[b-greek] Re: Use of the article..

From: Glenn Blank (glennblank@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Jul 14 2001 - 23:14:13 EDT


Let's define the notion of "definiteness" more specifically. My
understanding is that the "definite" article is used when the speaker
assumes that the audience knows specifically which referent within a class
of referents the speaker has in mind. The audience would know this in one
of two ways: either (A) the referent was previously introduced within the
discourse, as in

"I saw A man. THE man was wearing a hat."

or (B) the class of referents represented by the noun has only one member,
as in

THE sun,

or only one member with in the universe of discourse set up by the speaker,
as in the case where a particular town has only one grocery store

"The grocery store is having a special." (Don't laugh, I grew up in such a
town . . . such towns do exist :)

Matthew 5:1 is the first introduction in this discourse of the referent
"mountain," so Matthew does not use the definite article because of previous
refence. However he has just finished discussing the region of Galilee.
Could it be then that he used the definite article because there is only one
mountain in that region so that he could assume his readers would
immediately know to which mountain he was referring, or else that there is
one peak so prominent above the others that it could be referred to as "the"
mountain? Could it be, then, that the NIV translators chose "a" mountain
(absence of the article) because they assumed that the English audience
would NOT know which particlar mountain Matthew had in mind, making "the"
mountain sound strange in English?

glenn blank
Pensacola, FL

----------
>From: "Ted Mann" <theomann@earthlink.net>
>To: Biblical Greek <b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
>Subject: [b-greek] Use of the article..
>Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 14:55:50 -0400
>
>I know that the absence of an article in Greek does not necessarily call
for
>the use of the indefinite article in translation. However, are there
>occasions when it is reasonable (or at least acceptable) to use either the
>definite or indefinite articles in translation when the Greek has the
>definite article? For example, in Mt. 5:1, I notice that the NIV
translates
>ANEBH EIS TO OROS as "..he went up on a mountainside.." Does this
>accurately reflect the Greek, or would the readers of the gospel have
>understood this to be "THE mountainside ("mountain," "hill," etc.)"?
>
>Many thanks.
>
>Ted
>Dr. Theodore H. Mann
>theomann@earthlink.net
>http://home.earthlink.net/~theomann
>
>
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