[B-Greek] Genitive absolute akin to the Latin ablative absolute?

Barry H. nebarry at verizon.net
Sun May 15 14:53:37 EDT 2011


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Stump" <robertstump at gmail.com>
To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2011 2:10 PM
Subject: [B-Greek] Genitive absolute akin to the Latin ablative absolute?


> In one of the two Greek books I am using there is a passing reference
> to genitive absolute in John ii. 3: hUSTERHSANTOS OINOU. However he
> gives no explanation of how to treat the construction.  Wikipedia says
> it is akin to the Latin ablative absolute, but the article there is
> less than satisfactory. Can someone direct me to a better resource, or
> give an explanation in brief?

What Greek books?  Commentaries?  Anyway, a genitive absolute is a 
participial construction in which there is usually a participle and a noun 
or a participle and pronoun in the genitive case.  The construction is used 
to show the circumstances under which the action of the clause takes place. 
It may lend itself to a variety of translations in English, and English 
tends to use clauses for the same idea. A woodenly literal translation would 
be "With wine lacking, Jesus' mother said to him, 'They have no wine.'" 
Now, that sounds funny in English, so we have to ask what the likeliest 
relationship of the action to the main clause.  Is it temporal?  Causal? 
General circumstances?  It sounds to me here that this is the reason Mary 
tells Jesus there is no wine, so "since" works very well, "Since they were 
out of wine..." though temporal works just about as well, "When they were 
out of wine..."

Now way back when (at least during the Linear B period) Greek actually had 
an ablative case, but somewhere on the way to Homer, they lost it (silly 
Greeks, always misplacing things, like Helen, and so forth).  When their 
ablative dropped it out, its functions got taken over by the genitive and 
dative, and despite protests on the part of the dative, the absolute was 
apportioned to the genitive case.  The ablative absolute in Latin tends to 
work quite the same, but has some interesting variations from the Greek, due 
to the fact that the Romans, while they held on to the ablative, managed to 
lose both their present passive participles and their perfect active 
participles...

N.E. Barry Hofstetter, semper melius Latine sonat...
Classics and Bible Instructor, TAA
http://www.theamericanacademy.net
(2010 Salvatori Excellence in Education Winner)
V-P of Academic Affairs, TNARS
bhofstetter at tnars.net
http://www.tnars.net

http://my.opera.com/barryhofstetter/blog
http://mysite.verizon.net/nebarry







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