[B-Greek] Intensive Pronoun Classification

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Feb 2 15:51:29 EST 2005


At 4:14 PM +0000 2/2/05, Eric Rowe wrote:
>In an advanced Greek seminary course today we discussed classification of
>pronouns.
>
>We noticed that Wallace discusses the intensive pronoun as a separate class
>from the personal pronoun.   Some of us found this strange, since the
>classification of personal pronoun has many different uses already.  Why
>shouldn't the intensive use just be another subcategory of the personal
>pronoun (since, after all, it is the same word)?
>
>To add to the confusion, in Wallace's discussion of the intensive pronoun he
>claims that the main use of it is as a substitute for the personal pronoun.
>Moreover, in his discussion of the personal pronoun, he includes one use as
>the reflexive use, which, according to him only applies to the oblique
>cases.  But his discussion of the intensive pronoun proper (Eg. David
>himself, The Lord Himself, etc.) is restricted to the nominitive case.
>Couldn't the reflexive use of the personal pronoun include all cases, thus
>incorporating this intensive use of the so-called intensive pronoun?
>
>Finally, is this classification on Wallace's part the norm among biblical
>Greek grammarians, or is it an idiosyncracy?  If it's the norm, what is
>behind it?

Probably it ought to be realized that usage of AUTOS/AUTH/AUTO as a simple
third-person pronoun, although the most common NT usage, is a secondary
function of a pronoun that really means something like "self" or
"self-same." In earlier Greek one finds expressions like AUTOS hO ANQRWPOS
"the man himself" or hO AUTOS ANQRWPOS "the same man" much more frequently
than a simple AUTOS meaning "he"--and in fact, in Classical Attic, one
finds AUTOS as a simple pronoun only in the oblique cases. So AUTOS is not
just another personal pronoun but a distinct pronoun, one of the usages of
which is to function as a third-person pronoun.

And yes, the intensive pronoun can very well be used in the oblique cases,
although it is not to be found within the text of the GNT; for instance
Plato commonly enough has phrasing like ALLA TOUTO AUTO QELW EIDENAI, EI
ALHQWS ...
"But this very thing I want to know, whether in fact ..." Here AUTO is
intensive and used with the accusative object of EIDENAI, TOUTO. The more
common form of the reflexive is not AUTOS but hEAUTOU/hEAUTWi/hEAUTON KTL.
-- 

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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