Greek grammar in German anyone?

Roe d.roe at t-online.de
Tue Aug 6 14:42:53 EDT 2002


> bgreek at ntresources.com schrieb:
> 
> Can anyone help me make sense of this?
> 
> "Aber die vielen und verschiedenartigen Gebrauchsweisen des 'echten
> Genitivs' des Indogermanischen liessen sich wieder nur durch
> willk[ür]liche Definitionen auf einen Nenner bringen."

Hi Rodney,

The idiom "auf einen Nenner bringen" means to reduce to a common
denominator. So using your translation which was mostly ok, I would
loosely translate something like: 

"But the many and varied usages of 'true genitives' in Indogermanic can be
pigeonholed (as having a common function) only through arbitrary
definitions."

In your other translation I would use "later" instead of "additional" for
nachträgliche...

> [...]  "the free (absolute) use of an individual case is 
> likewise an additional [LATER] development, which does not 
> teach anything beyond the older structural use".

David

D.W. Roe
Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany



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