[B-Greek] Breaking words apart
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 12 14:08:31 EST 2004
At 1:46 PM -0500 2/12/04, Alan Bunning wrote:
>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?
I think that this is somewhat like the separable-prefix verbs in German, to
which "tmesis" in Greek is a related phenomenon (where the verb is used
regularly with an adverb--in Homeric poetry--but the adverb has not yet
attached itself as a prefix to the verb. In the matter of the
above-referenced items, I think the conventional spelling is based on
whether the items have fused into a single word: DIATI as a single word
means "why?" while DIA TI as two words means "on account of what?" or
"because of what?"; so hINATI as a single word means "why" whereas hINA TI
as a prepositional phrase means "for the purpose of what?" or "to what
end?" And there are lots of words that originate as compound phrases: hH
DIAPASWN ('octave') is from the prepositional phrase hH DIA PASWN CORDWN
SUMFWNIA, defined in LSJ as "concord of the first and last notes,
octave"--and LSJ notes that DIAPASWN is more commonly spelled as two words.
Other combinations: KAQOLOU (KAT' hOLOU) "partially", etc.
In this same regard a most important distinction is between two spellings
of what originated as one combination, the two spellings indicating
different functions: hOTI is the conjunction "that" which may also serve to
indicate directly cited material (= " ") or even a reason ("since",
"because")--but hO TI is the neuter sg. nom./acc. relative pronoun ("which"
or "that which").
--
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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