[B-Greek] Semantic Range of Prepositions
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Mar 24 20:10:16 EDT 2010
With all due respect to the many who have uncoiled the whole nine yards and more of this ball of yarn, I have looked on with jaws agape and marveled at the endeavor to establish some sort of heuristic or philosopher's stone to lay bare the secret of prepositions. I've certainly had my own problems from time to time with prepositions, sometimes in the GNT where there doesn't seem to be an ounce of difference between PROS + acc. and a dative noun or pronoun with a verb of speaking, more than once with EN where it doesn't seem to be locative or clearly instrumental; I've had problems with prepositions in Pindar who has been said to use prepositions in a "pregnant" manner. I don't recall problems with prepositions in Plato. In general, I'd have to say that it's adverbial conjunctions and particles that have slackened the pace of reading a Greek text. I'm just a little bit puzzled at the intensity of the anxiety over prepositions. Perhaps it's not at all appropriate, but I thought of Walt Whitman's poem on "the learned astronomer" --
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
At any rate, my own response to all this effort to lay out the dimensions of the Greek preposition is: wouldn't the time be better spent in reading some more good Greek literature?
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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