[B-Greek] Prepositions and Adverbs (was " B-Greek Year End Awards")
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue Dec 29 05:49:10 EST 2009
On Dec 29, 2009, at 5:46 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> 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)
That should, of course, be "APO 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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