[B-Greek] Beginner Struggling with Translating

Aaron Collins biblequiz at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 5 01:33:15 EST 2004


Interesting,

I am about to take the final of a 10 week Beginning Greek intensive done 
with Mounce's grammar and workbook.  I went and looked back to see what I 
had put as the answer and noticed I translated it as "Now he might be made 
known to the rulers and authorities."

"vuv" is obviously "now", "tais arxais" and "tais exousiais" are both dative 
plural feminine, and Mounce says means you use the key word "to" with the 
dative. The dative case and the word "to" usually indicate an indirect 
object.   Mounce defines "exousia" as "authority", "right" or "power", but 
you can't really make something known to a "right".  You can make something 
known to the authorities or powers.  I think both could be used here, but 
"authorities" seems to make for a better translation since it always refers 
to humans, while "power" can be a thing or a person.  You don't know whether 
to use "he", "she", or "it" in this sentence, because there is not enough 
context and all three can make sense otherwise, so choosing any of the three 
should be counted correct.  "he/she/it might be made known" + "now" + "to 
the rulers and to the authorities/powers" = "He/she/it might be made known, 
now, to the rulers and authorities/powers."

I'm sure with advanced Greek grammar this can be translated in other ways I 
am not aware of.  But just from what Mounce has said in his textbook, this 
appears to be the simple translation he is expecting the student to come up 
with.

Hope this helps,
Aaron Collins.
P.S.
Remember that Mounce is not the one who provided the translations to his 
workbook.  It was completed by one of his assistants.  One of my fellow 
students likes to refer to him as "mini-Mounce".  Later on, he makes a 
number of mistakes and gives several questionable answers.

>From: "Mitchell, John W" <JWMitchell at midamerican.com>
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>Subject: [B-Greek] Beginner Struggling with Translating
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>
>I'm working my way though Mounces' BBG.  One group of exercises for this
>chapter is translating various sentence fragments.  I'm really
>struggling to get my answers to match Mounces.  For instance, this is
>one of the fragements I'm supposed to translate (I haven't covered verbs
>yet which is why he provides the definition of the first word):
>
>GNWRISQH (he/she/it might be made known) NUN TAIS ARCAIS KAI TAIS
>EXOUSIAIS.
>
>Mounce translates it as:
>
>It might be made known now to the rules and the authorities.
>
>Before I looked at the answer, I didn't understand what to do with two
>words in the dative.  Does the clause TAIS ARCAIS KAI TAIS EXOUSIAIS
>represent the indirect object?  If so, how would I have known that ahead
>of time?  Also there doesn't seem to be a subject.  It appears the the
>subject in contained within the verb, but if so, how would I know to use
>'It' and not 'He' or 'She'?
>
>Also when a word means multiple things, such as the word EXOUSIAIS which
>I learned can mean power or authority, how do I know which English word
>matches the sentence thought best?  Is this something that just comes
>with experience?  Does this get easier with time?  I've been working
>hard to memorize the vocab, noun endings and articles and I thought I
>was doing well.  But this has got me thinking I've misunderstood
>something.
>
>John
>
>
>---
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