Lk 18:13; TWi hAMARTWLWi

Steven Lo Vullo doulos at merr.com
Sat Dec 1 04:05:07 EST 2001



On Saturday, December 1, 2001, at 01:39  AM, Iver Larsen wrote:

> As far as I can tell, it would not be possible in Greek to use a 
> relative
> pronoun as in *MOI hOS hAMARTWLOS (EIMI?). A relative pronoun 
> following a
> personal pronoun apparently never refers to the same person as the 
> personal
> pronoun does. This was a new discovery to me, and I invite people to 
> correct
> me by searching their databases for instances of a personal pronoun 
> followed
> by a relative pronoun. I may have overlooked something.
> But if this is a correct hypotheses, it seems that the only way to 
> express
> in Greek what corresponds to "me who am a sinner" is MOI TWi 
> hAMARTWLWi. If
> the pronoun had been in the nominative, one could say EGW hAMARTWLOS WN.

You seem to be saying that because it is not possible to use a relative 
pronoun following a personal pronoun, MOI TWi hAMARTWLWi must be the 
equivalent. This simply doesn't follow. And since apposition is such a 
ready explanation for this construction, I see no reason to complicate 
the situation by positing that we can (1) know what the speaker would 
have said if he could have said it that way and (2) posit that because 
he couldn't say it that way, he said it this way! That's an awful lot of 
conjecture in the face of a ready and simple explanation.
=============

Steven Lo Vullo
Madison, WI




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