Greek grammar in German anyone?
bgreek at ntresources.com
bgreek at ntresources.com
Tue Aug 6 13:33:29 EDT 2002
Can anyone help me make sense of this?
"Aber die vielen und verschiedenartigen Gebrauchsweisen des 'echten
Genitivs' des Indogermanischen liessen sich wieder nur durch willkürliche
Definitionen auf einen Nenner bringen."
Best I can do is: “But the many and varied usages of 'true genitives' in
Indogermanic can be brought back [i.e., ?imposed?] [?on a nominal? / ?into
the nominative?] only by arbitrary definitions."
For some background, this is from J. P. Louw, "Linguistic Theory and the
Greek Case System," *Acta Classica* 9 (1966): 73–88.
Here's the context of the statement (the quote above appears in the
footnote):
The explanation of the Greek case system among Classical scholar is
traditionally purely contextual (-syntatic), although the definitions
proposed were usually represented as semantic notions of the case itself. In
reality, however, they were merely contextual common denominators. Thus we
read in Schwyzer—Debrunner that the nominative is the case of the
grammatical subject. This is not at all a semantic definition, but a
contextual one and as a contextual definition it merely states the most
usual contextual role of the nominative. For the subject is not always
nominative, and the nominative is not always the subject. The same applies
to the accusative when denoting space and time relations or the object; it
also applies to the genitive denoting the partitive relation and that of
'belonging to'; and so on.** It all becomes clear when we read at the end of
Schwyzer—Debrunner's list: '...der freie (absolute) Gebrauch einzelner Kasus
ist ebenfalls eine nachträgliche Entwicklung, die nichts über die ältere
~konstruktionelle Anwendung~ hinaus lehrt'.
[This last German quote I've understood to say something like: "the free
(absolute) use of an individual case is likewise an additional development,
which does not teach anything beyond the older structural use".]
**[= f.n. 25] Here lies the reason why we read on p. 89 [of
Schwyzer—Debrunner]: 'Aber die vielen und verschiedenartigen Gebrauchsweisen
des “echten Genitivs' des Indogermanischen liessen sich wieder nur durch
willkürliche Definitionen auf einen Nenner bringen'.
Thanks for any help...
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Rodney J. Decker, Th.D., Associate Prof/NT, Baptist Bible Seminary
Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, USA
<http://www.NTResources.com> or <http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/>
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