00, David B Spotts wrote:
>Greetings, all you who are clearly more prepared than I for this
>question.
>
>I was helping my eighth graders look at the parsing of 1 John 1 and noted
>the phrase THN ZWHN THN AIWNION.  I am not familiar with any reason for
>the masculine/neuter accusative for AIWNION, used as it is with a
>feminine noun and a feminine article.  Why not AIWNIHN?

This one's relatively easy; AIWNIOS is a two-termination adjective,
evidently because it's deemed a compound of AI (i.e. AEI or AIEI) + WN).
There is at least one instance in Plato wherein it's deemed a regular
3-termination adjective, AIWNIOS/A/ON, but normally the -OS forms do
service for both masculine and feminine usage. It wouldn't be AIWNIHN in
any case because the original -A- of the feminine endings remains -A- and
doesn't change to -H- after an -I-, -E- or -R-.

>I'd welcome a reference to a web-based resource that would help with
>similar questions and keep you intelligent people from having to snicker
>at my questions.

For one like this on the web, it's easiest to go to the Perseus web-site's
LSJ lexicon; although you can go to the Perseus site's "starting points"
URL at

	http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/startingPoints.html

if it's an entry in LSJ, it's quicker to start with

	http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lexindex?entry=fe/rw

>By the way, I really enjoy it when I have the opportunity to try to
>follow a thread on this list.  It helps me try to remember to think like
>the Greek scholar I once was.

I'd put it, "like the Greek scholar we aspire to be!"



-- 

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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