[B-Greek] KAI AUTOUS--Mark 1:19
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Feb 16 19:10:48 EST 2004
At 3:22 PM -0800 2/16/04, Mark Lama wrote:
>Hello, fellow B-Greekers!
>
>Today I noticed what seems like a curious construction in Mark 1:19:
>
>KAI PROBAS OLIGON EIDEN IAKWBON TON TOU ZEBEDAIOU KAI IWANNHN TON ADELFON
>AUTOU, KAI AUTOUS EN TWi PLOIWi KATARTIZONTAS TA DIKTUA.
>
>To me, it looks like the writer is hesitating between the following two
>constructions:
>
>EIDEN IAKWBON ... KAI IWANNHN ... EN TWi PLOIWi KATARTIZONTAS TA DIKTUA,
>
>and,
>
>EIDEN IAKWBON ... KAI IWANNHN ... KAI AUTOI (HSAN) EN TWi PLOIWi
>KATARTIZONTES TA DIKTUA,
>
>producing a rather jumbled result. It is as if he starts out to use the
>KAI-phrase, to draw greater attention to what James and John are doing,
>but the influence of EIDEN (AUTOUS) is strong enough that he
>(ungrammatically) puts the pronoun-participle combination in the
>accusative, as if it were the object of EIDEN and not the subject of an
>implied copula (HSAN). Is my intuition correct here, or am I missing
>something? Could I view this as a kind of case-attraction, based on an
>identity of referents? I would see a change AUTOI>AUTOUS based on the
>logic: AUTOI (nominative) equals IAKWBON KAI IWANNHN (accusative),
>therefore AUTOI should be accusative, AUTOUS. Or am I all wrong, and this
>sentence is still somehow grammatical, or the solecism, if there be one,
>should be accounted for in another way?
One alternative is to understand AUTOUS ... KATARTIZONTAS as an
object-clause to be construed with EIDEN, which may commonly take indirect
discourse with a participle rather than an infinitive: "he saw James the
son of Zebedee and John his brother, and that they were mending nets in
their boat."
--
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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