[B-Greek] Matthew 8:23 EMBANTI AUTWi ... HKOLOUQHSAN AUTWi and What Grammar Is/Isn't

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Tue Nov 9 10:36:35 EST 2010



Matt. 8:23 	Καὶ ἐμβάντι αὐτῷ εἰς τὸ πλοῖον ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ.
[KAI EMBANTI AUTWi EIS TO PLOION HKOLOUQHSAN AUTWi hOI MAQHTAI AUTOU.]

This passage has been discussed frequently on B-Greek, e.g.
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2010-March/052924.html
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/1999-August/006757.html
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2004-March/028646.html

The July 2007 discussion seems to me one of the more helpful ones.
Here's Iver's response to one of mine in that thread, but some who
are disturbed by the phrasing of Matt 8:23 might want to read through
the whole thread:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2007-July/043520.html

Yesterday' blog entry by Bill Mounce on the Koinonia web site is
a discussion of this same somewhat problematic passage:
http://www.koinoniablog.net/2010/11/dative-absolute.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FpQHu+%28Koinonia%29

Apart from the acknowledgement that the usage in this verse is
rather puzzling, what I found somewhat intriguing was the
remarks concerning grammar, including the common distinction
drawn between "prescriptive" and "descriptive" grammar:

"Regardless of the specific reason for the dative, it does bring up 
an interesting point. Is grammar descriptive or prescriptive? 
The answer is, 'Both.'
"Grammar is prescriptive in that it contains the rules for how words 
are put together so there is meaning. Without following grammar, 
there is no way to know the meaning of the sentence, 'Bill bit 
the cat.' Without grammar, it could be me headed for a tetanus 
shot.
"But grammar is also descriptive. It tells us how a language group 
uses words. This is why grammar changes. ... "

I think I would rather avoid this distinction between "prescriptive"
and "descriptive" altogether. Languages seems always to be in 
flux: older standard usage yields before neologisms. I think that
grammar is our means of presenting the norms of usage observed
by most speakers and writers of a language in a given era and 
locale. Teachers and editors may endeavor to enforce a particular
set of norms: they intend to be "prescriptive" but they are engaged
in an ultimately losing battle.

I find myself at odds, however, with Professor Mounce's statement,
"Without following grammar, there is no way to know the meaning 
of the sentence, 'Bill bit the cat.' Without grammar, it could be me 
headed for a tetanus shot."

I don't think that we know the meaning of the sentence in question
because we know grammar. We have expectations about sequential
word-order that can be described by a grammar, but we do not have
to LEARN grammatical rules in order to understand other speakers
and writers of our language.

I believe that  we really have no difficulty whatsoever when it comes
to understanding what Matthew 8:23 means. Our difficulty comes in
EXPLAINING the fact that the participial phrase EMBANTI AUTWi
is in the dative case. Is it a "dative absolute"? Is it proleptic ahead
of AUTWi, itself the dative complement to HKOLOUQHSAN? Or
is the AUTWi which follows HKOLOUQHSAN redundantly 
repetitive of the AUTWi in the initial participial phrase/clause?
Is the author guilty of bad grammar? Or are our grammatical "rules"
inadequate to provide an accounting for this construction which will
satisfy us all?

My inclination is to think that "grammar" is all theoretical, whether
it is what we have learned from the age-old traditions of dead
grammarians or what we are being told by academic linguists who
often enough are able to give us more satisfying accounts of what
we understand an ancient Greek text to be saying. At any rate, I 
don't think that we learn to talk and to read by understanding 
grammatical rules; rather, I think that we attempt to explain our
understanding of what we hear and read through our inherited
(learned) or newly-formulated (learned) grammatical "rules."

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






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