[B-Greek] The perfect silence (was Semantic Range of Prepositions
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 24 21:50:40 EDT 2010
Carl wrote:
<WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer..
I became tired and sick...and...I...
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars...>
Hi, Carl,
Yes, but Whitman's point is that the silence is
perfect only AFTER hearing the verbose erudition.
Notice that Richard was driven to read Plato only
AFTER being threatened with Robertson's grammar.
During their meetings, President Kennedy would
always give the Vice President a great big bear
hug. One day an aide said to him, "You can't
stand Johnson. Why do you always hug him?"
The President said: "I hug him because it feels so
good when I stop."
I'm convinced that we talk about this stuff so much
because it feels so good when we stop.
But we HAVE to talk about it. The unexamined
Greek is not worth reading.
Mark L
Φωσφορος
FWSFOROS MARKOS
--- On Wed, 3/24/10, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:
From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Semantic Range of Prepositions
To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 6:10 PM
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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