From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 01 1998 - 11:49:56 EST
At 10:14 AM -0600 4/1/98, Paul S. Dixon wrote:
>On Wed, 1 Apr 1998 08:29:58 -0500 Jim Beale <beale@uconect.net> writes:
>
>NOOS is the genitive of NOUS. BAG has: NOUS, NOOS, NOI, NOUN.
>Consistent use in the NT bears this out.
>
>Taking NOUS as the genitive, I pretty much assumed DEXIOTHS was a
>genitive in parallel and with the -HS ending.
Paul is quite right here. NOUS is one word that has a distinctive
declension in the NT--different from the classical Attic; in Attic the stem
vowel and endings that are in hiatus after evanescence of the intervening
digamma are always contracted: NOFOS --> NOOS --> NOUS; NOFOU --> NOOU -->
NOU; NOFWI --> NOWI --> NWI; NOFON --> NOON --> NOUN; but the NT forms are
governed by Ionic dialect patterns, Ionic often does not contract
vowel/diphthong combinations in hiatus.
Another word that sometimes confuses people in NT is hUIOS/hUIEUS: these
are respectively 2nd declension and 3rd declension forms of the same noun
for "son." hUIOS is declined like any other -OS noun of the 2nd, but hUIEUS
is declined like GRAFEUS or BASILEUS. I think we often find hUIOS in the
gospels, but the apostle Paul in the letters tends to use hUIEUS not
infrequently.
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 OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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