At 9:17 AM -0600 1/24/97, Jonathan Robie wrote: >At 08:28 AM 1/24/97 -0600, Carl W. Conrad wrote: >>At 5:58 AM -0600 1/24/97, Jonathan Robie wrote: >>>OK, I'm moving on to the next chapter! In Ephesians 2:1, hUMAS is accusative: >>> >>>Eph 2:1 (GNT) KAI hUMAS ONTAS NEKROUS TOIS PARAPTWMASIN KAI TAIS hAMARTIAIS >>>hUMWN > >>The accusative of respect, at least in traditional grammatical terminology, >>tends to be used of accusatives qualifying adjectives or verbs denoting a >>state to denote a thing in respect to which the verb or adjective is limited >>(Smyth, #1601); Wallace seems to be using the term in an idiosyncratic sense >>including limiting functions of an accusative noun that can't be explained >>otherwise. But Ephesians 2:1 hUMAS ONTAS KTL. is not an accusative of respect. > >I may be misunderstanding the accusative of respect. I was thinking that the >accusative of respect might lead to a translation like: > >"And as for you, you were dead in your sins and transgressions, following >the age of this world, following the prince of the powers of the air, the >spirit which now works in those who are disobedient." > >Is this wildly off the mark? Yes, I really think it IS "wildly off the mark"--at least as regards an "accusative of respect." In fact, there's something backward, cart-before-horse, so to speak, about thinking of it in terms of the translation it might produce. Here's a "classic" (as well as classical Attic) Accusative of Respect: in the Oedipus Tyrannos, Teiresias is told by Oedipus: TUFLOS TA T' WTA TON TE NOUN TA T' OMMAT' EI "Blind at ears and at mind and at eyes are you." The three accusatives are clarifiers of the adjective TUFLOS, "blind." They specify in what respect Teiresias is blind. In Eph 2:1 one might argue that hUMAS is an accusative of respect only if it relates somehow to an adjective or an intransitive verb that it helps to clarify--and there's nothing in what follows to link it to (which is why some people want to make this whole clause an "accusative absolute"), but as I said previously, I really think that hUMAS ONTAS KTL. in 2:1 anticipates and is resumed by hHMAS ONTAS KTL. in 2:5. The sentence is an anacoluthon--its syntax (in terms of its initial structure) is broken off and recommenced in 2:5. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics, Washington University One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130 (314) 935-4018 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/