dative "direct object"
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Oct 18 09:16:25 EDT 2002
At 5:55 AM -0700 10/18/02, waldo slusher wrote:
>Steven...
>
>> Are there good reasons to think of this use of the
>> dative as a true
>> direct object, or is there a better way to explain
>> the phenomenon?
>> ============
>
>
>I would be interested in reading how many of the
>earlier Greek dialects (Attic, Aeolic, Ionic, Doric,
>etc.) contributed to the Hellenistic era. Is it
>possible that one of these dialects frequently used
>the dative as "direct object" and then, as the
>hodgepodge of Hellenistic Greek took shape, we ended
>up with a strange but explainable mix. In other words,
>we do know that the Hellenistic Greek is a compilation
>of many and diverse dialects.
This will not really be very helpful: the older dialects did indeed
continue to be used in verse because particular kinds of verse were
associated with particular dialects: epic and elegiac poetry (Meleager, for
example, a native of Palestine from the NT era) was written in the Homeric
"Kunstsprache," Theocritus wrote his bucolic idylls in Sicilian Doric and
his successors in that genre followed suit, choral lyrics were written in
Doric, and Theocritus wrote one poem in Aeolic dialect imitating a meter of
Sappho. Prose on the other hand tended from the fourth century onward to be
written with Attic grammar with Ionic spelling--but of course there came to
be broad fluctuations in the spoken and literary Koine. I don't think the
dialects play any significant role in the spoken or written Koine apart
from literary verse.
On the other hand, I think the conventional explanation of the so-called
dative "direct objects" remains probably as valid an explanation as one can
offer: when a transitive verb is used as an intransitive, it will take a
complement in something other than an accusative of object, and that will
more often than not be a dative. Quite commonly compounds of verbs that are
transitive and active in the simplex are intransitive and are completed by
a dative.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 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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