[B-Greek] Neither unreliable nor difficult...

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Sun Feb 12 08:48:48 EST 2006


It looks like the first adjective was supposed to be APISTOS rather  
than ARISTOS (that's what the Unicode Greek font indicates although  
the standard BG transliteration clearly has ARISTON/OS in both  
clauses); that would make "unreliable" more reasonable: "neither  
unreliable/untrustworthy nor wicked."

We have asked list-members not to use Unicode Greek font in messages  
to the list UNLESS there's the standard transliteration also; in this  
instance what is a PI in the Greek font is a RHO in the transliteration.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at ioa.com>
> Date: February 12, 2006 5:12:35 AM EST
> To: B-Greek B-Greek <B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Neither unreliable nor difficult...
>
>
> On Feb 12, 2006, at 2:34 AM, Christopher Shelton wrote:
>
>> I stumbled across this line in translation last night.  I will
>> transliterate:
>>
>> ἐμὲ οὔτε ἄπιστον οὔτε πονηρὸν
>> νομίζουσιν.
>> οὔτε ἄπιστος οὔτε πονηρὸς
>> νομίζομαι.
>>
>> EME OUTE ARISTON OUTE PONHRON NOMIZOUSIN.  OUTE ARISTOS OUTE
>> PONHROS NOMIZOMAI.
>>
>> Basically I'm not sure about the 2nd sentence.  I rendered the 1st
>> sentence as follows:  "They neither deem me unreliable nor
>> difficult."  But the next sentence throws me:  is NOMIZOMAI Middle
>> or Passive?  And what would its definition be in either case?  I'm
>> lost.  Thank you for any help you can give me with this.
>
> You don't say where you saw this; it looks like a grammatical
> exercise; that was your own translation? It depends to some extent on
> which period of ancient Greek this belongs to. I'd make it "They deem
> me neither very good nor bad; I deem myself neither very good nor
> bad." The second clause could be understood with a middle verb -- or
> with a passive; if it's a grammatical exercise, then the second
> clause probably has a passive verb. If it's a real sentence written
> by an ancient Greek, then it probably expresses the distinction
> between others' evaluation of the speaker and his own evaluation of
> himself.
>
> I say that the time period of the sentence matters because in
> classical Attic these are fundamentally words distinguishing social
> class when referring to persons: ARISTOS means "excellent,
> outstandingly good" while PONHROS means "working-class" The ARISTOI
> are the worthies, the PONHROI the "working stiffs" characterized by
> PONOI. PONHROS in Attic comedy has the sense of "underhanded" or
> "mischievous," but in Koine usage it may mean "evil" or "wicked."
>
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
> 1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
> cwconrad2 at mac.com
> WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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