From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 24 2000 - 17:30:30 EST
At 3:13 PM -0600 11/24/00, Steven Craig Miller wrote:
>To: Carl W. Conrad, et al.,
>
>While thinking on this issue, I've come across the following. First, I was
>somewhat intrigued to find that Benton has translated: HGERQH DE FARAW (at
>Gen 41:4 LXX) as "and Pharao awoke," since HGERQH is obviously passive.
>This led me to start reading again what the grammarians had to say about
>the passive. And Guy L. Cooper, in his "Attic Greek Prose Syntax" (1998),
>notes:
>
><< Classical Greek is perfectly capable of expressing strictly passive
>sentences, i.e. thoughts in which the subject receives the action of the
>verb. But in many other passages of Classical Greek[,] sentences with
>passive verbs portray the subject as not strictly passive but rather
>receiving, accepting, or admitting the action into its (the subject's)
>proper sphere. This suggests a middle or intransitive force in the verb >>
>(52.6.0; 1:583 [comma added -SCM]).
>
>There appears to be strong evidence for verbs with an aorist passive ending
>in -(Q)HN functioning as middles in Attic Greek. This hasn't totally
>convinced me that EGEIROMAI at 1 Cor 15 must be middle/reflexive rather
>than passive, but I do wonder if perhaps, "a Greek speaker" (so to speak),
>in the use of this middle/passive form might not resolve whether or not it
>was middle or passage? Could this be a problem of translation more than one
>of Greek syntax? In our attempts to translate EGEIROMAI into English, we
>might be tempted to translate it as a middle or as a passive, but Paul as
>he was writing 1 Corinthians didn't need to resolve the issue in his mind,
>did he? What do you think?
Yes, that's exactly what I think (but then, I've been say it ad nauseam)--I
think it's very much like subjective and objective genitive, which is a
translator's problem. I think a considerable portion of the problems we
have with Greek come from wanting to think that Greek is structured the way
we want to TRANSLATE it into English.
--Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics/Washington University One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018 Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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