[B-Greek] "Aporetic genitive" and "Nominativus ad Nauseam"

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Feb 17 06:37:02 EST 2007


I am NOT making this up! Surely it is a wholesome thing that Greek  
grammarians should have a sense of humor!

Don't you all recognize this most essential of all subcategories of  
the adnominal genitive, the "aporetic genitive"? For all the many  
times that I have consulted Wallace, GGBB, I have never read this  
intriguing work straight through like a novel, as (no doubt) we were  
all supposed to do. I have missed a few(!) things, notably the  
surname of the prime subcategory of adnominal genitives, "1.   
Descriptive Genitive (“Aporetic” Genitive) [characterized by,  
described by]"  (GGBB, p. 79), the surname being explained in an  
endnote thus: " That is, the “I am at a loss” gen. (from the Greek  
word, APOREW, “I am at a loss,” a tongue-in-cheek title suggested to  
me by J. Will Johnston). This is the category one should appeal to  
when another slot cannot be found. The title is descriptive not of  
the gen., but of the feeling one has in the pit of his/her stomach  
for having spent so much time on this case and coming up with nothing."

But wait, there's another: at the end of his listing of nominative  
categories there is the even-more-aptly-titled "Nominative ad  
Nauseam, " described, “Also known as the aporetic nominative (from  
the Greek word APOREW, ‘I am at a loss’), this is the category one  
should appeal to when another slot cannot be found. The title is  
descriptive not of the nominative but of the feeling one has in the  
pit of his/her stomach for having spent so much time on this case and  
coming up with nothing. “ (p. 64).

My newfound edification I owe to stimulation from Rick Brannan's  
Friday, Feb. 15 blog entitled, oh so aptly,  "Despair, O Ye Greek  
Grammarians ..." (http://tinyurl.com/3buvvu). As you may know, Rick  
works for Logos Bible Software as an "Information Architect" (his  
term) and rides a hobby horse that rocks to the Pastoral Epistles. In  
the above-referenced blog, his foray into Wallace-on-Genitive derives  
from a puzzlement over the function of the genitive phrase THS DOXHS  
at the end of James 2:1. His own little "aporia" takes him to a  
digital "syntactic Greek NT" which tells him precisely what kind of  
genitive this particular instance of THS DOXHS is (isn't it wonderful  
not to have to think through these things?) and projects him  
effortlessly into the digital pages of GGBB to the arcane realm of  
subcategories of adnominal genitives.

“Since there is already a plethora of gen. categories, we had to stop  
somewhere. The descriptive gen. covers a multitude of syntactical  
categories which have, as yet, to receive published sanction (though  
this would be a worthy project). ... At the same time, our approach  
in this chapter overall is different from grammars that refuse to  
analyze the descriptive gen. ..., because we believe that such  
analysis is not intuitive with most students of Greek and, further,  
that the additional categories have exegetical value.”

I think I'll refrain from commenting on that observation, although  
there's much that could be said about it.

By the way, Logos Bible Software has been working (they assure us) on  
a Macintosh version of their stuff. But don't hold your breath --  
there have already been two public notices that the project is  
running behind schedule. In the meantime, serious Macintosh-using  
researchers of the Bible are hardly aporetic (er, "at a loss"), while  
Accordance keeps cranking out new modules and recurrent software  
updates.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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