From: David Moore (dvdmoore@dcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us)
Date: Fri Feb 16 1996 - 10:23:49 EST
On Fri, 16 Feb 1996, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> On 2/15/96, David Moore wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> >
> > > What I really ought to have said is that the initial position
> > > in the sentence tends to be the position of greatest (rhetorical) emphasis
> > > and that the predicate word does tend to be the more emphatic element in
> > > this sort of sentence. Now, I'm not sure that I can prove this to be true
> > > for classical Attic, although I could readily enough take a large enough
> > > sampling of prose authors and do a count. I haven't counted, of course; I
> > > can only say it's my observation that this is a tendence: one finds
> > > AGAQOS ESTIN hO ANQRWPOS far more frequently than one finds hO ANQRWPOS
> > > ESTIN AGAQOS.
> >
> > That sounds correct., But the example is not completely parallel
> > to the sentence with nominative arthrous nouns joined by a verb of "to
> > be" in third person. Let's say that what we wanted to say was, "That man
> > is the good one." The word order would more probably be hO ANQRWPOS
> > ESTIN hO AGAQOS rather than hO AGAQWS ESTIN hO ANQRWPOS. The latter, at
> > least IMO, would usually mean something like, "The good one is that man."
> > The first would tend to be found in a context in which there had been
> > discussion of the man; the second, in a context that had been discussing
> > what is good.
> >
> > The construction anarthrous nominative - linking verb - arthrous
> > nominative does call for the major emphasis on the second nominative
> > noun, normally making it the subject, _a la_ Jn. 1:1.
>
[Some material deleted]
> With regard to your most recent comments above, I would note that you're
> not likely to see either of the alternatives you propose: hO ANQRWPOS ESTIN
> hO AGAQOS or hO AGAQOS ESTIN hO ANQRWPOS. What you'd have as a subject
> would be (just possibly) EKEINOS hO ANQRWPOS or (much more likely) simply
> EKEINOS--and it wouldn't make a bit of difference which of the two items
> preceded ESTI(N), because EKEINOS is a demonstrative and must be the
> subject.
Yes, I agree. I used AGAQOS because you had made it part of your
example, but some noun, rather than an adjective would have been better to
illustrate what I was saying.
> As for John 1:1, I assume you refer to the third clause (1:1c): QEOS HN hO
> LOGOS (I suppose we shall never go a month without having a discussion of
> this verse!). This is precisely the word-order that I was trying, in my
> ignorance, to assert as "normal, barring rhetorical rearrangement" for
> Greek: predicate-word /copula/ subject. And while I would agree that hO
> LOGOS is the subject in John 1:1c, I'm afraid I'd have to argue that QEOS
> is the emphatic element there.
Yes, again, QEOS does seem to have the emphasis although hO LOGOS
is the subject. But the absence of the article with QEOS puts this
construction in another category from Eph. 4:10, in which both
nominatives are arthrous.
All the best,
David L. Moore Southeastern Spanish District
Miami, Florida of the Assemblies of God
dvdmoore@dcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us Department of Education
http://members.aol.com/dvdmoore
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:38 EDT