[B-Greek] Syntax of Rev 21:3e
Michael Aubrey
mga318 at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 15 12:23:04 EDT 2011
Since I've now been mentioned, I guess I have to respond now...(good thing I got
here before Steve kicked me).
AUTWN is a clitic pronoun, though its never marked orthographically. In a
nutshell, there is a cross-linguistic correlation between languages that have
clitic positioning like we seen in Greek and sentential stress patterns. Thus
far, I've founded parallel data in Polish and Tagalog...and hopefully, I'll have
something for peer-review ready in the next two months...
Between the two variant readings, as I view it, they would be stressed something
(very, very roughly) like this:
____ ____
____/ ---------__________________/ ------__________
KAI AUTOS hO QEOS MET' AUTWN ESTAI [AUTWN QEOS]
____ _____
____/ ---------________________________/ -----____
KAI AUTOS hO QEOS MET' AUTWN ESTAI [QEOS AUTWN]
But then, this is roughly analogous to what Charles says--the prosodic
positioning of the pronoun = "the vernacular use of the possessive pronoun." So
knowing this doesn't necessarily help you decide between the options. I wouldn't
consider it "vernacular" per se, since I view the post-nominal position as also
prosodically motivated.
In my view the question that needs to be asked is whether it would be more
likely for the author to stress ESTAI or QEOS:
**ESTAI** AUTWN QEOS
ESTAI **QEOS** AUTWN
And this then makes it very much a question of the surrounding context, which I
sadly do not have time to look at right now...
Mike Aubrey
http://evepheso.wordpress.com
________________________________
From: Steve Runge <srunge at logos.com>
To: Stephen Carlson <stemmatic at gmail.com>
Cc: Biblical Greek Mailing List <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tue, March 15, 2011 8:21:01 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Syntax of Rev 21:3e
Hi Stephen,
If you take my revised reading with "God himself" as focal, there is no
dislocation in Greek, it is simply in marked focus, with the pronominal element
following. The problem with English is that we use intonation to communicate
what word order does in Greek. Thus I added a complication in my translation
that is not there in Greek. So, you cannot do a similar analysis of a left
dislocation, I probably should have rephrased the translation. I suppose I could
have put God himself in the it-cleft to mark it as focal, but I'd still have
needed to add a resumptive pronoun: "It is God himself who will be with them."
More English problems, best to stay in Greek.
Regarding your second question about the placement of the pronoun, that would be
better addressed to Mike Aubrey. Note that based on the verb being in final
position of the main clause and AUTWN QEOS comes right after it, the pronoun
immediately follows the verb as you'd expect. Mike has studied the effects of
clitic pronouns, and found that other pronouns can behave similarly in certain
contexts, not sure if he'd say this is one of those. I'd explain the same
phenomenon as natural information flow. At any rate, the point here is that if
there is a NP consisting of a noun and a pronoun immediately following the verb,
the pronoun will commonly be placed before the noun within the NP to be closer
to the verb. I'll go give Mike a kick when I get to the office to see if he'll
comment.
Steve Runge
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Carlson [mailto:stemmatic at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 7:07 AM
To: Steve Runge
Cc: Biblical Greek Mailing List
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Syntax of Rev 21:3e
On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Steve Runge <srunge at logos.com> wrote:
> 3e. and God himself, it is with THEM he will be--their God!
Thanks for your analysis, Steve, which is too extensive to quote. I appreciate
it. I've got a couple of follow up questions:
I notice that your English rendering above sort of treats "God himself" (from
αὐτὸς ὁ θεός) as a left-dislocation, which you resume with the pronoun "he." Is
it possible to do a similar analysis of the Greek, or is the lack a resumptive
pronoun there an impediment to seeing the left-dislocation?
Also, do you have any thought about the placement of the pronoun αὐτῶν before
θεός? It was this feature that mainly led Charles to obelize the text.
Stephen
--
Stephen C. Carlson
Graduate Program in Religion
Duke University
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