[B-Greek] The forms of AIWNIOS

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed May 28 14:33:06 EDT 2003


At 1:30 PM -0400 5/28/03, Erik Westwig wrote:
>The last clause in John 3:16 is ALL' EXH ZWHN AIWNION.
>
>Here AIWNION is clearly the feminine, accusative singular of AIWNIOS.  As I
>was checking things out in Trenchard's vocabulary book, however, he lists
>the forms of AIWNIOS as : AIWNIOS, -A, -ON which implies a separate
>masculine and feminine form.  This obviously disagrees with this usage in
>John 3:16.  So I checked out my other books and Mounce (my intro grammar)
>lists the form as AIWNIOS, -OV with the masculine and feminine sharing the
>same form.  This is odd, because Mounce claims to have derived his forms
>from Trenchard.  To complicate things, my Classical lexicon (The Pocket
>Oxford Classic Greek Dictionary) lists the form as AIWNIOS, -(A), -OV where
>the feminine form has been parenthetically marked as being somehow special,
>but with no explanation of what that mark means.
>
>Can anyone fill me in on what the deal is?

The fact is that there is a variation between the 3-termination M/F/N
adjectival form and the 2-termination MF/N form. BDF discusses "New
Feminines" of 2-termination-adjectives in §59; at §59 (2) hH AIWNIOS is
customary in the GNT as in Attic, although hH AIWNIA is found elsewhere in
Hellenistic Greek.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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