[B-Greek] Re: 1 Cor. 14:8 - word order, BDF & Turner
Chet A. Creider
creider at uwo.ca
Mon May 30 17:28:50 EDT 2005
This is self-reply to my query to Randall Buth as to where the fronted
elements in Paul's clause were fronted from.
My memory is alas failing me. Thanks to Paul Bell for reminding me
that BDF, para. 472 asserts that the "normal order" of NT Greek is
verb-subject-object. And a quick look at Turner (Moulton, vol.3),
pp.347-348, confirms that this is the general belief. Turner gives
data from Rife showing a slight preference for SOV order over SVO order
in 3 & 4 Mac. (as part of statement that "the normal order in the
ancient Greek was Subj.-Obj.-Verb (SOV), and then gives data, again
from Rife, showing that SOV order was not common in any book of the
NT. However, in no case is VSO order more frequent than SVO order.
(Since these data are based only on sentences in which all three
elements were present, one might argue that these sentences were likely
to be fairly marked to begin with so this is not necessarily a
refutation of the VSO-as-normal hypothesis.)
So, Randall, I think there is ample justification for you to have
written that three elements were fronted if by that you meant fronted
from a hypothetical neutral verb-subject-object order, but at the same
time, I think it is probably not wise to put too much reliance on
such an order since it is probably an artifact of the influence of
LXX on the Greek of the authors of the NT, specifically, that the order
signals "religious, formal" style.
Turner makes the interesting point that Aramaic has neutral order subject-
object-verb. Does anyone know if this was true of all Aramaic and in
particular Palestinian Aramaic. If so, one wonders why there is so little
syntactic evidence for this in the NT. Were the targums not as widely
read as the LXX or the Hebrew OT text?
Greek word order at any period in the history of the language is
difficult to understand!
Chet Creider
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