[B-Greek] MNEIA hUMWN Phil 1:3

Kimmo Huovila kimmo.huovila at kolumbus.fi
Thu Oct 23 09:33:10 EDT 2008


On Wed, Oct 22, 2008, Carl Conrad wrote:
> This is, I fear, an old peeve of mine: the notion that an adnominal  
> genitive, even when attached to a verbal noun, has any number of  
> inherent nuanced distinctive possibilities in the mind of the Greek  
> speaker/writer. These nuanced distinctions exist only in the mind of a  
> translator who is not content with "mention of you" or "thought of  
> you" -- or, to put it even more simply, "you-thought." The Greek  
> construction MNEIA hUMWN doesn't in and of itself offer any hint of  
> how to go about analyzing the mind of the writer. We may look for  
> hints in the context, but indications are to be found only in the  
> context -- if there -- or not at all. Otherwise there are no resources  
> enabling us to peer inside Paul's head.

Two opinions in response:

1) It is not primarily an issue of translation (even though it may influence 
translation). Primarily it is an issue of understanding the semantics of the 
Greek text. The issue is, how do you rank shift the noun phrase into a clause?

A Koine linguist might put it this way, with no reference to translation:
TIS ECEI MNEIAN PERI TINOS EN TWi GRAYAI TON PAULON 'MNEIA hUMWN'? hO PAULOS 
MNHMONEUEI TOUS FILIPPHSIOUS H hOI FILIPPHSIOI TON PAULON?

It is a matter of linguistic analysis of the Greek text.

2) While context is the most important (or perhaps even only) indication, 
lexis and encyclopaedic knowledge have an influence. If a word occurs much 
more often with subjective or objective genitive (of some types of words), 
that tends to create an expectation in the mind of the native speaker (if the 
difference in frequencies is big enough). In the mind of the native listener, 
to offset that expectation requires stronger contextual indicators than 
maintaining it.

To illustrate in English, without knowing anything of the context, do you feel 
that there is a natural interpretation (subjective or objective of-phrase) 
which tends to be selected in the absence of contextual indicators to the 
contrary? Partly, perhaps mostly or even only, it is a matter of creating some 
mental, easily accessible context, but lexis does have an influence.

(1) The love of God.
(2) The love of the friend.
(3) The love of money.
(4) The throw of the ball.
(5) The throw of that man.
(6) The shooting of the target.
(7) The shooting of the gun.

Even when the communication happens in a shared context, the speaker's and the 
listener's contexts may not be exactly the same. Therefore lexical and 
collocational cues may be important for the listener in trying to construe 
parts of the speaker's context.

MNEIA + genitive is overwhelmingly used with an objective genitive, but we 
must still be careful not to read too much into that. Most genitives with 
MNEIA are inanimate, and thus not good candidates for a subjective genitive. 
I would like to analyze lots of examples with MNEIA + human genitive to see 
if there is a clear preference for either type of genitive. I still have 
hundreds of examples to go, but so far human genitives have been rare.

Kimmo Huovila



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