[B-Greek] DECOISQE in Basil
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Jun 5 06:23:50 EDT 2004
At 5:14 PM +1000 6/5/04, <newsgroupstuff at swiftdsl.com.au> wrote:
>Hi. Just joined!
>
>I am learning Greek and trying to translate some Basil (TO YOUNG MEN ON THE
>RIGHT USE OF GREEK LITERATURE). I'm struggling because my Greek is so rusty,
>plus the vocab or usage which is outside the NT.
>
>At the moment I have become stuck trying to parse one word in the first
>chapter: DECOISQE. Can someone help with the parsing of this? Is it from
>DECOMAI or something else? Ususally I have used perseus morphological
>analysis when I get stuck, but it doesn't seem to be working lately.
>
>Also, as a general question, is Basil supposed to be easy/same/harder than
>general NT texts?
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>Craig (Johnson) Note: please give a full-name signature in future posts to
>the list as required by B-Greek protocol.
DECOISQE is an optative form: present optative second person plural middle;
depending on the context it may mean "May you receive ..." as a sort of
polite imperative, or it could be part of a conditional formula, but one
would need to see the context of its usage in order to be clear about it.
What may make this more difficult than much of the Greek of the GNT is that
it reflects the "Atticizing" movement of the second and third centuries and
the teaching in the schools that one ought to write the more formal Attic
Greek of the fifth- and fourth-centuries B.C.E. It's the same language, but
follows stricter patterns of grammatical usage and makes fuller use of
older morphological paradigms.
--
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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