[B-Greek] KAT' IDIAN LK 10:23 feminine singular

Carl W.Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Sat Apr 23 09:11:46 EDT 2005


On Apr 23, 2005, at 9:01 AM, William Hassold wrote:

> Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (based on Grimm's 
> Wilke's Clavis Novi Testamenti) suggests that the noun which lies 
> behind the phrase KAT' IDIAN is XWRA, which has the sense of "region" 
> or "place".
>                                    William Hassold. Oviedo, FL  
> Retired pastor and former Greek teacher

That may be the case, but on the other hand, there's the comparable 
correlative adjectival pair IDIAi/DHMOSIAi which also uses the feminine 
adjective, and I wonder whether CWRA is really the right implicit noun 
for these forms. It's certainly likely that CWRAi is the noun implicit 
in the expression EN THi ERHMWi ("in the wilderness") but quite a few 
Greek adverbs formed with feminine adjectives seem rather to involve an 
implicit hODOS, so that we might have KAT' IDIAN hODON as an adverbial 
expression meaning "one's own way" and IDIAI (hODWi) the same, while 
DHMOSIAi (hODWi) in one's civic way/role/capacity.  Such adverbial 
formulations are comparable to the Latin pattern of feminine adjectives 
+ MENTE (e.g. TACITA MENTE = "silently" --and this became the Romance 
pattern for formation of adverbs from adjectives (Fr. tacitement, It. 
tacitamente). KATA + substantival adjective in the accusative is one of 
the most common adverbial formative factors in Hellenistic Greek.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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