[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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