[B-Greek] Use of TE
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Nov 2 07:50:24 EST 2008
On Nov 2, 2008, at 1:33 AM, Scott Kennedy wrote:
> Hmm, thank you for your response. That is a very clever explanation
> of what it means. Going off what you have written, I think it is
> interesting to analyze the usage based off of how it was compounded
> in words. It appears in quite a few of our demonstrative pronouns
> such as TOSOS (TE+OSOS), TOIOS (TE+OIOS), TOIOUTOS (TE+OIOS+OUTOS),
> and even the adverb TOTE (TE+hOTE, note not QOTE on the analogy of
> POTE and hOPOTE).
What is the evidence for this hypothesis that these demonstratives are
compounded of TE + forms of hOSOS, hOIOS, etc? So far as I'm aware,
the "T" in these demonstrative pronouns/adjectives is essential to the
original demonstrative hO/hH/TO (with T in all but the nominative
forms -- TOU/THS/TOU, TWi/THi/TWi, TON/THN/TO, KTL) which became the
Greek article. TE derives from an oder form KwE (it's identical with
the Latin enclitic -QUE.
> I think tentativley that it served to give a definiteness and a less
> strengthened form of addition than KAI.Ex. hO hIATROS EISHLQE hOTE
> EXHLQE ho IHSOUS. hO hIATROS EISHLQE TOTE. As a stretch for
> comparison, I might suggest that English as a Germanic language once
> had a TE conjunction on the analogy of where/there and when/then,
> which did the same thing.Ex. You came when he left. You came
> then. However, this is not necessarily true if you look at MHTE (MH
> +TE) and OUTE (OU+TE). An interesting case for comparison in respect
> to TE and DE might be MHTE to M
> HDE and OUTE to OUDE. Anyone have any ideas? All I can think is that
> MHTE and OUTE where originally inclusive, whereas MHDE and OUDE
> where exclusive if that makes any sense. Ideas? Scott Kennedy
Seems to me there's a lot of guesswork here.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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