Word Order: Our God. The position of ἡμῶν
Posted: January 13th, 2012, 12:12 pm
Reading through the recent discussion on Luke 1:13 http://www-test.ibiblio.org/bgreek/foru ... ?f=6&t=964 on the position of the pronoun σοι gave me some thought today. Can we really tell if any given placement of a pronoun is enclitic or emphatic? I'm sure there are studies on this sort of thing. But how much traction can be gotten out of word order? If an author is emphasizing something, does that really come into play (i.e., are we able to determine that it actually is emphatic if the rest of the passage really does not talk about that emphasized noun/pronoun, or restate it any more further down the text? And then there are the limitations of word order which make it impossible to 'front' a certain word or pronoun. I may have run up against that in the phrase "our God."
Here is an example of what I'm talking about. One of the things I try to do is to translate English songs into Greek, I try to get phrases to match actual Greek phrases found in Greek literature via a Diogenes search of TLG. So what is the phrase for Our God? (Song: Our God is Greater) I've only searched for the nominative strings, but I think they are representative of the oblique usages. ἡμῶν is not an enclitic, so I suppose Wackernagel-Fraenkel's Law does not apply (probably would not apply anyways?). The phrases and their frequencies are listed below. Examples c and d below would be a good test to determine whether ἡμῶν is an emphatic or stylistic variation. I have not searched for other nouns used with ἡμῶν, but with κύριος and θεός, it almost acts like a post-positive. And in such cases, how would you emphasize "OUR God" if our is almost always after the noun? I suppose with a particle? Here are the phrases I searched for and their frequencies:
a. ὁ θεός ἡμῶν 592x ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν (500+)
b. ὁ ἡμῶν θεός 0x ὁ ἡμῶν κύριος 0x
c. ὁ ἡμέτερος θεός 6x ὁ ἡμέτερος κύριος 16x
d. ἡμῶν ὁ θεός / ἡμων ὁ κύριος 1x
b. Note 1. The sequence ὁ ἡμῶν only occurs 8 times in all of Greek literature. For two such common words, this is obviously a pattern that did not sound "nice". Is there an explanation for this?
d. Note 1. The sequence ἡμῶν ὁ κύριος (occurs once), and there it follows an emphatic αὐτός.
Olympiodorus Diaconus Scr. Eccl., Commentarii in Ecclesiasten
Volume 93, page 625, line 6
Here is an example of what I'm talking about. One of the things I try to do is to translate English songs into Greek, I try to get phrases to match actual Greek phrases found in Greek literature via a Diogenes search of TLG. So what is the phrase for Our God? (Song: Our God is Greater) I've only searched for the nominative strings, but I think they are representative of the oblique usages. ἡμῶν is not an enclitic, so I suppose Wackernagel-Fraenkel's Law does not apply (probably would not apply anyways?). The phrases and their frequencies are listed below. Examples c and d below would be a good test to determine whether ἡμῶν is an emphatic or stylistic variation. I have not searched for other nouns used with ἡμῶν, but with κύριος and θεός, it almost acts like a post-positive. And in such cases, how would you emphasize "OUR God" if our is almost always after the noun? I suppose with a particle? Here are the phrases I searched for and their frequencies:
a. ὁ θεός ἡμῶν 592x ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν (500+)
b. ὁ ἡμῶν θεός 0x ὁ ἡμῶν κύριος 0x
c. ὁ ἡμέτερος θεός 6x ὁ ἡμέτερος κύριος 16x
d. ἡμῶν ὁ θεός / ἡμων ὁ κύριος 1x
b. Note 1. The sequence ὁ ἡμῶν only occurs 8 times in all of Greek literature. For two such common words, this is obviously a pattern that did not sound "nice". Is there an explanation for this?
d. Note 1. The sequence ἡμῶν ὁ κύριος (occurs once), and there it follows an emphatic αὐτός.
Olympiodorus Diaconus Scr. Eccl., Commentarii in Ecclesiasten
Volume 93, page 625, line 6
Steve Runge's book "Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament" made a lot of sense on work order in Greek, but it does not deal with the order of specific words (i.e. "What you cannot do with Greek word order"). Mike Aubrey listed some individual resources on his post at Ἐν Ἐφέσῳ http://evepheso.wordpress.com/2012/01/0 ... amentaria/ that I intend to look into. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that while sentence order (clause order) can be very variable, the composite elements of noun phrases (especially the use of the article, prepositional phrases, article with infinitives, etc.) are fairly stable and can be relied on predictably to segment clauses and phrases. And unless you get a lot of training this area - which I think is lacking (not enough grammars really teach you by frequency of word order - the best may be Dobson's "Learn New Testament Greek") or do a lot of reading, many of these 'set constructions' are not recognized as such, or are not recognized as emphatic.Οὕτω καὶ
τὰ τῶν θείων Γραφῶν βιβλία πολύστιχα τυγχάνοντα,
οὐ πολλὰ λέγονται, ἀλλὰ νόμος Κυρίου· ἐπειδὴ εἷς
ἀμφοτέρων τῶν Διαθηκῶν ὁ νομοθέτης, καὶ πρὸς
ἕνα σκοπὸν ἅπαντα βλέπουσιν, ὡς καὶ αὐτὸς ἡμῶν ὁ
Κύριος ἐδίδαξε, ὁ μέγας Ἐκκλησιαστὴς, ἡ σοφία
τοῦ Πατρὸς, Ἀγαπήσεις, λέγουσα, Κύριον τὸν Θεόν
σου ἐξ ὅλης τῆς καρδίας σου, καὶ τὸν πλησίον
σου ὡς ἑαυτόν.