[B-Greek] Jn. 8:40

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Nov 23 13:20:26 EST 2004


At 12:31 PM -0500 11/23/04, Minton, Ron wrote:
>Yes, Carl, this is what I was examining.  I wondered if there was a specific
>name to the situation in which the nom. masc. sing. rel. prn can take a
>first, second, or third person verb.

Would it leave some sense of incompleteness to accept that there is no name
for this because it is relatively rare and by no means unintelligible? Dan
Wallace has gone quite far enough in creating new grammatical tags to refer
to constructions that serve no function other than assisting translation
into English. I guess that's OK if one learns Greek primarily in order to
translate it into English rather than in order to read and understand it.

At 8:44 PM +0300 11/23/04, Iver Larsen wrote:
>
>In the Friberg tags, the hOS is marked as -1S or -2S, just like the
>participle LEGWN above is marked as -2S. Such markings are derived from
>context rather than the word itself.

That is to say: if hOS is followed by a 1st-person verb, then it's
Englished as "I who ..." (or "we who ..."); if it's follows by a 2nd-person
verb, then its Englished as "you who ... " These too are categories that
are gratuitous creations. Of course it's the Friberg listings that give us
umpteen different kinds of "deponent" verbs, isn't it?

At 12:46 PM -0500 11/23/04, gfsomsel at juno.com wrote:
>
>OK.  I think I understand now.  I believe that would be called
>"anacoluthon" (basically meaning "it does not follow").

The term anacoluthon is normally used to refer to a sentence wherein an
incomplete sentence (a sentence fragment) is followed by a grammatical
construction that cannot properly construe with it. But that's hardly what
we have here. Nobody will fault the sentence in English, "When you've all
read the pamphlet, please return it to me, who brought it here for all to
share." The subject of "brought" is "who", which takes the place in this
relative clause of the subject "I" of a simple sentence that would be "I
brought it here for all to share."

If you have to have a name to ascribe to every linguistic phenomenon, your
grammatical categories are going to fill a pretty large book. What
Aristotle did in the Nicomachean Ethics when he found that he could
describe a vice that was either the excess or deficiency of a known virtue,
he called it ANWNUMOS. If you care to English that, it's "anonymous" or
"nameless." There's something of a philosophical problem in supposing that
things don't exist unless we can assign them proper names. According to
Genesis 2 God brought all the creatures to hA-ADAM to give names to, but it
seems to me that biologists are still making a practice of assigning names
to newly-discovered plants and animals. And so too there appears to be some
dira cupido to assign names to every conceivable grammatical feature, lest
it be thought otherwise to want existence.
-- 

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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