[B-Greek] What does this mean

Harold R. Holmyard III hholmyard at ont.com
Fri Aug 20 12:21:06 EDT 2004


Dear Jimmy,

>  >From Mounce's book.
>     He'll say something like this
>"PISTEUW can take a direct object in either the dative or the accusative.
>It is a cognate verb of PITIS"
>He mentions this a lot, he'll say it takes
>Does anyone know what he means? Does this only happen with certain  words
>Also when he says cognate, what does that mean or refer too?

HH: He means that the direct object of the verb PISTEUW can be in 
either the dative or the accusative case. In English you might say, 
"I believe the preacher." With such sentences in Greek the word 
"preacher" might be in the accusative case or perhaps in the dative 
case. The Greek word "preacher" as a noun takes cases, for the Greek 
nominal system is case-based. There is nominative, genitive, dative, 
and accusative.

Words formed from the same root are called cognates. Perhaps a noun 
like PISTIS will be related in derivation to a verb like PISTEUW. 
They are in the same word family. Perhaps there will be a related 
adjective and adverb too.

				Yours,
				Harold Holmyard



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