[B-Greek] Genitive in 2 Cor 1:5
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Jun 3 12:50:13 EDT 2004
At 8:23 AM -0700 6/3/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>Dr. Conrad:
>
>In the archives I've noticed your concern with the
>proliferation of Genitives that grammarians tend to
>invent or create. Based on your reply to this
>question, I was wondering what RESTRAINTS you could
>offer us such that we will not continue the
>proliferation of Genitives, even though your reply
>says:
>
>> how the two elements in that phrase are intended to
>> be understood in
>> relationship to each other must be derived
>> altogether from the context or
>> guessed at.
>
>This seems to me to run the danger of an ongoing
>creation of more and more categories as more and more
>translators/commentators "discover" additional
>relationships. How can we keep the number of Genitives
>to a workable size?
I'm not sure that we can "control" those who would keep inventing new
grammatical categories. I personally believe that ALL those subcategories
of adnominal genitives, including the so-called "subjective" and
"objective" genitive, Wallace's combo "plenary" genitive, and the
currently-under-consideration "causative" genitive, have been postulated
not for understanding what the Greek text says but rather to assist
translation into one or another target language; I think that they are not
real grammatical categories but "translation strategies."
When I taught Greek to English-speaking students, I told them that there
are fundamentally three kinds of genitives:
(a) "pertinentive" or "adnominal" or "adjectival": the noun in the
genitive qualifies another noun and indicates a "belonging"--and can be
conveyed most simply in English with the preposition "of" with the
appropriate gloss of the noun in the genitive;
(b) "partitive": the noun in the genitive functions substantivally
as the subject or object of a verb--and can be conveyed most simply in
English by "some" or "any";
(c) "ablative": the noun in the genitive functions as the object of
a preposition (e.g. EK, APO, ANEU, KTL.) or verbal notion of separation or
to qualify a comparative adjective or adverb--and can be conveyed most
simply in English by "from."
While I think that each of these may be more fully characterized in terms
of translation strategies, I personally think it would be better NOT to
suppose that our translation strategies for dealing with genitive phrases
must reflect some clear semantic distinction intended by the original
speaker or writer.
--
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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