matt 21:25
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Jun 25 11:26:36 EDT 2002
At 6:08 AM -0700 6/25/02, john umland wrote:
>my first question to b-greek, surely a softball.
>i was doing my exercises in ward power's book and
>couldn't understand why the definite article before
>john's name is neuter.
>
>Mat 21:25 TO BAPTISMA TO IWANNOU
Usage of the article is one of the trickier things a student confronts in
beginning Greek. Here the TO functions to indicate that IWANNOU is an
"attribute" of TO BAPTISMA, and since TO BAPTISMA is a neuter noun, the
article referring back to it will agree with it normally in number and
gender.
What's confusing is that Greek would allow three (or more) expressions all
to mean "The baptism of John":
TO BAPTISMA IWANNOU
TO BAPTISMA TOU IWANNOU
TO BAPTISMA TO IWANNOU
TO BAPTISMA TO TOU IWANNOU
and it would also be possible to make any of these forms of IWANNOU precede
TO BAPTISMA:
IWANNOU TO BAPTISMA
TOU IWANNOU TO BAPTISMA
TO TOU IWANNOU BAPTISMA
I think these latter three are less common, but they are by no means
unnatural or ungrammatical.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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