[B-Greek] Breaking words apart

Alan Bunning bunning at myrealbox.com
Thu Feb 12 13:46:49 EST 2004


I've noticed that various texts choose to combine or separate some words
differently such as:

"diati" vs. "dia ti"
"inati" vs. "ina ti"
"toutestin" vs. "tout estin"

I am not sure that this changes the meaning, especially since the Greeks did
not use the marvelous invention of the space. But in some cases, however,
the word break does affect the parsing that would be assigned to the word.
So one general rule I suppose would be to always break the word, if anyone
anywhere has decided to consider the two words as separate.

Okay, but then this raises a much bigger issue in my mind. There are lots of
words that can stand alone, but also have derivites with merely an appended
preposition like epi, peri, kata, etc. Why not also break these into two
separate words? How do you know when a preposition is to be separate or to
be combined as part of a bigger word. Two that I have seen are "ekperissou"
vs. "ek persissou" and "anameson" vs. "ana meson", but it seems that the
choices would be endless. Seems you could just break up all kinds of words
and a lot of time the meaning would not be changed at all.

So the only rule I can think of that would indicate when a prepositions
belongs as part of a greater word, is when a reduplication or augmentation
occurs that changes the preposition stuck on the front. This would clearly
indicate that the preposition was part of the word. Other than that, I am at
a loss as to how they would know when to combine words or not. Can anyone
shed some light on this?




More information about the B-Greek mailing list