[B-Greek] John 17:2 DWSHi

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Mar 9 10:23:23 EST 2004


At 2:26 PM +0000 3/9/04, D Jongkind wrote:
>Going through the subjunctives of DIDWMI in John, I found the form DWSHi .
>It seems to me that this is an Aorist Subjunctive 3rd sing, formed as if it
>is a weak Aorist subjunctive (cf. DOXASHi. in 17:1).
>Elsewhere in John we have DWi. To my amazement, I didn't find DWSHi in
>Moulton-Howard (they mention DWi, DOI, and DWHi), which makes me suspicious
>of my own parsing.
>
>Any thoughts?

At 3:41 PM +0100 3/9/04, Wieland Willker wrote:
>I would say that this is just a spelling peculiarity of
>DWSEI =  indicative future active 3rd person singular.
>EI and H are pronounced alike. Note e.g. Codex Theta which reads DWSI.

I rather think that is IS indeed aor. subj. 3d sg., in view of the
introductory hINA.  BDF §95.1 has a note: "hINA DWSHi Jn 17:2ScACal.
(v.l.-SW, -SEI,DW etc.) and AGORASWMEN ... DWSWMEN Mk6:37 SBD (v.l. -SOMEN
and DWMEN) need not be examples of the late aor. EDWSA" and cites other
discussions. BDAG cites this as an aor. subj. 3d sg. It is true that the
future indicative is occasionally found with hINA, but what I think we have
here is more of the abundant evidence that the NT Koine is a language in
flux wherein speakers/writers are inconsistent in practice with respect to
relatively rare forms of irregular verbs.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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