Thomas Dolhanty wrote:Also, I really wanted to say: τίνες εἰσιν αὐτῶν αἱ ἐλπίδες; rather than ὅις ἐλπίζουσιν;
How would a Ποῖαι go in your revision? (Instead of τίνες?).
Thomas Dolhanty wrote:Finally, I had a difficult time finding the right language in Koine to describe the four smokestacks. What is the Hellenistic term for chimney?
For a general word for "smoke-stack", probably in the earlier period χώνη, and as time went on, it might have had its gender simplified to χωνίον and perhaps in the Byzantine period (earlier or later, I can't be sure) καμινάς may have been used for a specific type of chimney attached to a furnace.
The credence that you should give to those words is that they are poorly attested and probably the most viable Koine words on the basis of later evidence - i.e. if the word was attested at the beginning of the period and then again in a later period, it is likely that it survived through the period. The words are in that part of the lexicon where plausible conjectures with theoretical basis have possible validity.
The words that you have found in LSJ, like κάπνη and especially καπνοδόκη seem to be words from the viewpoint of someone looking up at the ceiling at where the smoke will go, whereas in this picture, we are looking at the process from the outside.
Thomas Dolhanty wrote:
Yes, thank you Carl. That explains why I couldn't find ἐπιβάτες with my look-up tools, although I could guess its meaning. I will tuck that phrase away in my 'nautical terms' bag
It was an understandable (but not acceptable) error because of my habit of taking accusatives as exemplars in the plural. Just as I mentioned earlier, the only plausible way that the dative could have been lost would have been with alternative patterns of nunation, so also I think that the only way Modern Greek declensions could have emerged from the Koine, would be if the accusative was the basic form of the noun. Parallel to the prominence of the diminutives, my two plausible (to me at least) reasons for that the accusative was the basic form that children used in speech and there was a break in the generation sequence, so that children couldn't fully form language before the model of their elders was no longer available, or that the way of teaching Greek to students Greek in the Hellenistic (or Christian) world first used a set of sentence patterns in which the accusative was prominent. You should value these statements as conjecture.