[B-Greek] Acts 16:34 & sentence diagramming
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Dec 14 13:18:09 EST 2004
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:53:06 -0800
Forwarded for: Travis Jackson <trepp at telus.net>
When one has much to express, and yet wants his expression to be fluidly
readable, he has to make a choice concerning which items of a great burst of
thought he shall string together in any given line, often finding it impossible
to include every element of that thought in one and the same line explicitly -
nonetheless, his having other related thoughts attached, in his mind, to what
he has selected to write explicitly, will often be seen reflected in what he
has written, so that a writer's partially unwritten thought may jump out at the
reader of the explicit grammatical matter. I would agree both with the
precaution against taking an adverb as a modifier of two participles, so as to
do justice to the grammatical choice made, and with the idea that in
translation the sentence be arranged so as to hint at the fuller thought
beneath the grammatical selection, evident in the writer taking care to at
least pair together what elements he did (even if he could not apply one adverb
to both elements) - as well as pairing these with outside information (that is,
in other sentences) belonging to the same passage.
As Iver Larsen commented:
>As I looked at other examples of adverbs with perfect participles in the
>GNT, it seems that the pattern is for the adverb to precede the participle.
>It is then most likely that the adverb PANOIKEI modifies the following
>participle PEPISTEUKWS - he had come to believe with his whole household.
>Since the basis for the rejoicing is the believing it follows that
>semantically it is also PANOIKEI that he rejoices. So, when we talk about
>grammar, I would say that PANOIKEI modifies the participle, but in
>translation one can formulate the text in such a way that the PANOIKEI
>applies to both verbal ideas. I would therefore disagree with the REB
>rendering you quoted, because
>it implies that only the jailor had come to faith in God.
Travis Jackson (name added in conformity to BG protocol)
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