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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