[B-Greek] Col. 1:13a causal pronoun FOLLOW Up2

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Apr 16 08:51:45 EDT 2004


At 4:55 AM -0700 4/16/04, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>This is my final follow up to this line of
>questioning, since it seems so "unEnglish" to me.
>
>Dr. Wheeler wrote:
>
>> Relative Pronouns,....   But then
>> can also be used to indicate argument development
>> (means, manner, purpose,
>> result, reason, condition, concession) in a passage.
>
>Could someone provide me with as many examples as your
>time permits of these kinds of functions
>(semantic/pragmatic) of relative pronouns? I would
>like to gain a familiarity and actually see some of
>these pronouns functioning as means, result,
>concession, condition!!!!, and so on. Whenever I see a
>relative pronoun, my thinking does not go beyond an
>equal sign (and to which noun/pronoun it is equal).
>But this I realize stems from my limited exposure to
>both Greek and English. At this stage, I am not
>interested in relative ADVERBS. Thank you so much!

Mitch, I have no intention of disputing what Dale Wheeler has said on this
matter. I will only say that interpretation of these nuances may well be a
matter of reading between the lines and guessing intelligently at what's
going on in the mind of the writer; remember that in conversation--and
often enough in writing also--we often have to "divine" what the person
we're talking with is thinking about. In the first two chapters of
Galatians I think there's need for a lot of such intelligent guesswork
required in order to perceive what's implicit but left unspoken. At any
rate, I don't really think this is something that can be cataloged in a
neat list to be committed to memory; I think rather it's a matter of
reading lots and lots more of Greek texts and attaining an intimate sort of
familiarity with the substance of the larger text. But let me suggest that
KIND of thing that I think Dale is suggesting, in conversational
English--without attempting to draw upon or create examples in Greek:

	"I'm going to let Dale, who'll give you a much better explanation
that I
	can offer, describe a couple instances of this "adverbial" function of
	relative clauses ..."

Here the clause "who'll give you a much better explanation ..." is,
technically speaking, an adjectival clause describing Dale. But from the
context it is reasonably evident that the clause gives a reason for my
deferring the description to Dale; i.e. "who'll give you ... " implicitly
means "because he'll give you ... " Does that help any?
-- 

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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