[B-Greek] Prepositions and Adverbs (was " B-Greek Year End Awards")

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue Dec 29 05:46:43 EST 2009


On Dec 29, 2009, at 1:20 AM, Brian Abasciano wrote:
> I was surprised by this in Mark's B-Greek Year End Awards:
> 
> THE FACTOR THAT MAKES THE TRANSITION
> FROM NEW TESTAMENT TO HOMERIC GREEK
> THE MOST DIFFICULT, AND IT?S NOT WHAT YOU
> THINK, IT?S NOT ALL THE EXTRA FORMS YOU
> HAVE TO LEARN, OR THE DUAL, OR THE MASSIVE
> VOCABULARLY, OR ELISION:? The fact that in the NT
> prepositions essentially go with nouns, whereas in Homer,
> prepositions essentially go with verbs.
> 
> I would have said that prepositions tend to go with verbs in the NT. I have 
> been taught this and taught this myself. So which is it?

Well, I think I would have expressesd this observation differently (i.e. pedantically): 

Prepositions seem to originate historically (many of them, at least) as adverbs that clarify a case-usage that already conveys the basic sense; the ablatival genitive, for instance, conveys the sense of separation; with APO or EK or KATA an ablatival genitive expression such as TOU OROUS becomes "away from the mountain" (KATA TOU OROUS) or "out of the moutain" (EK TOU OROUS) or "down from the mountain" (KATA TOU OROUS). 

But the original adverbs are used as adverbial modifiers of verbs regularly associated with the verbs and becoming like "separable-prefix verbs" in German (e.g. 'hineingehen' "go inside" -- but 'er kam hinein' = "he came inside"). Similarly adverbs that are quite used as modifiers of verbs in Homeric verse became in later Greek regular prefixes of standard compound verbs: APERCOMAI is compounded from the originally adverbial APO and the verb ERCOMAI. One tell-tale sign of this process of evolution is the fact that an augment on a past-tense form of one of these compounded verbs must be placed ordinarily before the original verbal stem rather than before the prefix: KATHLQEN derives from the original KAT(A) and the augmented aorist of ERCOMAI, HLQEN.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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