From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 22 1998 - 06:15:18 EDT
At 2:56 AM -0500 10/22/98, Byron P. Knutson wrote:
>I was out looking at grammars today ( haven't bought any for a few years)
>and it seems that all those I've found that are new are 5 case system
>grammars. ATR pushed the 8 case system and I thought many thought highly of
>his work and scholarship enough to follow it. The newer scholarship must
>have reasons for going back to the 5 case system like the Classical Greek
>grammars do/did. Is there any discussion on this by those who have kept up
>on this aspect of the research?
I don't think this is so much a matter of research, personally. I work more
with Classical Attic than with Koine, and I only refer to five cases, but I
think that some of the functions are so readily distinguishable in terms of
original IE cases that I teach the cases at the outset as:
Partitive Genitive: basic sense of "part of," "some of"
Pertinentive or Adnominal Genitive: basic sense of "of"
Ablatival Genitive: basic sense of "from"
True Dative: basic sense of "to," "for"
Instrumental-Comitative Dative: basic sense of "with"
Locative Dative: basic sense of "in," "on," or "at"
Of course Nominative and Accusative are distinct cases reasonably clearly
defined; and some would refer to Vocative as a real case, although I'd say
it's just a form of the noun without a distinct ending.
It's true that some secondary Genitive meanings may appear difficult to
assign to one of the three Genitive categories, and I think that more than
economy is involved in the historical assimilation of originally distinct
case functions to a smaller number of case endings--but it's hard to get
too precise about that. I just personally think it's easier to
understand--and explain-- the great bulk of functional case usages if they
are broken down as I have suggested in terms of the historical IE
antecedents.
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/
--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:05 EDT